Directed by: F.W. Murnau
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach, John Gottowt

STORY
Before Dracula became a romantic figure in a cape, before Bela Lugosi gave him an accent, and long before vampires became handsome, seductive creatures of the night, there was Count Orlok.
Young real-estate agent Thomas Hutter is sent by his employer, the increasingly bizarre Knock, on a journey to Transylvania. His assignment seems straightforward: meet the mysterious Count Orlok and arrange his purchase of an abandoned property in Hutter's hometown of Wisborg.
But nothing about Orlok is straightforward.
The farther Hutter travels toward the Count's isolated castle, the more ominous the warnings become. Villagers recoil at the mention of Orlok's name. Strange events surround Hutter's arrival. And inside the castle waits a creature unlike anything Hutter could have imagined.
Count Orlok is not simply an eccentric aristocrat.
He is Nosferatu.
Hutter gradually discovers the horrifying truth about his host, but by then Orlok has seen a portrait of Hutter's beautiful wife, Ellen — and his attention has turned toward her.
Orlok leaves his castle concealed among coffins filled with earth and begins a nightmarish voyage toward Wisborg. Death follows him. A ship becomes a floating tomb. Rats accompany the mysterious cargo, and when Orlok finally reaches the city, terror and disease descend with him.
Hutter races home, desperate to save Ellen, but the final battle may belong to Ellen herself. Learning that a pure-hearted woman can destroy the vampire by willingly keeping him beside her until sunrise, she makes a terrible and courageous choice.
She opens the window.
She waits.
And Count Orlok comes.
As morning approaches, the creature who has survived by hiding from daylight becomes so consumed by Ellen that he fails to notice the rising sun.
Daylight finally enters the room.
And Nosferatu disappears.

AIN BACKSTAGE SECRETS & AINTOIDS

THE VAMPIRE BEFORE THE VAMPIRE
This is one of the great ancestors of cinematic horror. F.W. Murnau's film helped establish the visual language audiences still associate with vampires and Gothic horror more than a century later.
And Count Orlok could hardly be further removed from the elegant screen vampires who followed him. Max Schreck's creature is skeletal, bald, clawed, almost rodent-like — a walking nightmare rather than a romantic seducer.

DRACULA — WITHOUT PERMISSION
Here comes one of the greatest AINtoids in horror history.
Nosferatu is essentially an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Screenwriter Henrik Galeen changed names and details — Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Hutter, and the story was relocated — but that wasn't enough.
Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker, pursued legal action against the filmmakers for copyright infringement. A court ultimately ordered copies of the film destroyed.
Fortunately for film history, prints survived outside Germany.
The movie they tried to destroy became immortal.

THE SHADOW THAT WOULDN'T DIE
One of cinema's most recognizable horror images requires almost nothing: Orlok's elongated shadow creeping across a wall and climbing a staircase.
No elaborate monster. No gore. No digital effects.
A shadow.
More than a century later, filmmakers are still borrowing from what Murnau accomplished in 1922.

MURNAU TOOK HORROR OUTSIDE
Although Nosferatu is closely associated with German Expressionism, Murnau didn't confine his nightmare to wildly artificial studio sets. He used real landscapes, buildings, mountains, streets and waterways, allowing something supernatural to invade a world that looks disturbingly real.
Location shooting took place in Germany and what is now Slovakia, including Wismar, Lübeck and Orava Castle in the Carpathian region.
That realism makes Orlok feel even stranger.
He isn't safely contained inside a fantasy world.
He has entered ours.

COUNT ORLOK CHANGED THE VAMPIRE FOREVER
There is a fascinating dividing line in vampire cinema.
There is the vampire before Nosferatu.
And the vampire after Nosferatu.
Orlok's unnatural movements, claw-like hands, silhouette, rigid posture and connection to rats, plague and death established imagery that filmmakers would revisit for generations.
Bela Lugosi would later give audiences the sophisticated aristocrat.
Christopher Lee would bring danger and sexuality.
But Max Schreck gave cinema something more primitive:
the vampire as death itself.

AIN REASON
This is precisely why AIN preserves and presents classic cinema alongside contemporary independent filmmaking.
A 1922 independent German production, made by filmmakers who could never have imagined streaming television, survives more than a century later and continues influencing artists.
The production company that made it disappeared.
The film didn't.
Once it's there, it's there.
And Nosferatu is still there.
Still unsettling.
Still beautiful.
Still casting that impossible shadow across the wall.