The Occult Origins of Nosferatu (1922)

Source: The Occult Origins of Nosferatu (1922), Zorse, 9:11, uploaded 2024-06-30, Watch Later position 814.

Zorse reads F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu as a film shaped by occult ideas, medieval demonology, alchemy, Hermeticism and the recent memory of the First World War. The argument begins with Albin Grau, the film’s producer and production designer, then moves through the symbols in the film’s letters and the occult genealogies given to its characters. It ends with a more historical haunting: the trenches, epidemics and mass death that surrounded the people who made the film.

Albin Grau and the Prana project

Grau spent much of his life studying the occult and belonged to the Fraternitas Saturni, or Brotherhood of Saturn. Its founder, Gregor A. Gregorius, described the order’s concerns as esotericism, mysticism and magic in a cosmic sense. Grau also adopted the magical name Master Pacius. Zorse presents this background as the reason occult ideas enter Nosferatu at the level of its production, rather than as decoration added by later viewers.

Grau intended Nosferatu to begin a series of supernatural films made through his Prana Film studio. The plan ended with the film’s copyright dispute. The production adapted Bram Stoker’s Dracula without permission whilst the novel remained under copyright, and Stoker’s family sued. A court ordered the destruction of the surviving prints. Prana Film declared bankruptcy, which Zorse says allowed Grau to evade the legal troubles, leaving Nosferatu as the only film the studio produced.

The studio’s name and emblem carry the same interest. Prana is a Sanskrit term for the vital force within living things. The studio’s yin-yang symbol comes from Chinese philosophy and also works as an esoteric image of light struggling with darkness. In 1936, the Fraternitas Saturni was prohibited in Germany. Grau then moved to Switzerland with other members of the order.

Letters, angelic language, and the Scholomance

The letters exchanged early in the film between Count Orlok and Knock contain symbols associated with alchemy and Hermeticism. They also include Enochian, a constructed language that John Dee and Edward Kelley claimed to receive from angels in the sixteenth century. Dee called it angelical, celestial speech or a holy language, and sometimes connected it to the language Adam spoke in Paradise. The name Enochian refers to Enoch, whom Dee described as the last human to know the language before the angels returned it through Dee and Kelley.

Zorse connects one set of those angelic communications to Kelley’s presence at the court of Stephen Báthory, king of Poland and prince of Transylvania, around 1584. The video then draws a line from Báthory to the infamous Countess Elizabeth Báthory. That line belongs to the occult associations surrounding Dracula, rather than to a claim that the historical countess supplied a direct model for Orlok.

Stoker’s Count Dracula is said to have studied at the Scholomance in the Carpathian Mountains. Romanian folklore describes the Scholomance as a school run by the Devil, where ten students learn black magic and become sorcerers who can control the weather and ride dragons. Zorse uses this story to show how the film’s vampire inherits a learned and demonic past. After Dracula dies and is buried, folklore says that he rises from the grave as a vampire. Nosferatu gives Orlok a darker origin.

The film states that Orlok is a direct creation of the seed of Belial. Belial appears in demonological traditions as a king of Hell and one of Satan’s archdemons. His name comes from a Hebrew word associated with worthlessness, and Psalm 41 links him with illness. That connection suits Orlok’s role in the film. He arrives in Wisborg with plague rats and makes himself the personification of pestilence.

Zorse cites David Annwn Jones’s account of early vampire cinema for another reading. The link between Orlok and Belial resembles the practice of goetic magicians who summon demons. Orlok may therefore have been a practitioner of black magic who summoned Belial and received vampirism through a ritual or a literal bargain with the Devil. The film leaves his human status open. The phrase about the seed of Belial can describe a demon’s offspring, although it can also preserve the possibility that Orlok once had a human life.

Bulwer-Lytton, Paracelsus, and blood sacrifice

Professor Bulwer is Nosferatu’s version of Abraham Van Helsing. His name recalls Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the nineteenth-century writer and member of parliament. Bulwer-Lytton coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” and wrote the opening “It was a dark and stormy night” in his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. He also took a serious interest in the occult. He published A Strange Story anonymously, and later writers expanded its account of a subterranean society beneath the German Reich into stories about contact with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society whose members included friends of Bram Stoker.

Stoker’s alleged membership in the Golden Dawn remains a rumour. He was interested in occultism, although Zorse says that he valued the progress of science and medicine more than superstition. The video also suggests that Bulwer-Lytton’s supernatural fiction, especially A Strange Story, may have influenced Stoker while he wrote Dracula. It presents that influence as a possibility rather than a settled source.

The film’s opening credits call Professor Bulwer a Paracelsian. Paracelsianism developed after the death of the Swiss physician, philosopher and alchemist Paracelsus. His reputation as an occultist remained disputed, while his medical contributions were widely acknowledged. The philosophy associated with him held that dark entities, born from the evil thoughts of human beings, could cause epidemics. That idea joins the supernatural origins of Orlok to the plague that follows him.

Blood sacrifice completes the connection. Nosferatu changes the ending of Dracula: Ellen Hutter gives herself to Orlok so that he remains with her until dawn, and sunlight destroys him. Zorse reads her death as a sacrifice that removes both the vampire and the pestilence he brought to the town. The film turns a familiar vampire defeat into an occult act of exchange.

The grave of Murnau

The film acquired another occult story long after its release. In July 2015, somebody broke into F. W. Murnau’s grave in a cemetery south-west of Berlin. Murnau had died in 1931. The intruders disturbed his remains and stole his skull. Authorities found wax at the site, which suggested that candles had burned there. People then speculated that an occult ritual had taken place, although the skull was never recovered and the perpetrators were never identified.

The story links Murnau to Grau through the First World War. Both men served in the German army. Murnau fought in the trenches and flew during the war, surviving at least eight crashes. Grau, stationed in Serbia, met a farmer who claimed that his father had joined the undead and become a vampire. Zorse presents the encounter as Grau’s inspiration for making a vampire film.

Max Schreck, who played Orlok, also served in the trenches. After the war he reportedly lived in isolation, kept to himself and spent hours walking in the woods. Schreck once described his world as remote and incorporeal. His private life became part of the film’s later mythology because Nosferatu gives his face and body so little human warmth.

Grau described the Great War as a monstrous event released across the earth like a cosmic vampire drinking the blood of millions. Writing about Murnau, Lotte Eisner argued that mysticism, magic and dark forces had flourished in the face of death on the battlefields. Trench warfare brought mass sacrifice, disease and rats into the lives of the people who made the film. Zorse’s final claim is that the war made occultism, otherness and death newly present to these artists. Nosferatu then gives those pressures a body that carries plague into a European town.

Limits

This note reconstructs Zorse’s argument from the complete English automatic caption track, the video’s metadata and its description. The description contains only “He is coming.” and rat emojis. It supplies no chapters, bibliography or reference links, so the named books and historical claims below remain references made or used in the video rather than an independently checked source list.

The captions repeatedly mishear proper names, including Albin Grau, Gregor A. Gregorius, Enochian, Stephen Báthory, Count Orlok, Belial, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Paracelsus, Murnau, Schreck and Lotte Eisner. I have normalized those names where the film history and surrounding sentence make the intended reference clear. The claims about Grau’s order, Stoker’s influences, Orlok’s possible goetic practice, the 2015 grave robbery and the artists’ wartime experiences remain attributed to the video. The final caption, “this is not pudding,” appears after the argument and is omitted as outro filler.

Further reading / references

• Bram Stoker, Dracula, the novel that Nosferatu adapts without permission.
• David Annwn Jones, the book on cinema’s first age of vampires that Zorse cites when interpreting Orlok’s link to Belial. The video gives no full bibliographic details or link.
• Edward Bulwer-Lytton, A Strange Story and Paul Clifford, named in the discussion of Professor Bulwer.
• John Dee and Edward Kelley, the sixteenth-century angelic communications associated with Enochian.
• Lotte Eisner’s writing on F. W. Murnau, quoted in the video’s account of mysticism and the First World War.