Welcome to My Legacy. I'm Martin of the King to Third, and together with my wife, Andrea Waters King,

and our dear friends Mark and Craig Kilberger, we explore the personal journeys that shape extraordinary lives.

Join us for heartfelt conversations with remarkable guests like David O'Yello-O, Mel Robbins, Martin Sheen, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Billy Porter.

Listen to My Legacy on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is My Legacy.

Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact,

a short-form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

At last, I can speak to you of the most recent cinematic treatment of Count Orlock,

the off-brand Dracula from 1920's Nosferatu, a symphony of horror,

who went on to become a horror icon in his own right.

We have to remember that in 1922, Bram Stoker's novel Dracula was only 35 years old.

In fact, F. W. Murnau's unauthorized adaptation drew the ire of Stoker's widow,

whose legal actions threatened to see all copies of the now legendary silent film destroyed.

Luckily, of course, Murnau's masterpiece survived.

As horror film historian David J. Skull points out in his book,

V is for Vampire, the A to Z Guide to Everything Undead,

the German expressionist picture can largely be seen as a, quote,

metaphor of the plague-like destruction of Germany in World War I.

He also points out that in its initial release, it was far from the silent black and white nightmare that we think of today,

and was actually elaborately colored tinted and accompanied by a modernist orchestra score.

The film influenced not only subsequent Dracula adaptations,

...