Nosferatu: The Unauthorized Dracula Film That Was Ordered Destroyed - But Rose From The Grave - Weird Darkness: Paranormal & True Crime Stories

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
One hundred years ago, a rather strange want ad appeared
in German newspaper Wanted thirty to fifty living rats. The ad,
which ran on July thirty first, nineteen twenty one, was
a casting call. The rats were needed for a film
that was being shot in the northern German town of
Wismar that summer. The film was Nosferatu. If you've seen

(00:26):
that film, and many of you have, you know that
they got their rats. COVID nineteen has made us look
at a lot of familiar things with fresh eyes, from
a handshake to a doorknob to a grocery list. Certain movies, too,
will never look quite the same. One is this early

(00:47):
silent movie version of Dracula, which might have been made
with the present moment in mind, and no wonder because
it was made during a similar moment. I'm Darren Marler,
and this is weird Darkness. Welcome, weirdos. I'm Darren Marler

(01:15):
and this is weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of
the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy,
mysterious Macabbre, unsolved and unexplained coming up in this episode.

(01:36):
The nineteen twenty two horror classic Nosferatu still turns up
on TV and on college campuses every Halloween, and it'll
likely show up again somewhere this year as well. In
this episode, we'll look at how Nosferatu is terrifyingly relevant
even still today, the controversial making of the film and
the lawsuit by Bram Stoker's wife, how the director of

(01:59):
the film was involved in the occult, and how you
would not have wanted to miss the film's premiere, which
was an unforgettable epic event all by itself. That and
a whole lot more about nineteen twenty two's Nosferatu on
this episode of Weird Darkness. Now bult your doors, lock

(02:19):
your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me
into the Weird Darkness. Nos Faratu has become a part
of pop culture to an extent that is unusual for

(02:40):
a silent film. It was remade by Werner Herzog in
nineteen seventy nine, A quirky film about the film, Shadow
of the Vampire in two thousand starred William Dafoe as
the actor Max Schrek, whom the film proposed was an
actual vampire. The villain in Batman returns from nineteen ninety
two was named Max Schrek, the name of the actor

(03:03):
who portrayed Nosparatu in the nineteen twenty two film. There
have been nos Faratu novels, comic books, model kits. In
twenty nineteen, the supernatural horror series called Nosparatu spelled ns
the number four, the letter A the number two, premiered
on AMC. There is even a Nosferatu beer. You may

(03:27):
even know something about the film's backstory, which we will
go deeper into later in the show. For example, Shrek
is a word that means terror, and for decades it
was assumed to be a pseudonym, but now it was
the poor actor's real name. How the widow of Bram Stoker,
author of Dracula, sued to have the film not only

(03:48):
stopped but destroyed by fire, and nearly succeeded in wiping
it out of history entirely. How it's director F. W.
Burnow is considered one of the giants of German cinema.
What you might not know is what the rats are
doing there in the film. Bats are the animals generally
associated with vampires. Certainly that was the totem animal in

(04:11):
Hollywood's Dracula, starring Bela Leegosi in nineteen thirty one. This
was the movie that set the fashion for the vampire
as a suave, diabolically handsome aristocrat. But in Nosferatu, it's rats.
When the vampire's coffin is chopped open, rats comes swarming out.
When he debarks from a ceiling ship after killing the

(04:34):
entire crew, hordes of rats follow Shrek. Far from being
a debonair nobleman is even made up to look like
a rat. Mernau and his collaborators were not making a
movie about a vampire. They were making a movie about
a pandemic. Between nineteen eighteen and nineteen twenty, Germany lost

(04:57):
roughly two hundred eighty seven thousand people in the Great
Flu pandemic the Spanish Flu as it is erroneously called today,
which killed fifty million people worldwide. It was a shattering
experience for the Germans, as it was for people everywhere.
It may even have helped fuel the rise of Hitler

(05:18):
and the Nazis. A recent paper by economist Christian Bikel
proposed influenza deaths themselves had a strong effect on the
share of votes won by extremists, specifically the extremist National
Socialist Party, Bickl wrote, between the flu, the Lost War,
economic instability, and political turmoil, Germans of the nineteen twenties

(05:42):
were spooked. It showed in their films The Cabinet of
Doctor Calgari, The Gollum, Warning Shadows, Tired Death, and a
dozen other creepy titles. In the case of Nosferantu, the
Dracula story became a vehicle, a way to deal with
horrors that were fresh in the mines of the German audience.

(06:04):
Plague is not a concept that comes up in Stoker's novel,
nor will you find it in the more conventional Dracula movies,
the ones with honky guys in capes bending over the
necks of swooning ladies. But it is central to Nosferantu.
The scenes in which the vampire brings death to a
captain and his crew and then pilots the ghost ship

(06:26):
into the harbor, where dozens of rats scurry off to
infect the city, is almost literally a page from history.
In January of the year thirteen forty eight, three ships
carrying cargoes of spices put in at Genoa, Italy, wrote
historian Donovan Fitzpatrick. They were also loaded with rats, lean

(06:47):
and hungry that scurried down the hawsers and anchor lines
and disappeared into the city. The rats died by the thousands,
and then the people began to die. It was the
beginning of the lack death ububonic plague. In Osferantu. There
are quarantines, funerals, stay at home, orders, all the things

(07:09):
that are so familiar to us right now. There is
also significantly rumormongering and scapegoating. Near the climax, an escaped
lunatic is chased by an angry mob, something you could
see today just because the man wasn't wearing a face mask.
In his themed study of German cinema from Caligari to Hitler,

(07:31):
critic Siegfried Krakauer argued that the vampire of Nosferantu was
a tyrant figure, a foreshadowing of Hitler that may be
exactly backward. The vampire called count Orlock in the film.
It was made out of copyright, which is why Missus Stoker, sued,
is stealthy, an infiltrator, not a conqueror. He is the

(07:54):
outsider bearing disease, the snake in the garden, the alien
them who brings ruined down on the hapless us. Such scapegoating,
as we've seen, was an undercurrent in our twenty first
century pandemic. Chinese, Americans, Orthodox Jews, and in India Muslims
have been blamed for the outbreak, and of course, in

(08:16):
Germany ninety nine years ago, there was one particular group
that bore the brunt of all such insinuations. Not that
Nosferatu is an anti Semitic film. Several of the actors
were Jewish, others were left wingers Mernow the director was gay,
but Nosferatu was drawing its themes from our collective unconscious,

(08:39):
which is still as active now as it was in
nineteen twenty two. It's worth noting that the Nazis, when
a circulated lurid propaganda cartoons about inferior races, often depicted
them with rat like features. Sometimes they were pictured like
the vampire in Nosferatu in the midst of rats. Nosfaratu

(09:02):
is old, celebrating its one hundredth birthday in twenty twenty two.
But history is said to repeat, and in a time
of plague, paranoia and fear mongering, alas everything old is
new again, Nosfarantu terrified audiences when it was first released,

(09:29):
leaving many to go home to nightmares in their sleep.
But the film was also a nightmare to make. The
controversial making of Nosperantu. The lawsuit that should have had
all copies of the film destroyed the occult connection had
had through its director, but the film added to vampire
lore that we still use today and more when weird

(09:51):
darkness returns in the horror genre, few, if any, movies

(10:12):
are as iconic and revered as F. W. Murnau's nineteen
twenty two silent vampire tale Nosferatu. Brimming with dread and atmosphere,
the film is an example of how even the primitive
movie making of cinema's early days can yield breathtaking results
that stick with the viewer forever. More so, the film's villain,

(10:36):
graph Orlock, portrayed by German actor Max Schrek, has become
a timeless and gut wrenching interpretation of the vampire, offering
those who grew up with the cliched, flowing eveningwear and
smirking arrogance of Bela Lagosi's Dracula an uglier, more haunting
interpretation of the undead. But like any movie worth its salt,

(10:58):
Nosferatu was a nightmare to make. The film's production was
plagued by financial and legal issues, nearly ruining the lives
of some of the people who made it. That we
even have the movie at all is a miracle, given
that every copy of Nosfaratu was ordered destroyed by the
German courts, but the film remains a dark classic, exciting

(11:21):
cinema fans to this day and lending an odd sort
of validation to the real life circumstances behind his creation.
German director F. W. Murnau is most often credited for
Nosferatu's unique atmosphere and imagery, and rightly so. Murnau would
go on to massive success for films like nineteen twenty

(11:43):
four's The Last Laugh, nineteen twenty six Faust, and nineteen
twenty seven's Sunrising. But equally deserving in praise for the
film is all Bin Grau, nos Faratu's producer and an
experienced occultist. According to people pill dot com, Grau was
a member of a hermetic order named Fraternitus Saturni Latin

(12:06):
for Brotherhood of Saturn, referencing the Roman god of time,
the harvest, and Death, where he used the magic name
Master Pasidious. The order was founded in the nineteen twenties
and Germany by Eugen Gorsch. Many believe it was Grau's
spiritual relationship with the occult that lent Nosferatu its chilling ambience.

(12:28):
One can even see hermetic and occultic symbols in certain
scenes of Nosferantu. When Grause started the production company which
made the film, named Prana Film after the Buddhist concept
of prana, meaning breath or life force, it was meant
to focus on films solely of a spiritual or supernatural nature.

(12:48):
Many critics will point out that Nosferatu is a ripoff
of Dracula, and to be fair, that's exactly what it is.
Before the widespread popularity of Bram Stoker's novel, vampires were
folk legends rather than part of pomp culture. But apparently,
while Alban Grau wanted to film Dracula, he had become
interested in vampires even before reading the novel when he

(13:11):
was stationed in Serbia during World War One. According to
a nineteen twenty one article by Grau in Boon on Film,
partially reprinted by vampire research site shroudeater dot Com, a
Serbian farmer told the producer that his father had become
a vampire. The farmer's father had died and was buried
without receiving the holy sacraments. A month later, a string

(13:35):
of deaths occurred, and then witnesses reported seeing the farmer's
father walking around. Locals exhumed his coffin and found it empty.
The next morning, they returned and found a healthy looking
man with teeth so long and pointy that they couldn't
close his mouth. A stake was driven through the corpse's

(13:55):
heart before it was cremated. While Grau's story might have
been away drum up hype for his film, Eastern Europe
has always been where the legends of vampires as we
know them, the blood drinking nocturnal undead, have originated. According
to National Geographic the country was home to some of
the earliest European vampire hysteria, in part focused around the

(14:18):
folkloric character Sava Savonovic. That Grau would have heard this
story in Serbia makes sense, though Nosferatu's creators gave their
central vampire a look and feel all its own. Many
contend that the plot a young clerk traveling to the
Old Country only to discover a vampire nobleman who covets.

(14:39):
His beloved is just Bram Stoker's Dracula with the names changed.
This is quite literally true. Nosfarantu was adapted from Dracula,
but the character's names were altered for the simple reason
that producer Alvin Grau couldn't obtain the rights for the
novel from Stoker's estate, according to a piece in Plagiarism Today.

(15:00):
According to Forward, the job of trying to dodge litigation
fell on screenwriter Henrik Gayleen. He changed names, settings, descriptions,
and even the cast of the story in order to
avoid litigation and adapt Stoker's lengthy epistolary novel into a
silent film. Count Dracula became graf Orlock, Jonathan Harker became

(15:22):
Thomas Hutter, Renfield became Knock, and Mina Harker became Ellen Hutter.
Many of the novels supporting characters, such as Professor Van
Helsing and cowboy Quincy Morris, are absent entirely. Unfortunately, the
writer's hard work was not enough to keep Prana film
out of legal hot water. The actor playing graf Orlock,

(15:47):
one Max Shrek, has been the subject of rumors over
the years. The most common one is that he was
in fact a vampire himself, a concept that was turned
into the full length horror film Shadow of the Van Empire,
starring William Dafoe as the undead Shrek. While the story
is obviously untrue, everything about Shrek did little to dispel

(16:09):
these rumors. According to an interview with biographer Stefan Aikoff,
in Reuter's Shrek was no supernatural creature, but rather a
versatile actor with an unusual temperament. He was a civil
servant's son with over eight hundred screen and stage rolls,
and was a loyal, conscientious loaner with no family to

(16:30):
speak of. Shrek was also known for his detached, offbeat
sense of humor, leading one of his contemporaries to claim
that he lived in his own remote and strange world.
Of course, it certainly didn't help his reputation that the
word Shrek is German for terror, immediately painting the man
as an intimidating figure before you even meet him. While

(16:54):
different depictions of vampires cherry picked their strengths and weaknesses,
fearing the crucifix, casting no reflection, and mirrors transforming into
bats one of the universally recognized tropes is that vampires
are killed by direct sunlight. However, this wasn't always a
common concept. In fact, bram Stoker's Count Racula walks around

(17:17):
in the sun he's merely weakened by it. It was
Nosferatu's climax that cemented the idea of sunlight killing the
vampire into the minds of the public. As noted in
a Peace on Medium, it was F. W. Murnauch who
came up with the idea of the vampire being disintegrated
by the rays of the dawn. While the poetry of

(17:39):
the final scene is laid on thick. The virginal ellen
Hutter sacrifices herself to the vampire so that he, drunk
on her innocent blood, doesn't notice the rising sun until
it's too late. Truthfully, the use of this special effect
was just a cheap alternative to a grisly death scene.
The folkloric way to dispense with a empire involved driving

(18:01):
a stake through its heart, cutting its head off, and
burning the corpse, which wasn't easy to show on screen.
The medium piece does make a good point, though Nosfaratu
wasn't widely viewed after its release due to it being
destroyed via court order. So whether the sun as Vampire
repellent spread quickly among the few folklore enthusiasts who saw

(18:25):
the film, or whether Murnau had heard about it in
some rare piece of lore is unknown. For a work
of art as atmospheric and macabre as Nosferatu, Grau and
Murnaut couldn't simply host the world premiere in a movie theater. Instead,
the film was premiered with the kind of event one

(18:45):
wishes more horror movies launched with an epic costume party
at a zoo. According to mental flaws, nos Faratu premiered
March fourth, nineteen twenty two, at the Marble Hall of
the Berlin Zuola Gardens. Before the film, there was a
stage show, including a spoken word prologue by star Max

(19:06):
Schrek himself, followed by a dance number. After the showing,
there was an elaborate masquerade ball, complete with gowns, frocks,
and suitable costumes to honour such a morbid film. The party,
dubbed dos Fest des Nosfratu the Festival of Nosferatu, raged
until two am, with guests including German filmmakers like Ernst

(19:29):
Lubitch and Heinz Shawl. As noted by Brenton Film, the
party and promotional campaign surrounding the film costs more than
the movie itself. Thankfully, this elaborate event has been recreated
to a certain degree. Today. Austin, Texas hosts an annual
Nosferatu Festival, inviting fans from all over the world to

(19:53):
travel to America's City of Bats and celebrate all things vampiric.
The climate of anti Semitism in Europe during the first
third of the twentieth century, it's unsurprising to learn that
many saw Nosperatu as an inherently anti Semitic film. Jews
had for some time been cast as blood drinking witches

(20:15):
by anti Semites, and the similarities between the vampire graf
Orlock and contemporary stereotypes of Judaism, a long nose, rat
like features, and hunger for innocent Germanic women lent the
movie a bigoted undertone. One member of the audience at
Nosparatu's premiere leaked on this concept, Julius Striker, who had

(20:37):
become chief editor of Hitler's anti Semitic newspaper dur Sturmer.
According to an article from the blog of the Museum
of the Jewish people at bite Hotpustad Striker was so
transfixed by the film that he returned to watch it repeatedly.
Later on. In the pages of Dursturmer, Striker would repeatedly
use art and prose to conflate Jews with vampires, making

(21:00):
Jewish people out to be rat faced, bloodthirsty plague spreaders.
While it has since been noted that F. W. Murnau
was friendly with many Jewish people in the film industry,
the feeling that Nosferatu was made to stoke the fear
of the universal other acclaim often made about Dracula as well,
remains to this day. Nos Faratu was a direct adaptation

(21:24):
of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, with names and references changed
to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. Unfortunately, the makers of
the film weren't ready for the sheer tenacity of the
enemy that they had made. Florence Belcolm, Stoker's widow. According
to David J. Skull's book Hollywood Gothic, The Tangled Web

(21:44):
of Dracula from novel to stage and screen, Belcolm was
an English Rose style beauty who had once been courted
by influential public figures such as Oscar Wilde. After her
husband's death, her only real source of income was the
royalties from Dracula is one truly successful book. When she

(22:05):
discovered that Grau and Murnau had made the film, she
demanded financial compensation. When they dodged this, she demanded that
all copies of their film be destroyed. Despite nos Faratu's
producers doing their best to avoid Balcolm's wrath, Stoker's widow
won the German courts ordered all prints and negatives of

(22:27):
Nosferatu to be burned, in one of the first cases
of capital punishment being waged against a film. However, by then,
copies of the movie had been distributed throughout the world,
and as one can guess, the fact that Nosferatu is
such an iconic film means that it was nuts entirely lost.

(22:47):
Though Nosferatu is considered a cinematic milestone today, at the
time it was a risky money making venture that had
cost a ton to promote. When Bram Stoker's widow decided
to take legal action against Prana, film producer Alvin Grau
had only a few options when it came to avoiding lawsuits,
so he chose one of the extreme ones and declared bankruptcy.

(23:12):
Prana Film's finances had always been precarious, but the threat
of litigation and one with actual merit behind it, given
Grau's decision to simply make Dracula with the names changed,
would have been too much for the production company to bear.
According to screen Prism, Grau's declaration of bankruptcy made Nosferatu

(23:32):
the only feature Prana Film would ever make. Meanwhile, TCM
says that Grau sold the movie to Deutsch Film Production
in order to immediately distance himself from the production. Even
after Stoker's widow ordered Nosferatu destroyed, the film managed to
live on. By that time, copies of the movie had

(23:53):
been sent to theaters around the world. Meanwhile, TCM notes
that after Grau sold the film to Deutsch Film Production,
the company edited it without Murnau's permission. The result is
that many of the copies of Nosferatu that survived were incomplete,
re edited, or had their title cards changed, so every
version of the film is different, As reported by Fictosphere,

(24:18):
one such unique copy was the Twelfth Hour, A Night
of Horror, a sound version of the film released in
nineteen thirty by Deutsch Film Production, featuring new scenes a
different end name, the inclusion of footage that didn't make
the original film, and even a different actor playing the
vampire in similar makeup. The Twelfth Hour was shown in

(24:40):
theaters and on television around the world, but is now
difficult to find and stands as a testament to how
original movies were recut and re released before the art
form was commonplace. Interestingly enough, even Bram Stoker's Widow couldn't
kill the vampire, even after she'd ordered it beheaded and burned.

(25:00):
According to David J. Skull's Hollywood Gothic, Shortly after she
had won her case against Nosferatu, Florence Malcolm received an
invitation to a private Film Society screening of F. W.
Murnau's Dracula. At the end of the day, the most
iconic depiction of Dracula will always be bela Lagosi in
Todd Browning's nineteen thirty one film by universal, the cape,

(25:24):
the widow's peak, the thick Eastern European accent, and yet
for many film critics, Nosferatu's ugly, ethereal depiction of the
vampire makes it a superior film to its latter day
properly licensed descendants. In fact, renowned film critic Roger Ebert
gave the movie four out of four stars, saying on

(25:46):
his website to watch F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu nineteen twenty
two is to see the vampire movie before it had
really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before
it was buried alive in cliches, Joe TV skits, cartoons,
and more than thirty other films. The film is in
awe of its material. It really seems to believe in vampires.

(26:11):
Nosperratu is a better title anyway than Dracula. He adds,
Say Dracula and you smile. Say nos Faratu and you've
eaten a lemon. We are not quite done. There are
a few more facts about nos Faratu that we can

(26:32):
sink our teeth into when weird darkness returns. Before Bela

(26:52):
Lagosi ever dawned his Dracula cape, there was Max Shrek's gaunt,
pointy eared, and nimble fingered Count Orlock as the iconic
villain of Nosfaratu. A symphony of horror. Worlock represents the
earliest surviving attempt to put a vampire onto the silver screen.
He's also the product of intellectual Theft, universally recognized as

(27:15):
one of the greatest horror movies ever made. Nosparatu has
a complicated legacy because it shamelessly plagiarized Bram Stoker's Dracula,
and yet without this seminal motion picture, the vampire genre
that has found success in every medium from television to
young adult novels might never have taken off. Despite popular belief,

(27:38):
Nosparratu was not the first Dracula film. Stoker's famous novel
earned him some welcome praise, but very little cash. The
Gothic thriller Dracula first hit the shelves in eighteen ninety seven.
Most reviews were favorable. Persons of small courage and weak
nerves should confine their reading of these gruesome pages strictly

(27:59):
to the hours between dawn and sunset, gushed The Daily Mail.
Further praise was heaped on by the incomparable Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, who told Stoker, I think it is the
very best story of diatribe, which I have read for
many years. Alas such, esteem did not turn Dracula's author
into a wealthy man. Although the book sold around thirty

(28:22):
thousand copies per year for the next three decades, most
of its profits bypassed Stoker and went directly to his publisher.
The writer's long standing debts and poor health kept him
in dire financial straits until he passed away in nineteen eleven.
Ten years later, Stoker's most notorious character made his big

(28:42):
screen debut. Released in nineteen twenty one, Dracula's Death was
the earliest attempt to convert the eighteen ninety seven novel
into a motion picture. Mildly put, it was a loose
adaptation filmed in Hungary and directed by Carole La Jay.
Dracula's Death tells the story of a young woman who
gets a terrible nightmare after she crosses paths with the

(29:05):
eponymous villain. Strangely, Dracula himself is an insane musician in
this version, rather than a suave aristocrat. No copies of
the silent film survive today. Were it not for some
recovered publicity photos and newspaper reviews, movie historians might not
know that it ever existed at all. Stop motion photography

(29:27):
helped sell the paranormal aspect of Count Orlock in Asperatu.
At one point, Orlock's coffin closes by itself after the
lid levitates off the ground. An early form of stop
motion animation made this possible. By rapidly showing a sequence
of still images in which the lid moves closer and
closer to its final resting spot, Myrnau was able to

(29:50):
trick the viewer into thinking that the inanimate object was
actually flying around under its own power. This same technique
was also employed during the scene in which Orlock uses
his magic to open the hatch of a ship. Count
Orlock's abode in the film was in fact a real
Castleros Ferrantu was mostly filmed on location within the German

(30:13):
cities of Lubeck and Vismar. However, the Transylvania scenes were
shot in northern Slovakia, a place that was significantly closer
to home for mRNA and company than Romania would have been.
With one exception, all the exterior shots of Orlock's palace
really depict the seven hundred year old Orava castle that

(30:33):
sits above a fishing village called Oravski Pusumonva. The very
last scene in Osperantu is a shot of our vampire's
Transylvanian home, which has collapsed after his death. To shoot
this footage Murnah traveled to starat a long abandoned Slovakian
castle that has been decaying since the fifteen hundreds. Many,

(30:54):
and I do mean many, different soundtracks have been written
for Nosferantu. This sort at often happens for silent films.
When nos Faratu premiered in Berlin, it was accompanied by
a live orchestral score composed by one Hans Erdmann, which
you are hearing a rendition of behind Me. No recordings

(31:14):
of this original soundtrack are known to exist, although a
few restorations have been made over the years. Nosferatu has
also received several alternative scores spanning a wide array of genres.
Various home video editions of the film now include jazz, electronic,
and classical background music. In two thousand and two, the

(31:36):
Nickelodeon cable channel you know the channel for kids shows
count Orlock a Bit of Love. Listeners of a certain
age might remember Nosferatu not as a classic horror film,
but as the subject of a particularly strange SpongeBob SquarePants gag.
The season two episode Graveyard Shift sees SpongeBob and Squidward

(31:58):
trying to survive their first twenty four hour workday at
the Krusty Krab. Things get eerie when the lights start
to flicker on and off, seemingly all by themselves. At
the end of the episode, who should they find playing
around with the light switch but that mischievous rascal count Orlock.
Even by the show's own absurd standards, this joke is

(32:19):
a real non sequitor. Jay Lender, one of the cartoon's
longest serving writers, conceived the bit as an out of
left field ending for the episode. In twenty twelve, Lender
told Hogan's Alley magazine, I've had several people say to
me that it's the all time funniest SpongeBob moment. From
a technical standpoint, the most difficult aspect of this joke

(32:41):
was finding a usable image of Max Shrek in full
vampire regalia. I drove all over town looking for books
with scannable pictures of count Orlock. I searched what little
there was of the web back then, says Lender. Hours
and hours of my life were spent over four seconds
of screen time because it made me laugh. And a
few bullet point facts for you. Ruth Lanshoff, the actress

(33:06):
who played the hero's sister, once described a scene in
which she fled the vampire running along a beach. That
scene is not in any version of the film nor
in the original script. The creature in the film that
they say is a werewolf during the scene at the
inn is actually a hyena. The character of Nosferantu is

(33:26):
only seen on screen for a bit less than nine
minutes in total throughout the entire film, and even during
those nine minutes, you can only find count Orlock blinking once,
as the actor and director never wanted the creature to
blink as it was too humanizing, and many scenes featuring
graph Oorlock were filmed during the day, and when viewed

(33:50):
in black and white, this becomes extremely obvious. This is
somewhat corrected though, when watching later edits of the movie,
which are tinted blue to represent nighttime scenes. Thanks for listening.

(34:20):
If you like the show, please share it with someone
you know who loves the paranormal or strained stories, true crime, monsters,
or unsolved mysteries like you do. All stories in Weird
Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and
you can find source links or links to the authors
in the show notes. The message Nosferatu has for us

(34:41):
today is by Jim Beckerman for North Jersey dot Com.
The true story behind nos Faratu is by Sam Marcus
for Grunge dot com, and other Nosferadu facts came from
Mark Mancini at Mental Floss and William Burns at Horror
News Network. Again. You can find links to all of
these stories and the sources in the show notes. Weird

(35:01):
Darkness is a production and trademark of Marler House Productions.
And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll
leave you with a little light one Corinthians thirteen, verse twelve.
For now we see only a reflection, as in a mirror.
Then we shall see face to face. Now I know
in part. Then I shall know fully even as I

(35:22):
am fully known. And a final thought, always have hope,
Always have faith, no matter how bad any situation is.
Your miracle can be closer than you can imagine. I'm
Darren Marler. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

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Nosferatu: The Unauthorized Dracula Film That Was Ordered Destroyed - But Rose From The Grave

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Nosferatu: The Unauthorized Dracula Film That Was Ordered Destroyed - But Rose From The Grave