Film Nitrate

The whole 'Universal Monsters' franchise, which spawned such revered films as Frankenstein (1931), The Invisible Man (1933) and The Wolf Man (1941) began in 1931 when the studios' young new head of production Carl Laemmle Jr. authorised Todd Browning's adaption of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula . The Dracula novel had been put to film before, when F.W. Murnau made the eerie 1922 silent, Nosferatu . Stoker's widow successfully sued the film studio after they decided to save money by not paying for the rights to the novel, and it was ordered that all prints were to be destroyed. Fortunately, the film survived, and the popularity of the novel ensured that it would not be long until the production of another adaptation would be underway. As early as 1924, an authorised stage play adapted from Stoker's novel by Hamilton Deane was doing the rounds in London, after successfully touring England. America was not blind to the play's success, and in 1927 John L....

Nosferatu is the first silent film I ever saw, and what an introduction to silent film it is. Nearly 90 years after its premiere it still rates highly in numerous 'Best Film' polls, and it's easy to see why. The most famous of all of director F.W. Murnau's Weimar films, this was one of his first, created 4 years before he left Germany to move to the United States to create films for Fox Studios. Nosferatu was based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula but due to the studio's unwillingness to licence rights for the novel all of the names of the characters were changed. So instead of Count Dracula, we get Count Orlock (which I actually prefer), and instead of Jonathan Harker we get Thomas Hutter. Amusingly, Murnau appears to have believed that by simply changing the names any potential libel would be avoided, despite the fact that the story itself heavily draws on the novel. So it must have been a surprise to him and the film's ill-fated production com...