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Nosferatu

One might be looking for Nosferatu (White Wolf) which refers to a clan of vampires.


Nosferatu was originally filmed in 1922 by F.W. Murnau. He had wanted to film a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, but his studio was unable to obtain the rights to the story. Murnau decided to film his own version of the story, and the result is a movie that bears many similarities to Stoker's original tale.
Thus, "Dracula" became "Nosferatu" (the Old European word for "vampire"). The names of the characters are changed, with Count Dracula being changed to Count Orlok[?]. The role of the vampire was played by Max Schreck[?] -- who also starred in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, another of the famous silent films to come from Germany during the 1920s.

Stoker's estate sued for copyright infringement and won. The court ordered all existing prints of Nosferatu to be destroyed, but a number of pirated copies of the film had already been distributed around the world. These prints were then copied over the years, resulting in Nosferatu gaining a reputation as one of the greatest movie depictions of the vampire legend.

In 1979, Werner Herzog directed a remake of Nosferatu. Filmed on a shoestring budget (as was common for German films during the 1970s), Herzog's Nosferatu was a critical success, considered by many to be a faithful homage to Murnau's original film.

In 2000, a Hollywood movie called Shadow of the Vampire told a fictional story of the making of the silent version of Nosferatu. Starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe, it was a fantasy-horror story of a film director (Murnau, played by Malkovich) who created an utterly realistic vampire movie by hiring a real vampire (played by Dafoe) to play the role of the vampire.



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