The first vampire film arose by accident when filmmakers lacked Stoker rights.

Evidence

The vampire first appeared on the silver screen in Nosferatu (1921), a German presentation of Bram Stoker’s monster, featuring the rodent-like Count Orlock. Although considered the first “Dracula film,” Orlock is radically different from Stoker’s Count; this is because the filmmakers could not secure the rights to Stoker’s text. Nosferatu is the film that establishes the genre of today’s Gothic horror film, followed by numerous studio productions like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, and Wuthering Heights—films that feature monsters, ghosts, and other terrors. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 653

Categorization

• CANDY: Fun trivia: the foundational vampire film differs from Stoker’s Count because of a rights failure.
• XREF: Productions shifting monsters when denied source rights echoes the reader’s thesis about manufactured monsters independent of any real object.