Line #17 Trivia/Nosferatu


1	* BannedInChina: Due to "excessive horror", the film was banned in Sweden until 1972. It was also banned in its native Germany for a while when the Nazis took over.
2	* CompletelyDifferentTitle: In a particularly bizarre (and ironic, given the original's copyright disputes) example of this trope, an independent German film company released a heavily edited sound version of ''Nosferatu'' entitled ''The Twelfth Hour'' in 1930. The producers of this version had supposedly received a print of Creator/FWMurnau's rough cut from Albin Grau, the film's producer, and received permission to reedit it once the copyright disputes were cleared. They not only drastically recut the film but added sound, used alternate takes cut from the theatrical release, changed the character names (again) and even shot new scenes [[TheOtherMarty featuring different actors]]. This version saw release in Germany and a handful of other European countries, with the producers initially marketing it as a [[BlatantLies completely different movie]], but other countries with stricter copyright laws blocked its release.[[note]]Which didn't stop a number of historians from conflating it with the "official" ''Nosferatu''; ''Twelfth Hour'' is often listed as an alternate, or even the primary title for Murnau's film in several reference books[[/note]] Decades later, Murnau's estate purchased the rights to ''The Twelfth Hour'', and to date they have blocked any official video release - although it turns up occasionally on television and at classic film festivals.
3	** Hong Kong: ''Undying Corpse''
4	** Taiwan: ''Vampire''
5	* CreatorCouple: Max Schreck's wife Fanny has a small role as a nurse.
6	* CreatorKiller: Prana Studios was bankrupted by the Stoker family's lawsuits and never produced another film.
7	* DeletedScene: Ruth Landshoff claims she filmed a scene where her character flees from Orlok along a beach. It's not in any version of the film, and doesn't appear in the original script either.
8	* TheForeignSubtitle:
9	** France: ''Nosferatu the Vampire''
10	** Hungary: ''Nosferatu: Dracula''
11	* KeepCirculatingTheTapes: The reason the film still exists. According to [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu The Other Wiki]], the studio who made the film was sued by the estate of Creator/BramStoker, and the courts ordered all copies of the film to be ''burned''. Somehow, one copy slipped through the cracks, and this copy was then duplicated and spread throughout the world. The 'crack' was the United States, which didn't recognize most foreign copyright claims until decades later, by which time the original book was public domain and the claim against the film moot.
12	* LyingCreator: Studio head Albin Grau claimed that he was inspired to make the film in 1916 when a Serbian farmer told him his father was a vampire. Film historians believe this story was fabricated to sell tickets.
13	* MissingEpisode: The original score was supposedly recorded during a screening, but has been lost. There is however a reconstitution of it as it was played in 1922.
14	* NeverWorkWithChildrenOrAnimals: One scene has Orlok loading up a horse-drawn cart with coffins. He then gets inside one at the top of the coffin stack. Watch as the lid of the coffin moves up to Orlok's coffin (via stop-motion photography) -- the horses change position a couple of times.
15	** An earlier scene has Hutter climbing into Orlok's horse-drawn carriage. Watching the film closely, you can see the horses wandering off the dirt path on the way back over the hill.
16	* PopCultureUrbanLegends:
17	** At the time of release and for many years after, there were rumors that Max Schreck didn't actually exist and was a stage name used by well-known actor Alfred Abel to make his character seem more mysterious. It's often noted that Schreck (German for "terror") is a curiously appropriate name for an actor playing a vampire, which is a pleasant coincidence, but Schreck is also a fairly common German and Dutch surname.
18	** It is often reported that the names of characters were changed to avoid [[WritingAroundTrademarks copyright disputes]] with the novel. But the titles actually state that the film is based on the novel, and the name changes seem more just for the sake of relocating the story to Germany - as it was low budget and intended just for German audiences.
19	* ScrewedByTheLawyers: The film was nearly lost due to a lawsuit from Bram Stoker's estate over the film blatantly plagiarising ''Literature/{{Dracula}}''. All but one of the original prints were ''burned'' - but that one print ended up in the United States, which refused to recognize foreign copyright claims until well after ''Dracula'' entered the public domain and the ruling was rendered void, and thus the film survived.

Context Trivia / Nosferatu