Nosferatu: Folklore, History, and Horror
The past is terrifying.
Watching the original 1922 version of Nosferatu is like uncovering a lost artefact. Having stumbled across the film in the depths of some neglected archive, you surreptitiously stow the reel away and bring your intriguing discovery to a clandestine cinema, where you watch a grim tale of death, love, and the occult unfold before you. You can almost feel the fraying fragility of the projection as dark, grainy images flicker across the screen.
Rather than mere consumers of fiction, it is as if we are privy to some closely kept historical secret. There is a relentlessly unnerving mood of forbidden discovery that the audience shares with the characters in the story as they learn more about the dreaded entity that assails them.
The narrative is framed as a historical document with an opening title card that claims to present “A Chronicle of the Great Death of Wisborg in the Year 1843 A.D.” A chilling editorial commentary follows, dwelling on the infamous name:
“Nosferatu! Doesn’t this name sound like the very midnight call of death? Speak it not aloud, or life’s pictures will turn to pale shadows, and nightmares will rise up to feed on your blood.”
The phrase, “life’s pictures will turn to pale shadows”, is particularly affecting, surely incubating some unspoken anxiety about the strange shifting shapes of light and darkness that inhabited the fledgling motion picture medium at the time of the work’s creation: at once a record of life captured in light and a grim measure of deathly decay.
The feeling that we are engaged in an uneasy confrontation with a long-hidden text is only heightened upon learning that Stoker’s widow obtained a German court order to have all copies of the movie destroyed, along with the negatives, and that the complete version of the film now available has been stitched together from a small number of prints that survived the purge.
Although it is not an example of the ‘found footage’ genre in the modern sense, Nosferatu is over a century old and thus inevitably comes to us in a decrepit, unstable, and faded form, much like the ancient creature himself. Even so, the film remains alive and ravenous for our attention. There are moments at which the film seems to conspire with the vampire, as the choppy frame rate and pacing of the old patchwork print appear to help the villain gain on his quarry all the quicker… with unexpected jolts of surprising movement towards you.
This theme of terrifying knowledge extends to the texts within texts that litter the story: a parchment of dark magical symbols delivering instructions to an acolyte; an old tome, resting upon a dusty shelf at an inn, entitled Of Vampyres, Gastlie Spirits, Bewitchments and the Seven Deadline Sins; the cargo papers aboard a doomed ship.
All of this amplifies one of the most compelling and terrifying themes of the original novel Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker, upon which the film is based: the strange and opaque boundaries between folklore, history, and horror.
The novel is presented as a series of letters, newspaper clippings, and journal entries that collectively reveal the full scope of a vampiric horror that is subtly lurking on every page.1 The character of Dracula was also partly a product of the same dramatic tension between folklore and technology that sustains Nosferatu as a work of horrifying historical fiction. In his notes, Stoker emphasised the following among the essential features of the vampire: “could not Codak [photograph] him - comes out black or like a skeletal corpse”.2
It is almost as if Nosferatu (1922) attests to this phenomenon of macabre evasion, only ever capturing some ghoulish phase of a living spectre too terrible to fully comprehend. In this way, the changing visual field that marked the fin de siècle was not just a backdrop for the terror of the vampire, but also a formative element in his creation and endurance.
Investigating the sources that shaped Stoker’s vision of the character again produces the sensation of exhuming a long-buried secret in the archives. Imagine the pulsating glow of candlelight in some silent corner of a remote library as you encounter this passage from the article “Transylvanian Superstitions” by the folklorist and travel writer Emily Gerard (1849-1905), which appeared in the periodical The Nineteenth Century in 1885:
“More decidedly evil, however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell […] every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised.”3
To happen upon that name, that “midnight call of death”, in an old account of local customs and traditions - the very report that arrested Stoker’s attention and provided the basis for the now infamous opening part of his novel - begins to recreate a portion of the gradually unfolding mystery that stalks the narrative. Journals, studies, novels, and movies will always pursue this midnight call to its hiding places, trying to reveal a part of the past too ancient to know and too dark to see.
As the sumptuously sepulchral Nosferatu (2025) demonstrates, each rediscovery of the original captures a compelling fragment of the whole, keeping alive a liquid shadow that will forever feed on the lifeblood of history: storytelling.
I look forward to reading Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian (2005), which I understand offers a fascinating examination of the relationship between Dracula and history.
This insight is gleaned from Christopher Frayling, who also suggests that contemporary audiences read the novel “as an early piece of techno-fiction”. See Christopher Frayling, “Preface”, in Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (rev. ed., London, 2003), p. viii.
Emily Gerard, “Transylvanian Superstitions”, The Nineteenth Century, 18 (1885), pp. 130-150.