(Thrice Told Tales is an ongoing series about stories brought to the screen at least three times.)

If Florence Stoker had had her way, I wouldn’t be writing this post. Bram Stoker’s widow tried to destroy all copies of the 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and she was very nearly successful. She did have her reasons.

The film is very clearly a rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. It’s a great novel, using the epistolary (letter writing) format very well. Not only can it still give a reader chills, it’s quite surprisingly a Christian story. Count Dracula as a character is still easily one of the most widely recognized characters in fiction. 

However, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was made just a decade after Stoker passed away, and his widow was still receiving royalties on the novel.

German screenwriter Henrik Galeen and director F.W. Murnau made no effort to hide the fact that they were using the Stoker novel as a blueprint for their story. Not only is it a vampire story, but such plot elements as a real estate agent going to a foreign land, a death ship, and a Transylvanian count whose nemesis is a scholarly doctor are clear steals. 

They did change names, such as Dracula becoming Orlock, but even the original credits acknowledge the debt to Stoker. They never officially sought permission or made payment to the Stoker estate. It was a naive but costly mistake.

Florence brought the filmmakers to court (I assume a German court), which ruled that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. Fortunately for cinematic history, not everyone followed the court order, and some copies survived. It is a black and white, silent film that holds up as a great work. The German Expressionist set design and cinematography are beautiful and unsettling. The villain, played by the mysterious actor Max Schreck, is hideous and imposing. (Another film worth watching  is Shadow of the Vampire, a Gothic drama about the making of Nosferatu that theorizes that Schreck really was a vampire.) And the tale leads to a thrilling, sunlit conclusion.

F. W. Murnau is now regarded as a master of cinema. His Oscar-winning film Sunrise is considered by some (like me) to be the greatest silent drama. What a tragedy if Nosferatu had been lost. (For one thing, Sponge Bob Square Pants would have lost a great punchline.)

Just watch this film and then watch the 1931 Universal Studios version of Dracula. Sure, Bela Lugosi’s performance is still fun, but otherwise the film is stodgy, and yes, bloodless, and in every other way inferior to the 1922 classic.

The film was particularly venerated in Germany as a cornerstone in their cinematic history. Obviously, Germany went through some dark times in the 1930s and 1940s for some reason, but it went through a great resurgence beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Such auteurs to emerge were Volker Shlondorff (The Tin Drum), Rainer Werner Fassbinder (The Marriage of Maria Braun), Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot), and Werner Herzog. 

Herzog is probably the most famous of these directors for his work in documentaries (Grizzly Man) and features (Fitzcarraldo). He decided to honor the history of German cinema by remaking Nosferatu in 1979.

This remake differs from the original in a number of ways, starting with the fact that it’s in color and it’s a talkie (in German, of course). But there are other differences.

Herzog’s version is a remake of Nosferatu and Dracula. Herzog used the names from the Stoker novel: Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, Renfield, and even Count Dracula because the year the film came out, 1979, was the year that Dracula entered the public domain. As in the original Nosferatu, there are striking images in the film and a dark mood throughout, but it has a more pessimistic ending.

And, of course, Herzog didn’t hire a vampire to play Dracula, but he got the next best thing, Klaus Kinski. He and Herzog had a tumultuous relationship, at times almost coming to blows in their work together, but Kinski is quite believable as a monster.

The film was made on a minimal budget with only sixteen people on the crew. Herzog wanted to film in Transylvania, but Nicolae Ceausescu didn’t want people to think there was any relationship between Dracula and their national hero, Vlad the Impaler. So the Czech Pernštejn Castle was used instead.

Two versions of the film were made simultaneously, one in German and one in English. Herzog was fine with the English version, but felt the German version was more “authentic”. 

Fortunately for this Ricochet series, another remake of the story came out last year. The film was written and directed by Robert Eggers, the maker of three previous successful horror and horror-adjacent shows. The Witches (2015) is set in colonial America, rather like The Crucible except the witches are real. The Lighthouse (2019) is the bizarre story of 1890s isolated lighthouse keepers, played by Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe, as they seem to go mad. The Northman (2022) is about a young Viking prince on a quest to avenge his father’s murder. Eggers likes to make period films. He has said, “The idea of having to photograph a car makes me ill. And the idea of photographing a cell phone is just death.”

In Eggers’ version, we are back to Count Orlock rather than Dracula. The levels of blood and nudity were certainly upped from the previous versions. The cinematography is as beautiful as that in previous versions. The story greatly tones down the Christian element, and that saddens me a bit. There are crucifixes in the film, but the cross isn’t a danger to the vampire. Willem Defoe as Professor Albin Eberhart isn’t a Christian like Van Helsing in Dracula lore, but looks to world mythology for his direction. 

This version of the story has yet a different conclusion than the previous two films. Though not clearly Christian, it does celebrate self-sacrifice. And features a really disgusting sex scene (not a part of the 1922 version).

People often complain about the creative bankruptcy of Hollywood and its remakes, but these three films have very different visions of the same story. Rather the opposite of creative bankruptcy. Not all of these films are for everyone, but I’m glad they all exist.