The sad, short life of Nosferatu's original creator

Robert Egger’s new version of Nosferatu is impressing the world now, but while you might know it’s based on an over 100 year old silent film, do you know much about the original director?

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was born in Germany in 1888 and was interested in film and drama from a very young age. He served in the military in WWI like most Germans, serving as a combat pilot and surviving eight crashes without serious injury.

He began his career in film almost immediately after the war ended, directing his first film in 1919. But he is most well known for Nosferatu, his 1922 unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It was this lack of approval from Stoker’s estate that initially doomed the film, with lawsuits and poor box office leaving the film unseen (and almost lost entirely) for decades.

Murnau was gay, in a time where this was hardly accepted. When his lover, the poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, was killed on the eastern front in 1915, Murnau drew on this tragedy in much of his future work, as well as his general experience of the war.

Murnau moved to Hollywood in 1926 and directed several films there, but was tragically killed in a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in 1931, aged 42.