Starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder, Georg H. Schnell, Ruth Landshoff
Directed by F.W. Murnau
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A real estate agent sells the house across from his to the foreign Count Orlok, who is in reality a vampire who brings pestilence and death to the agent's homeland.
This was the first screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, but an unauthorized one that per Wikipedia bankrupted its studio due to copyright infringement litigation. It is nonetheless a brilliant film from acclaimed director Murnau, with wonderful shadowy photography and a striking performance and makeup for Schreck as the undead count. The story does depart quite a bit from the Dracula text, changing the character names, and setting up a noble sacrifice by Schroder's character at its climax to bring Orlok's crimes against humanity to an end, instead of utilizing the more familiar confrontation between the villain and the novel's Van Helsing. That makes the picture somewhat unique among all the Dracula adaptations, and the German Expressionist imagery contained within has kept it a cinema treasure in perpetuity.
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