How the Law gave us DRACULA

One of the few things I’ve learned after more years in the law than I care to remember is that the less you have to do with it, the better. However it’s right to say that without three infringements of the law involving the jurisdictions of England & Wales and Germany, we would probably have never had the phenomena of what we know today as DRACULA.

Conveniently overlooking the basic tenets of intellectual property law, the German film director F W Murnau made what he quaintly believed to be an undetectable plagiarised version of Bram Stoker’s failed novel. Changing the names of the characters and using the title NOSFERATU, he produced such a successful film that its reputation even reached the ears of the wronged author’s widow Florence eking out a living in 1920’s London.

She went to law and obtained an injunction which incredibly she managed to enforce in a German court ordering the destruction of the negatives and all prints of the film. However, as you would expect, pirated versions which were clearly in breach of the order, started to surface at film societies around Europe and North America with the result that NOSFERATU acquired cult status. The cat was out of the bag and poor Florence who would soon become rich Florence, quietly gave up the ghost, so to speak. Hence, the first rule of film-making was inadvertently invented by Murnau: A banned film is a good film.

In 1984, after 8 years of painstaking work involving prints from Switzerland, France and East Germany, the film as Murnau had originally conceived it was finally screened to universal acclaim. The film is definitely worth seeing on the big screen, particularly for the chilling performance of Max Schreck, as the very first DRACULA. It was put about - one suspects by Schreck himself – that he was in fact a real vampire, and this formed the basis of a recent film featuring Eddie Izzard.

Generally considered to be a genius of early cinema, Murnau inevitably was lured to Hollywood where he made the legendary SUNRISE, prior to his early demise at 42, not with a wooden stake in his heart but in a common and garden car crash. No conspiracy theories there, yet.

The irony of course is that if Murnau hadn’t decided to disregard the law and make the film, Florence hadn’t decided to litigate, and film buffs hadn’t decided to subvert the court order, then Bram’s manuscript would probably have lain undisturbed in a trunk in Florence’s loft at St Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, and we would never have had all those nightmares. Loft? Trunk? Manuscript? The ingredients of yet another DRACULA film, surely? And the law?