Location As Infection

Murnau could not get the rights to Dracula, so he changed the names and made it anyway. Bram Stoker's widow sued, won, and a German court ordered every copy destroyed in 1925. The film survives because prints had already scattered across Europe and America, which is the first thing to know about it. The second is that Murnau took his camera outside. Where Caligari painted its shadows on flats, Nosferatu was shot in real Baltic towns, real Carpathian passes and real daylight, so the horror arrives in ordinary places. Orlok is not a seducer in evening dress. He is a rat faced carrier of plague, played by Max Schreck with long fingers and no charm at all, and the film treats him less as a monster than as an epidemic with a will.