They were warned: make a movie about the Devil, and the Devil will try to stop you. What followed were plane crashes, bombings of film locations, animal attacks, and a real-life decapitation that mirrored a scene from the film itself. From The Omen to Nosferatu, these are the horror movies where the curse might have been real, and the truth behind it is even stranger than the legend.
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SOURCES
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmsNWmKqsAY
https://horrorobsessive.com/2020/04/21/the-omen-curse-devil-of-a-time/
https://collider.com/the-omen-curse-production/
https://elhype.com/en/nosferatu-esotericism-and-terror/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXX8v5TgiEg&t=15s
https://skepticalinquirer.org/2017/11/hollywood-curse-legends/
TRANSCRIPT
The Omen started with a simple premise: what if the Antichrist, the son of the Devil, had already come to Earth, and was walking among us, but no one recognized him – because he had taken the form of a child?
Producer Harvey Bernhard was so struck by this thought, that as soon as he heard the pitch, he stood up in the middle of the meeting, excused himself, and immediately drove home to flesh out the idea. In the wake of blockbusters like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, Bernhard felt certain he had a major hit on his hands.
But he might have gotten more than he bargained for. A lot more. It’s been said that “the greatest trick” the Devil ever played, was to make you think he doesn’t exist. Bernhard’s movie was a direct assault on this strategy, and several people warned him - the Devil will try to stop it from ever being made.
They were right at first, but only in an ironic way. The script sat in “development hell” for a few years before it was picked up by 20th Century Fox in turnaround. There were more script revisions; the title changed from The Antichrist to The Birthmark and then finally The Omen.
If you haven’t seen the movie, I can give you a quick summary - spoiler warning, obviously.
We meet Robert Thorn and his wife Katherine on what should be the happiest day of their life. The day their son is born. Sadly, the doctor tells Robert that the baby died after only one breath. But they can still have a family - there’s another baby in the hospital whose own mother died in childbirth. They can adopt him. Robert agrees, but keeps the truth from his wife, presenting the baby as their own. They name him Damien.
Everything seems fine at first, but as Damien grows up, unexplained things start happening in the Thorn household. The boy seems to have a strange effect on animals; they’re terrified of him. (Except for a pack of Rottweilers that keep appearing outside the Thorn’s house.) At Damien’s fifth birthday party, his nanny hangs herself from a second story window in front of all the guests, proclaiming “It’s all for you Damien!” before jumping to her death. When the Thorn’s arrive at a cathedral to attend a family wedding, Damien freaks out, attacking Katherine as soon as they’re in sight of the church.
More bodies keep piling up around Damien - a priest who tries to warn Robert that Damien is actually the Antichrist is impaled by a falling steeple; a photographer who tries to help Robert investigate the mystery is beheaded by a pane of glass; and Katherine suffers a miscarriage after accidentally falling over the second floor railing. An accident that may or may not have been engineered by Damien.
Robert learns that, if Damien is the Antichrist, he’ll bear the mark of the Devil. One night while he’s asleep, Robert looks for any sign. He finds a birthmark on his scalp, hidden beneath his hair, in the shape of 666. With this confirmation, he knows what he has to do: kill his own son.
Okay, I don’t want to completely ruin it for you, so I’ll stop there. Especially because the real point of today’s episode is what was happening behind the scenes.
After sitting on the shelf for almost two years, once The Omen was picked up by 20th Century Fox, the production rapidly fell into place. Gregory Peck signed on to play Robert Thorn, opposite Lee Remmick as Katherine. Production was slated to start in London in the fall of 1975. If everyone made it there in one piece.
Three different people had a rough time even getting to London for shooting. Gregory Peck’s flight was plagued with heavy turbulence almost the whole way and the plane was struck by lightning. Three days later, writer David Seltzer flew the same route with the same airline and his plane was struck by lightning, too. Then it happened a third time during producer Mace Neufeld’s trip. Now, it’s not exactly uncommon for planes to be struck by lightning, but this cluster of lightning strikes is definitely weird.
Also, one night during production prep, producer Harvey Bernhard and director Richard Donner were working late. Afterward, Bernhard offered to drive him home. He parked on the street, in front of Donner’s house. It was dark, and Donner’s house was on the curve of a hillside. Seconds after Donner stepped out and closed the door, he was caught in the glare of headlights. Another car came careening down the hill out of nowhere and slammed into them, pinning Donner between the two cars. He managed to walk away from the accident, but just barely - a few inches difference and, according to Donner, he would have lost a leg.
Was it just an accident? A crazy LA driver on a windy road? If you know the reputation of drivers in Los Angeles, that’s probably the most reasonable explanation. Except… Bernhard had been warned. The Devil will try to stop you.
Robert Munger worked as a spiritual advisor on the movie. Before he flew to London, he had lunch with a friend, a fellow theologian. After Munger excitedly told him about the production, his friend got quiet. He thought the whole thing was a bad idea. It was tempting the Devil.
Munger shrugged; his faith had nothing to do with the Devil. To him, Christianity was about his belief in God and relationship with Jesus. And this was just a movie.
His friend shook his head and replied, “You may not believe now, but if you go ahead with this movie… before you are done, you will believe the Devil exists.”
When production started in October of 1975, multiple people commented on a “strange atmosphere” surrounding the set. Like a tension in the air. A sense of dread and discomfort that you couldn’t quite put your finger on. And it seems even the animals on set felt it too.
The film featured Rottweilers in a few scenes – threatening shadows lurking around the Thorn’s house and stalking Robert as he investigates the truth behind Damien’s past. In one scene, Robert and a friend, played by David Warner, are attacked and chased out of a cemetery by a wild pack. But on the day of the shoot, the dogs were seemingly reluctant to, ahem, show their teeth. Instead of chasing Peck and Warner, the dogs sat patiently on the hillside, perfectly behaved, almost in a trance. To get the shots they needed, Peck and Warner had to hide slabs of meat under their clothes to get a reaction from the dogs. The whole thing turned into a joke.
For the final shots, Peck and Warner were replaced by their stunt doubles. Terry Walsh, who played Warner’s double, was an experienced stunt man. He had performed stunts using dogs before and had thoroughly prepped the scene before shooting. But when he walked onto the set, that palpable tension returned, the strange atmosphere buzzing in the background.
As soon as the director called action, one of the dogs turned on Walsh, hackles raised, his entire demeanor changed. That trance had been broken. The dog lunged at Walsh, attacking him so viciously, he bit through the protective padding, effectively mauling him. As Walsh was sent to the hospital, the rest of the crew was left shaken. It felt like more than an accident. Something had just made the dog snap.
I personally feel like animals can sense energy that we just can’t, and the dogs were not the only animals having strange issues on set.
In the movie, Katherine takes Damien to a drive-through safari park outside of London. It’s one of the early hints that something’s off about the little boy. As they move from exhibit to exhibit, the animals grow increasingly wary of him, like they can smell something wrong with him. It all culminates in the baboon enclosure. The entire pack of monkeys swarms Katherine’s car, leaping on the hood, pounding on the windows. It’s truly one of the most terrifying scenes in the whole movie.
And for Lee Remmick, who played Katherine, that terror was genuine. To get the reaction they needed from the baboons, the crew had to provoke them. The problem was, the baboons were completely desensitized to humans; cars drove through their enclosure day-in and day-out. They just didn’t care anymore.
But there was a plan B. if they separated the alpha baboon from the pack, they might get riled up. So the on-site veterinarian sedated the leader, and held him in the back seat of the car. Director Richard Donner shot with a handheld camera in the backseat, with Lee and Harvey, who played Damien, in the front. When the rest of the baboons saw their leader being driven away in the car, they panicked, and swarmed the car- just like Donner wanted.
Unfortunately, Lee Remmick didn’t know how to drive a stick shift very well, and as the baboons swarmed in full force, she got so flustered, the car kept stalling out. As she struggled to flee through the sea of baboons, the alpha started to wake up, and it realized what was happening, so he grabbed hold of her hair from the back seat and refused to let go. Somehow, she eventually managed to get the car in gear and drive to safety. But Donner confirmed that most of her screams in the final cut were 100% real.
It was a harrowing experience, for sure, but like I said earlier, doesn’t sound like a curse. If anything, the director thought it was a blessing because he got the performance he wanted out of the actress. But there was another incident at the safari park that day that hints at a darker hand at work.
Donner had also shot a sequence in the lion enclosure, though the scene ended up on the cutting room floor. After they were done filming what they needed, the crew moved on, to a different part of the park. Traffic resumed and the guards and handlers went back to work. But apparently, when one of the guards went back to his booth, the door didn’t close all the way. He didn’t notice as it slowly swung all the way open. And remember, this wasn’t a normal zoo, the animals were kept in an open habitat enclosure. The next time the guard looked up, there were two lions standing in the doorway. Before he could call for help, they attacked, mauling him to death.
but It’s just an accident, right? It’s horrible, of course, but ultimately just an accident. Except, that’s exactly what The Omen the film is filled with - tragic occurrences that have a plausible explanation, but are also so horrible, they make you stop and wonder if something darker is at play. The circumstances of the lion attack would have fit seamlessly into the world of the film. So was it really just an accident?
As the weeks of production marched on, the atmosphere on the set turned darker. One of the actors started to feel there was a genuine presence of evil. And then it started to follow them home.
Gregory Peck had a favorite restaurant in London, called Scott’s. He went there practically every night after filming wrapped, he had a standing reservation. One night, after a long shooting day, Peck decided to sit out that night’s meal at Scott’s. But one of the producers, Mace Neufeld, offered to keep the table and go in his place.
He decided to walk from the hotel, it was hardly more than 10 minutes away – and all the better to work up his appetite. Even in the dark, he had a decent view of the park, the winding pathways dotted with lantern globes. When he reached Mount St, he realized there were fewer cars on the street than usual. It was still early, not even 8 o’clock. But he was alone on the sidewalk, his footsteps echoing. Then, when he turned the corner–
It sounds like joke, but the restaurant literally blew up.
Broken glass littered the sidewalk and the entire area in front of Scott’s had been cordoned off by police. There was a gaping hole where the front window used to be, splintered tables and chairs piled on the pavement. Scott’s was the latest victim of the IRA’s bombing attacks. And Mace Neufeld had missed it by less than an hour. Reports said six people died in the blast
But it wasn’t the only near miss – several weeks earlier, the same IRA cell had bombed the Green Park underground station. Neufeld and a few other crew members had been walking towards the station that night around 9PM when the blast rocked the surrounding area, shattering windows and launching parked cars across the road. Neufeld had avoided this one by mere minutes.
So far in the span of the production, Neufeld’s plane was hit by lightening, and two locations he was heading to blew up on his way there. It’s starting to feel more like a coincidence.
As filming continued, the subtle sense of disquiet on set remained. So the cast and crew were probably grateful whenever they had a day away from the studio, an escape from the tension and dread.
Like this one day, director Richard Donner and a small crew are at a private airstrip outside of London. They’ve chartered a small plane for some exterior shots - simple stuff, Gregory Peck getting off the plane, talking to another character who meets him at the runway. Simple.
Before they arrived, the charter company offered them a deal. Because they only needed to film the plane on the ground, the company asked if they could charter out the plane to actual customers, who would take off after they were done shooting. Basically, the paying passengers would cover most of the cost, and the production could get the shots they needed at a fraction of the price. Even with starpower like Gregory Peck as their leading man, The Omen wasn’t a big budget picture. So any chance to save a little money was a welcome opportunity. They agreed to the deal and adjusted their shooting schedule accordingly.
They arrived at the airstrip in the morning, set up their shots, and started rolling. It was a simple day, maybe a few hours to capture the different angles, then an early wrap. The crew finished packing their gear just as the actual passengers arrived. By the time the plane was ready for take-off, all the elements of the production were long gone. But perhaps one piece of it lingered; that hint of darkness that they all had felt for weeks now.
The plane squared up at the end of the runway, the pilot made confirmation with the radio tower: all clear for take-off. He throttled the engines, gathering speed, advancing down the runway. The wind lifted the little craft into the air, climbing higher, higher–
But as they made their ascent, the plane flew directly into a flock of birds. The engines seized, sputtering, and then died completely. Only moments after take off, the plane plummeted back toward the ground, crashing at the end of the runway, killing everyone on board. Unable to do anything to stop it, the wreckage barreled through the fence at the end of the runway and out into the road, slamming into a passing car, crushing it, and killing all three passengers.
And in an even crueler twist, The woman driving the car was the pilot’s wife, and their two children had been riding in the back seat. This one horrible accident had claimed the lives of an entire family.
And with that, the Omen started to feel like it actually might be cursed,
Throughout the film, several of the characters in Damien’s orbit suffer their own accidental deaths and injuries. Richard Donner was deliberate in how he wanted these to play out in the movie - he wanted each one to be directly on the line between plausible and supernatural. Even when it felt like Damien was the source of the violence, there was always a plausible alternative explanation.
To make these accidents feel as realistic as possible, Donner relied on an experienced and inventive cohort of seasoned special effects designers and stuntmen.
Near the end of the film, after Katherine learns the truth about Damien, she’s attacked by Damien’s nanny and “protector,” Mrs. Baylock. She launches Katherine through the window of her hospital room, where she falls to her death, crashing through the roof of a parked ambulance.
To capture this feat on film, Donner turned to stuntman Alf Joint, who specialized in high falls. He once leapt 430 feet into a waterfall for a stunt, so a jump from a two story window was hardly breaking a sweat.
He was supposed to jump off the roof of a building and land on an airbag on the ground. Something he’d done dozens of times. But just as Alf got ready to leap, he felt someone push him - making him lose his balance, and he fell instead of jumping, missing the airbag completely, and slamming into the ground. He managed to survive the fall, refused to call it an accident. He insisted: something pushed him off that roof. But there was no one there who would have done it. People watched him fall, they confirmed there was no push.
It was as if that horrible presence they all had been feeling had pushed him. The curse was getting strongest. But no one could have imagined what was about to happen,
In the movie, Robert Thorn investigates Damien’s background, and the possibility that he’s the Antichrist, with the help of a photographer, Keith Jennings. Moments after Jennings tries to convince Thorn that he must kill his son to eliminate the threat, he is decapitated by a huge pane of plate glass.
Originally, the scene was scripted so that the glass would fall from above – some workers are hoisting the pane up the side of a building to place in a window, the cable snaps, and the glass falls onto Jennings, slicing through his neck. However, when it came time to rig the stunt, the lead special effects designer, John Richardson, ran into issues. Instead of falling straight down, the glass kept sweeping out, at an angle, as the huge pane caught the air. So he came up with an alternative that eventually became the scene in the movie.
In that sequence, Robert and Jennings travel to meet with an Antichrist expert in Jerusalem. He tells Robert to look for the mark of the Devil, a birthmark in the shape of three sixes, to confirm Damien’s true identity. Then he gives Robert seven silver daggers and instructs him to kill Damien. Robert is shocked and horrified by the prospect, but Jennings insists - it must be done. While they argue on the street, Robert throws the daggers down an alley, in refusal. But Jennings won’t let him give up. He goes after the daggers and starts collecting them.
While Jennings searches the ground, a flatbed truck carrying a huge pane of glass parks at the top of the alley. When the driver gets out, he knocks the parking brake loose without realizing it. Slowly, the truck creeps backward, gathering speed as it slips down the sloping alley – until it rams into a barrier. On impact, one of the panes of glass slips free of its tether and shoots off the truckbed, just as Jennings stands up, holding the daggers–
It slices clean through his neck and crashes into the storefront behind him, his severed head tumbling after.
On the day of filming, the new stunt went off without a hitch, and Richard Donner agreed that it made for an even more impactful moment than the original. He gave all the credit to John Richardson.
But what happened next would cement the legend of The Omen curse.
After production wrapped, John Richardson was hired to work on another movie, A Bridge Too Far. A WWII epic set in the Netherlands; it was probably a nice change of pace after the weeks of doom and gloom.
One night, John was out driving, on his way back from a long shoot day. He was with his girlfriend, Liz Moore, who also worked in special effects. In fact, she’d also worked on The Omen. It’s late, almost midnight, and the roads were dark and winding. Maybe John was exhausted, maybe the curve in the road was sharper than he expected, maybe he was distracted by the radio suddenly buzzing with static. When all of a sudden
It was a head-on collision. John was thrown from the car and knocked unconscious.
And when he woke up, he saw how horrible the scene was. On one side of him, he saw Liz who had been decapitated by a tire that smashed into the car.
And on the other side, he turned and saw a big blue street sign, one of the headlights making it gleam in the darkness: and it read 66.6 km to Ommen. A nearby city.
In the decades following the film’s release, director Richard Donner hasn’t put much stock in the rumors of a curse. He thinks, no matter what kind of movie you’re filming, the themes and the tone are always amplified in your memory. They were making a horror movie, so the horrible things stick out. If they had been making a comedy, all anyone would remember are the laughs.
But both producer Harvey Bernhard and advisor Robert Munger walked away from the experience with a changed perspective. Munger had to admit that his friend was right. After everything he’d seen the Devil throw at them, he was a believer now.
The Omen was hardly the first horror movie people believed to be cursed. We can go even farther back, to one of the first horror movies ever, and still find signs that something wasn’t right.
Nosferatu is the OG vampire. And even today, over 100 years later, he is horrific. Even if you haven’t seen the original 1922 movie I guarantee you’d recognize Count Orlok. Long spindled fingers studded with sharp claws. Towering frame. Death white skin. And two pronged fangs, like a rat.
Nosferatu is arguably one of the most important horror films ever made - not only because of its influence on so many subsequent movies and filmmakers, but because in many ways, it defined our expectations for horror and horror monsters. Which is wild because no one was ever supposed to see it.
But before we get into that, let me give a quick summary. The full title Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was a silent film released in Germany in 1922. It follows the story of Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent, his wife, Ellen, and the bizarre pseudo love triangle they find themselves in with Count Orlok, a Transylvanian nobleman, Who’s also a vampire.
Hutter is sent to Transylvania to meet Orlok and finalize his purchase of a house in Hutter’s town, Wisborg. On his way there, Hutter stops over at an inn, where the people there are terrified by just the mention of Orlok’s name. In his room that night, Hutter finds a book on vampires, and decides to bring it with him.
When he arrives at Orlok’s castle, he meets with the count and presents him with the contract to finalize and sign. Orlok sees a picture of Ellen among Hutter's belongings and comments on her “lovely neck.” At dinner, Hutter cuts his thumb, and is horrified when Orlok tries to suck the wound clean. Then, when he wakes up the next morning, he finds two fresh puncture wounds in his neck. After consulting the book about vampires, he begins to suspect Orlok is a vampire. Then, while wandering around the castle, he finds Orlok sleeping in a coffin. So, suspicions confirmed.
Now terrified for his life, Hutter hides in Orlok’s castle. He sees Orlok load several coffins onto a carriage, before climbing into one himself, and then riding off into the night. Hutter makes his escape and flees back home to Wisborg.
Soon enough, Orlok also arrives in Wisborg and moves into his new house. He brings with him a plague of pestilence, spread by rats throughout the city. Hutter's friends and neighbors start dying from the disease. Ellen finds the book about vampires and realizes the truth about Orlok and the source of the plague. To save the town, Ellen decides to sacrifice herself. She offers herself to Orlok, allowing him to drink her blood, distracting him until sunrise. When the sunlight falls on Orlok, he’s destroyed, vanishing, leaving only a puff of smoke behind.
Nosferatu went on to define the vampire legend, and the film created tropes about the lore that still hold fast today, like the idea that vampires spread disease and that they can be killed by sunlight. And that second point was purely budgetary - the production didn’t have the means for fancy special effects, so blasting Orlok into a puff of smoke was the solution.
For the most part, Nosferatu was the brainchild of producer Albin Grau. As he tells it, he found inspiration for the picture while serving in WWI. Grau claimed that in the winter of 1916, while serving in the German army, he was dispatched to a small village where he met a Serbian farmer. The old man told Grau that his father had been killed in a “blood feud” and therefore buried without proper sacraments. The unholy act transformed his father into a vampire and, night after night, he haunted the village. Grau claimed the man showed him an official document describing the way they went and dug up his fathers body to end the torment. The paper claimed the corpse was “perfectly preserved” – except for the two front teeth, which now extended well below his bottom lip in two pointed fangs. The local priest drove a stake through the heart of the “nosferatu.” It let out a sigh, and then died.
This story really resonated it with Grau, who had just come back from the war. He likened WWI to a “cosmic vampire” drinking the blood of millions.
After his time in the Army, Grau returned to Berlin and in an attempt to make sense of the horror he witnessed, he became a serious student of the occult. He was a member of the Rosicrucian magical order and later the Fraternitas Saturni under the name Master Pacitius. Now, back in 1922, dabbling in the occult wasn’t actually that uncommon. Everyone had suffered so much death, between the war and the Spanish flu pandemic that followed. Those that remained searched for answers in mysticism - why were they spared? What had happened to those they’d lost? But Grau was a major player in German mystic circles, even taking part in the infamous Weida Conference, where occult leaders from around the world gathered in Germany, including the most famous occultist at the time, Aleister Crowley.
Grau’s connection to the occult was peppered all throughout Nosferatu. The occult is literally baked into the film. The letters between Orlok and his servant Knock - who also happens to be Hutter’s boss - are written in Enochian. It was a 16th century occult language recorded in a British alchemist’s personal journals. Only someone who was seriously steeped in the world of magics would even know it existed. There’s also a reference to Paracelsus, a Swiss alchemist who the Rosicrucians regarded as a prophet. Ironically, Paracelsus was an early opponent to blood-letting as a medical treatment. Grau also contributed to Orlok's backstory, that he was created by the archdemon Belial. In the bible, Belial is linked with pestilence; Orlok was a literal bringer of disease, arriving in Wisborg with thousands of plague-infested rats. He also looks like a rodent – another choice Grau was responsible for.
Now, as occultism later fell out of favor and was relegated to fringe status, it cast a pall on the fates of those connected to Nosferatu. And that’s when the discussion of a curse really began. So many people connected to the film, both cast and crew, died in obscurity or under strange circumstances. By embracing the influence of mystic arts, had they brought it on themselves?
For one, many of the cast and crew started disappearing. First, screenwriter Henrik Galeen disappeared in 1933. actor John Gottowt vanished around the same time and was only heard of again when people read about his murder in 1942.
But anyone with a basic knowledge of history probably can tell what was going on. Well… I think there are two other factors to consider when discussing the Nosferatu “curse.” The first is Facism.
The screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, was Jewish. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933.
Actors Gustav Wangenheim and Alexander Granach, who played Hutter and Knock, respectively, both fled Germany for the USSR because of their communist backgrounds.
Jewish actor John Gottowt, who played Dr. Van Helsing, went into hiding in Poland, disguising himself as a Catholic priest. He was murdered by the SS in 1942.
As for Grau, When the Nazi’s came to power, all kinds of groups were targeted by the regime. (Though obviously none so much as the Jewish.) The Fraternitas Saturni, Grau’s order, was outlawed in 1936 and he was threatened with persecution. He managed to flee to Switzerland, where he lived until the end of WWII.
Director F. W. Murnau was gay. Sensing the rising Nazi tide in his homeland, he moved to Hollywood in 1927. Unlike so many others, Murnau did continue his trade, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential directors of the silent film era. His first American movie, Sunrise, won three Oscars at the first ever Academy Awards ceremony.
In 1931, Murnau was on a high. His latest film, Taboo, was set to release in a few weeks. He owned two properties, a house in Hollywoodland and a farm in Oregon. He was in love. But something prickled at the back of his consciousness. A warning.
Murnau was expected in New York City for all the press and hubbub leading up to release. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that his trip was doomed. At his last reading, his astrologer had cautioned him against travelling on land. He’d just have to put his foot down; there was no way he could board the train for New York.
Instead, on the afternoon of March 10th, 1931, Murnau left his house in Santa Monica with his chauffeur and personal valet, driving south on the PCH towards the marina. Instead of a train, he decided to take a steamship to New York.
But as the car raced down the careening curves of the coastal highway, a truck approached from the other direction, drifting over the line. Swerving to avoid a head-on collision, Murnau’s car skidded off the road and down the steep embankment, barrel-rolling end over end, eventually landing upside down. Murnau died the next day from his injuries.
Well… the astrologer did warn him about travelling on land.
The final element of the Nosferatu “curse” has nothing to do with the occult, or astrologers, or anything exotic at all, really. If Murnau and Grau and all the rest were really cursed, what they suffered from was a vindictive application of copyright laws.
See, even though Grau waxed poetic about the Serbian farmer and the scourge of WWI, it was plain to anyone with eyes that Nosferatu drew heavily from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Sure, they changed the location, they gave the characters new names, they added their own flourishes to the vampire lore, but the basic framework was practically identical.
When Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, found out about the unlicensed adaptation, she sued the pants off Grau and his production company for copyright violation. And, not really a surprise here, she won the case. When she realized that she wouldn’t receive any of the proceeds from the film – there weren’t any, the studio had declared bankruptcy – she instead insisted that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. And the judge agreed.
So with the cooperation of the Deutsche-Amerikanisch Film Union, The London Film Society, and even Universal Pictures, the original film negatives were shredded.
Except… this movie has lasted over 100 years. I told you, it’s on YouTube. Luckily, copies had already been sent to France, Spain, Japan, and America. They not only survived but continued to be copied and shared around the world. Only now, it was with an air of secrecy; just watching the movie was to do something forbidden. Florence Stoker’s campaign of vengeance transformed Nosferatu into its own legend, a haunting creature of the shadows that refuses to die.
So maybe it’s a curse of irony?