In 1925 a European court ordered the destruction of every print and negative of a film. The movie was Nosferatu, the 1922 silent masterpiece from the short-lived German studio Prana-Film, and it survived anyway. This episode is the biography of a film: conceived by producer Albin Grau after a Serbian farmer told him during the First World War that his own father was a vampire, directed by F.W. Murnau, a combat pilot who survived eight plane crashes, and starring Max Schreck, a traumatized trench veteran, as Count Orlok.

We dig into the occult symbolism Grau layered into the sets, the Enochian script on the film’s real estate contracts, the single camera that meant only one negative ever existed, and the metronome Murnau used to time his actors. We cover the blatant unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Florence Stoker’s lawsuit and the resulting execution order, how bootleg prints spread across the globe like the plague the film depicts, and how the movie invented the idea that sunlight kills vampires before finally entering the public domain in 2019.

• Why a post-World War I Weimar audience needed a monster that embodied contagion rather than romance
• How simply renaming Dracula as Count Orlok failed to protect the studio from copyright law
• The scholarly debate over xenophobic imagery in the film and the counterarguments about Murnau himself
• The international telephone game of mangled intertitles restorers had to untangle decades later
• The lost original score and a century of alternative soundtracks, from classical to Type O Negative