Today in History - March 4: Judge orders destruction of one of the best horror films ever made

A German judge ordered the destruction of all copies of one of the most influential films of all time after its release on March 4, 1922.

Nosferatu depicted a vampire from a Transylvanian castle terrorising a German town.

The silent film was a big hit and remains one of the most important horror movies ever made.

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But director FW Murnau found themselves in a legal battle with the widow of another creator of vampire fiction.

Florence Stoker sued Murnau, arguing that Nosferatu was a copyright infringement of her late husband Bram's work, the novel Dracula.

Dracula, which had been published 25 years earlier, also told the story of a Transylvanian vampire terrorising an English town.

In the book, Count Dracula is killed with a stake to the heart. In Nosferatu, the villain dies from exposure to sunlight - the first time a vampire was depicted as dying that way.

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In the original novel, exposure to sunlight wasn't fatal to vampires, but was irritating.

After a court battle that lasted several years, the judge ruled in favour of Stoker's widow, and all copies of the film were ordered destroyed.

In Germany, every reel was destroyed.

The film would have been lost forever were it not for several copies in the United States which were kept in breach of the judge's orders.

A bureaucratic error meant the book Dracula never had a legal copyright in the US.

The novel was never a massive hit during Stoker's lifetime.

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Ironically enough, it was the countless film adaptations of the book that made it a bestseller in the subsequent decades.

The Dracula archetype was set by the 1931 version.

The English-language version starring Bela Lugosi was filmed during the daytime. At night, another cast filmed the same movie on the same sets, but speaking Spanish.

Critics argue the Spanish version is better directed despite being functionally identical.

Nosferatu itself would be remade multiple times, including twice in the past three years.

Because it has now entered the public domain, Nosferatu no longer holds a copyright.

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