A Nosferatu (1922) movie review has a strange obligation that reviews of later horror films don't carry: it has to reckon with the fact that this is where it all began. F.W. Murnau's unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula is not just an old film that horror fans should respect. It's a working piece of cinema that still generates unease over a hundred years after its first screening in Berlin. That alone is worth examining closely.
What the film actually is
Nosferatu was produced by the German studio Prana Film in 1921 and released in March 1922. Because Prana couldn't secure the rights to Stoker's novel, the production changed the character names: Count Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter, and Transylvania became the fictional land of Nosferatu. Stoker's estate noticed. A British court ordered all prints destroyed. The film survived only because copies had already circulated internationally. That near-extinction is part of the mythology now, but it's also a reminder of how precarious early cinema preservation was.
Max Schreck plays Count Orlok, and the performance is unlike anything the vampire had been imagined as before. Orlok isn't seductive. He isn't aristocratic in any appealing sense. He's skeletal, with elongated claw-like fingers, pointed ears, and a bald dome. He moves in sudden, angular lurches. Schreck plays him not as a predator who charms but as something closer to a disease given form. The film leans into this: the screenplay frames Orlok explicitly as a plague carrier, connecting vampire mythology to the cholera outbreaks that devastated 19th-century Europe.
Why it still works
Murnau understood something about horror that many directors still miss. Fear lives in implication. The film's most celebrated image, Orlok's shadow climbing the staircase toward Ellen (Greta Schröder), works because it shows the monster as an absence of light rather than a physical body. The shadow reaches the door before the creature does. Your imagination does the rest. Murnau built the scene using in-camera manipulation, no optical printing, just precise choreography of light and set geometry. The result is a shot that looks deliberately designed even by modern standards.
The pacing, by contrast, will challenge viewers used to contemporary horror. Nosferatu runs 94 minutes in its most complete surviving print and moves with the deliberate rhythm of German Expressionist cinema. Long takes. Held compositions. Intertitle cards that interrupt the image to deliver dialogue or exposition. None of this is a flaw. It's the grammar of the era. Audiences willing to adjust to it will find the film rewards patience with a texture no digital production can replicate: real locations shot on real orthochromatic film stock, with a pallor that makes the daylight scenes feel almost as unsettling as the night ones.
The Expressionist influence is everywhere. Murnau had worked alongside the movement's architects, and Nosferatu translates Expressionism's core idea, that the external world mirrors internal psychological states, into practical filmmaking choices. The mountains Hutter crosses to reach Orlok's castle are genuinely ominous. The ship carrying Orlok to Bremen is filmed so the vessel seems to drift under its own dark will. These aren't just pretty compositions. They're arguments about how dread accumulates before a threat is ever shown directly.
Hutter, Ellen, and the stakes the story actually sets
Gustav von Wangenheim plays Thomas Hutter, and the character is a curious one. He's naive, sometimes laughably so, and the film doesn't try to disguise this. Where a later Hollywood production might have made the hero resourceful and quick, Murnau keeps Hutter passive almost to the point of uselessness. The dramatic weight falls on Ellen, who eventually sacrifices herself to destroy Orlok by keeping him distracted until dawn. It's a remarkably female-centred resolution for a 1922 film, and it carries an emotional cost the movie earns through Schröder's restrained, physically committed performance.
The folk horror dimension deserves attention too. Hutter's journey into Orlok's territory is structured as a descent into a world the educated townspeople around him refuse to take seriously. The coach driver who abandons him at the crossroads, the innkeepers who won't speak Orlok's name, the villagers who treat the castle as a known source of evil: Murnau builds a landscape in which local knowledge is correct and urban rationalism is a liability. That structure appears again and again in later horror, from The Wicker Man (1973) to Robert Eggers' The Witch (2015), because it taps something genuinely old in the genre's DNA.
The music question and version history
Because Nosferatu is a silent film, no single definitive score exists. The 1922 theatrical release used a live orchestra playing Hans Erdmann's original compositions, which are largely lost. Subsequent decades produced dozens of replacement scores: orchestral, ambient, rock (a 1979 live accompaniment by the band Goblin is part of the film's cult history), and electronic. The restoration distributed by Kino Lorber pairs the film with a modern orchestral score. It's serviceable. The honest advice is to find a version whose music you can sit with and let the images do the work regardless of what's playing underneath.
Robert Eggers directed a new adaptation of Nosferatu released in late 2024, with Bill Skarsgård as Orlok. That film exists in direct conversation with Murnau's version, and watching them back to back is instructive. Eggers' film is lush, explicitly Gothic, and precise in its period detail. Murnau's film is stark, expressionistic, and draws power from what it can't show. Neither replaces the other.
What a modern horror viewer takes from it
Viewers who come to Nosferatu after building a diet on films like Hereditary (2018) will find the experience disorienting in useful ways. The grammar is different. The pacing is slower. The monster is not hidden but is somehow still unseen, because Schreck's Orlok is so far outside recognisable human affect that the brain keeps searching for a frame of reference and not finding one. That is the oldest kind of horror: the creature that doesn't map onto anything you already know.
Murnau made a film about a plague creature at a time when plague was a lived memory for German audiences. The metaphor was not abstract. It was not clever subtext for critics to excavate later. It was the point, and it worked then for the same reason it still works now: death that spreads invisibly, that moves through communities without warning, is one of the things human beings have never stopped fearing. Nosferatu gives that fear a face. The face is Max Schreck's. It's been more than a century, and it's still the right one for the job.