1897, 1922, 2024: From Dracula to Nosferatu, a Legacy of Blood

Hello spookies, and welcome to another Graveyard Shift and this week it’s all about vampires! 1897 to 2025, the legacy of the vampire has made its mark on pop culture as we know it, and that legacy continues with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. What a beautiful, haunting, sexy two hours of madness. The physical acting alone is a thing of utter beauty. I have loved gothic horror for the last 15 years or so, so maybe I’m biased but I thought it was utterly fantastic. Of course, we almost did not have Nosferatu as the Stoker estate came after the filmmakers legally due to obvious similarities to the original Dracula novel. A judge ordered all copies of the 1922 film be destroyed and it nearly became lost media. Today, we’ll compare – what is the difference between the 1897, 1922, and 2024 versions of this story of love, obsession, power, and a dead Transylvanian noble?

1922 v 2024

In 1922, F. W. Murnau took us back to the 1830s to a German town where young Hutter had  been sent by Knock to Transylvania to sell Count Orlock a house. In fact it is the house directly across from where Hutter lives with his wife Ellen. While Hutter travels to Count Orlock, he leaves Ellen in the care of their friend Harding. While travelling to Orlock’s castle, locals warn Hutter to stay away from Orlock, alas he persists and sells the house to Orlock, strange as he may be. As he feels a dark shadow looming over him, Hutter finds the Count’s resting body in a crypt, believing him to be a vampire based on his readings. Orlock sails to Hutter’s town of Wisborg, masquerading as a mere shipment of coffins. Hutter races home to save Wisborg and Ellen from Orlock’s dark influence. Ellen feels the impending darkness, and, learning that a pure woman may sacrifice herself to destroy the vampire, utilises Orlock’s obsession with her to call him to her side, where he feeds on her until dawn, bringing the vampire’s death by sunlight.

In 2024, we still came back to the 1830s and the main points of the story still stand, Hutter – now given the first name Thomas – still travels to Transylvania, sells a house to the vampiric Count, and Ellen still destroys the Count by sacrificing herself. The whole experience is expanded on and is really worth a watch, especially if Victorian vampires are your thing. Eggers takes the sexual undertones of the 1922 version and turns them into overtones, with Ellen whimpering in both twisted pleasure and pain when Orlock takes hold of her. Additionally Ellen awakens Orlock in her youth, crying out in loneliness and Orlock taking her as prey, bringing discussions of sexual assault and the lasting effects on victims. This truly makes the love story between Thomas and Ellen so much deeper, especially when she cries at him not to touch her, that she is unclean. He stays by her, doing everything for her, ultimately working through his fear to plot to kill Orlock for her. She makes the ultimate sacrifice for him, so the man she loves may live.

Another change is Harding, becoming Friedrich Harding, married to Anna with their two children. He becomes a skeptic whose desperation to protect his family from the plague Orlock brings, driving him to pushing away Ellen in her time of need, drives him to near madness, especially after Anna and their children are attacked and slain by Orlock in his torment of Ellen. The character of Professor Van Franz is also a new addition, this character type being the small role of Doctor Bulwer in 1922. When Van Franz leads Thomas and Sievers to drive a stake through Orlock to kill him, Thomas swings and kills Knock, the man who started it all. Knock’s plot of a mad follower of the Count is more in depth, exploring his obsession with life and death. Knock’s death is also different, with Knock dying in the coffin rather than hunted down by townspeople as a scapegoat for the plague. The plot to kill Orlock by stake also does not appear in 1922, driven by occultist Van Franz, a plot taken from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, leading us to…

Dracula v Nosferatu, battle of the Counts

Dracula v Nosferatu to me feels like a romantic view of vampirism versus a more realistic, horrific view of vampirism. Dracula comes in as a charming, if eccentric, Transylvanian noble who is fairly human. Orlock, on the other hand, comes across as intimidating, using his power rather than his charm to get what he wants. He’s visibly a reanimated corpse of a Transylvanian noble, being closer to the depiction of the vampire common in folklore of the time. While both vampires are based on fear of desire and sexuality, Dracula shows this through his ability to make others like him, as he turned Lucy into a vampire who becomes a sexually liberated woman, the likes of which we are used to in 2025, but that audiences in 1897 would have seen as a divergent from the social norm; a convention often used in horror throughout time. Orlock is a darker side of desire, awakened by Ellen’s loneliness and obsessively hunts her until he is able to use her loved ones against her until she agrees to be with him to save the ones she loves. Orlock also comes to Germany as a personification of the plague which decimated Europe in the 18th century, he is a destructive desire, all too familiar a concept in the wake of the Me Too movement of the empowerment of the victims of sexual assault. This romanticism v horror also manifests in the way both vampires attack; Dracula biting into the neck, almost as a lover would versus Orlock sinking his teeth into the chest, pinning his victim down to take what he wants. The way the men became vampires is also interestingly similar, having dealings with demons that led to their current existence.

Both men were Transylvanian noblemen who dabbled in the dark arts. Dracula was a man who attended the Scholomance – the school of dark magic run by the devil. Among nine other scholars, Dracula learned these forbidden secrets from the devil himself, at the end of which the devil selects one scholar as his ‘due’. As payment for dark knowledge, the devil takes a human life as his own and twists it into an undead vampire. Dracula died a warlord and, due to his lineage of pacts with the devil, came back as a vampire. Orlock is believed to have been resurrected as a vampire by the demon Belial, the demon lieutenant to Satan. Belial is traditionally a demon summoned by Geotic magicians, a type of European sorcery. This would allude to Orlock being a Geotic (or similar) sorcerer, tying his involvement with the occult to that of Dracula. Is this due to Dracula being the source material of Nosferatu? Perhaps, but it’s a fascinating parallel between the vampires.

I could talk about these stories for hours, but I’ll leave it there for today. What do you think? Have you seen the new movie? Are you a fellow lover of gothic horror? Let me know in the comments! Thank you for taking this journey with me, and I’ll see you next time for another Graveyard Shift.