Nosferatu

Murnau's film established what a vampire looks like ON SCREEN nine years before Universal's, and it did so as an unlicensed adaptation that Florence Stoker had the courts order destroyed. What survived into 1931 is atmosphere rather than plot: the arrival by ship with a dead crew and a log nobody lived to finish, the castle sequence as a mounting series of wrongnesses, and the idea that the vampire should be filmed as an infestation. Filed MEDIUM. Browning's film is made from the Deane and Balderston play, not from Murnau, and the two are opposite in style; the debt is to what Nosferatu proved a camera could do with the material.

Coppola's film quotes the silent cinema its subject came from, and Nosferatu most of all. The shadow that moves independently of the body climbing the stair, the rats, and the coach ride shot in undercranked, jerky motion are Murnau's images reproduced deliberately. The method was a choice about technique as much as homage. Coppola insisted the effects be achieved in camera with the tools available in 1922 wherever possible, including reverse filming and forced perspective, so the film looks handmade rather than composited. The debt is visual and explicit rather than narrative: the story comes from Stoker.

Amirpour's film is shot in high-contrast black and white and uses the silent-era vampire's visual grammar: the figure held still in a doorway, the long shadow arriving before the body, and a predator who moves at walking pace and is frightening because she does not hurry. The chador the character wears is used the way Murnau used Orlok's silhouette, as a shape that reads as a vampire before anything supernatural has happened on screen. The setting and the politics are the film's own; the way the figure is photographed is inherited.

An adaptation made without the rights, and the courts said so. Prana Film changed the names (Count Orlok, Hutter, Ellen) and moved the story to Wisborg, Florence Stoker sued, and in 1925 a German court ordered every copy destroyed. Prints that had already left the country are why the film still exists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu