DireLilith's Den

HORROR HISTORY

Almost 100 years ago, Dracula author Bram Stoker’s widow Florence Balcombe sued to have all prints of Nosferatu destroyed, and in so doing, nearly deprived horror movie fans of one of its most iconic movie monsters: Max Schreck as the gaunt, rat-like Count Orlak.

After Stoker’s death in 1912, Balcombe, who had once been courted by The Picture of Dorian Gray author Oscar Wilde, was in tough straits. In 1922, after the premiere of Nosferatu in Berlin, which had had full orchestral accompaniment and live sound effects, someone anonymously sent Balcombe a program for the lavish event. The program explicitly stated that Nosferatu was “freely adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” a thing for which Balcombe, as Stoker’s executor and financially dependent upon her late husband’s works, was not told about or paid for. Balcombe joined the British Incorporated Society of Authors, sending along the program with her check, and asked them to take legal action against Prana Films, the company that made Nosferatu, and which had been founded by German occultist Albin Grau.

The British Incorporated Society of Authors coordinated with a German attorney on Balcombe’s behalf against Prana films, which was itself on the financial rocks by the end of three years’ worth of legal wrangling. Realizing she wasn’t going to get any money from the film version of Dracula, Balcombe settled for the destruction of all prints of Nosferatu.

But, before the destruction of all the prints in Germany, several copies had been shipped to the United States, where, through a clerical error, Dracula was in the Public Domain. Nosferatu was re-released in 1929 in the States, paving the way for its rise from the dead to be iconic classic it is today.