But Stoker’s estate had not granted permission: his widow sued, and the negatives and most prints were destroyed. It was based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published only 25 years earlier, though Henrik Galeen’s screenplay changed names, setting and details of the plot – this vampire was called Count Orlok he came to haunt not late Victorian London but Wisborg, a fictional Baltic port, and the action took place some 60 years earlier, in 1838 rats were elevated from a minor element in Stoker’s scheme, so that the vampire became a harbinger of plague.

On release it was hailed by some as a work of genius – the Surrealists were particularly taken with it – but failed commercially it didn’t get shown at all in the United States or Britain, where distributors reportedly rejected it as ‘too horrible’.

Nosferatu itself was for a long time hidden in the shadows. We have met countless – pun inescapable – varieties of vampire: the tragic sexy teens of the Twilight films, the lovable buffoons of What We Do in the Shadows and its TV spin-off, the jaded hipsters of Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive Black vampires, biker vampires, Californian vampires, cartoon vampires, catsuited vampires, child vampires, cuddly vampires, and on and on. But another cultural event of that year, in its way no less consequential, attracted less attention: the premiere of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens, the film that paved the way for what we might call ‘vampire modernism’ – for an era in which the vampire would creep into every corner of culture, and become an all-encompassing metaphor for the anxieties (political, racial, economic, medical, sexual) of the modern world.

2022 saw a profusion of events, broadcasts and publications to mark their joint centenary. 1922 saw the birth of literary modernism, in the form of the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and T.

Vampire Beat by Vincent Courtney