Nosferatu influenced Dracula

Murnau's film established what a vampire looks like ON SCREEN nine years before Universal's, and it did so as an unlicensed adaptation that Florence Stoker had the courts order destroyed. What survived into 1931 is atmosphere rather than plot: the arrival by ship with a dead crew and a log nobody lived to finish, the castle sequence as a mounting series of wrongnesses, and the idea that the vampire should be filmed as an infestation. Filed MEDIUM. Browning's film is made from the Deane and Balderston play, not from Murnau, and the two are opposite in style; the debt is to what Nosferatu proved a camera could do with the material.