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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures,

ideas, and monsters in time.

At last, I can speak to you of the most recent cinematic treatment of Count Orlock,

the off-brand Dracula from 1922's Nosferatu, a symphony of horror, who went on to become

a horror icon in his own right.

We have to remember that in 1922, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula was only 35 years old.

In fact, F. W. Murnau's unauthorized adaptation drew the ire of Stoker's widow, whose legal actions

threatened to see all copies of the now legendary silent film destroyed.

Luckily, of course, Murnau's masterpiece survived. As horror film historian David J.

S. S. Schault points out in his book, V is for Vampire, the A to Z Guide to Everything Undead,

the German expressionist picture can largely be seen as a, quote, metaphor of the plague-like

destruction of Germany in World War I. He also points out that in its initial release, it was far

from the silent black and white nightmare that we think of today and was

actually elaborately color-tinted and accompanied by a modernist orchestra score.

The film influenced not only subsequent Dracula adaptations, but horror cinema as a whole.

While Dracula deservingly enjoys the greater following, and has seen countless screen and TV incarnations,

Count Orlock has enjoyed his own cinematic legacy as something of a deeper cut.

Klaus Kinski famously played the bald, cadaverous vampire in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu Phantom Dernacht,

and then once more, sort of,

...