F.W. Murnau, one of the half-dozen greatest directors of silent films, did this unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Murnau’s vampire is not the courtly campy count that Bela Lugosi played in the 1931 Hollywood version or the demon lover of later vampire movies. As incarnated here by Max Schreck, he is a foul creature, more rodentoid than human, and his bite is not a kiss. This first great feature-length horror movie casts a long, angular shadow over film history. Klaus Kinski brought a pestilential presence to the role in Werner Herzog’s wonderful remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and Willem Dafoe played the mysterious Schreck in Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fantasy on the making of Murnau’s creepy classic.
