What does Nosferatu mean? A guide to all your pressing questions

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu resurrects a 102-year-old vampire who first appeared in a silent black-and-white film by F. V. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. /Nouveau’s own film review praises Nosferatu as a truly terrifying horror pictureas terrifying to modern audiences as Murnau was a century before.

It’s incredible that cinema is so old that some classic films have lasted a century or more. Heck, The Wizard of Oz’s 100th anniversary is only 15 years away. (In the meantime, you can celebrate the 85th anniversary of the technicolor Oz with Wicked: Part One.) However, Nosferatu is technically older than it appears because the character is Count Dracula in all but name.

Now the vampire in Murnau’s film is not called Dracula (and not “Nosferatu”), but rather Count Orlak (played by Max Schreck). However, the story follows the basic beats of Bram Stoker’s novel, apart from moving the action from England to Germany. Thomas Hatter (Gustav von Wangenheim) is barely renamed Jonathan Harker is a real estate agent who visits the Transylvanian castle of Orlak. After some time in captivity, Hutter escapes, but Orlak follows him back to Germany across the sea. Orlok almost ends up being trapped and beloved by Hutter, but ends up being defeated. However, not a stake in his cold heart, but a rising sun, creating an archetypal vampiric weakness.

Werner Herzog’s acclaimed 1979 color remake of Nosferatu the Vampire, dispels claims that the film is not a Dracula adaptation and uses Stoker’s character names (but also Murnau’s German settings). Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu looks like Max Shrek’s bald elf Orlock, but his name is Dracula. Eggers’ film, by contrast, goes back to Murnau’s invented names.

If none of the vampires in any iteration of Nosferatu are actually called Nosferatu, why did the name stick? This is because the word itself is inextricably linked to Stoker’s novel Dracula, which popularized its association with vampires.

In Bram Stoker’s Dracula the word “Nosferatu” appears to be an ancient, Eastern European term for “vampire” and is used by vampire hunter Dr. Abraham Van Helsing as such. After Dracula turns Lucy Westenr into a vampire, Van Helsing explains both his condition and the danger it poses to his lover Arthur:

“Friend Arthur, if you had met that kiss you know of, before poor Lucy died; or, again, last night when you opened your arms to her, you would in time, if you died, become a nosferatu, as they call it. in Eastern Europe, and would always like to make more of those Undead that so fill us with terror.”

Stoker apparently got the word from the English writer Emily Gerrard, author of the 1885 book Transylvanian Superstitions. Gerard writes of “Nosferatu” as the local word for “vampire” – “in which every (Romanian) peasant believes as firmly as in heaven or hell.”

This word goes back 20 years to the works of the German writer Wilhelm Schmidt in 1865, published in Book of 1866 (approximate English translation) “The Year and Its Days in the Opinions and Customs of the Romanians of Transylvania.” Schmitt’s spelling implicitly identifies “Nosferatu” as the Romanian word for “vampire”.

However, the etymology of “Nosferatu” remains shrouded in myth until the 19th century, because it no part of the Romanian language. In the 2011 edition of the Borgo Post (bulletin of the Canadian branch of the Transylvanian Dracula Society), Elizabeth Miller suggests that the word may have been “a localism that never entered the Romanian vocabulary” as Gerrard does not cite Schmitt and it is unlikely that both could have made the same mistake .

Other suggested origins of the word include the Romanian word “nesuferit” (“unbearable”) or the Greek word “nosophoros” (“carrying disease”, corresponding to the concept of the vampire as a cursed person who spreads his defeat through his continued existence).

Wherever the Nosferatu trail ended, it eventually found its way to Stoker, who used it in Dracula. With Dracula being the most famous vampire story ever published, Nosferatu became a label for vampires far beyond provincial Transylvania. Unlike vampires, language itself is never dead, but constantly changing.

If you know how Nosferatu copied Dracula, it’s easy to assume that the title change was a plausible deniability in the event of copyright fraud being discovered. But dig deeper and the answer doesn’t seem so simple. The credits for Nosferatu confirm that the film is based on Stoker’s Dracula and is “loosely adapted” by screenwriter Henrik Gelin.

U “The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors, and Its Enduring Legacy”, author Rolf Giesen suggests that the filmmakers “may have been misled by bad legal advice that they would not have to pay the copyright holders for the film rights if they changed the story and titles significantly”.

As for specifically choosing “Nosferatu” for the name change? Evidence suggests they just thought it was a scary and alien name, a perfect prelude to a movie subtitled A Symphony of Horror. The film’s Act 1 title card reads:

“Nosferatu. Doesn’t that word sound like the cry of a death bird at midnight? See that you never utter it, lest the pictures of life fade into pale shadows, and ghostly dreams rise from your heart and feed on your blood.’

While Stoker died in 1912, his widow Florence Balcombe was executor of the estate until her death in 1937. After she discovered in 1924 that Nosferatu had been produced without her permission, she launched an aggressive legal campaign (through the British Society of Authors) to obtain compensation. When the production company Prana Film failed to pay (even declared bankruptcy), Stoker’s widow demanded that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. A German judge ruled in her favor, but a few copies were leaked, and so “Nosferatu” survived. (“Dracula” eventually entered the public domain in 1962, making proper authorization for any film adaptations a moot point going forward.)

While Nosferatu wouldn’t exist without Dracula, the film has earned a reputation as a classic in its own right—enough to be remade not once, but twice.

Wide release of “Nosferatu” is planned for December 25, 2024.