Nosferatu (1922)

F. W. Murnau, Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder · 1922 · 94 min

Murnau filmed Dracula without the rights, changed the names, and lost the lawsuit so completely that a court ordered every print destroyed. Copies survived anyway, which is the only reason we have the first great vampire film. Max Schreck's Orlok is a rat-faced plague carrier rather than a seducer — all fingers and shadow — and the film's most famous images have never stopped being borrowed. A century on, the shadow climbing the staircase still works.

Chosen print (2026-08-23): Archive.org item nosferatu-2000sdvd — 768x576 @ 6.3 Mbps, 4.32 GB, 92.0 min.

Selected by a catalog-wide print sweep, which scores candidates on resolution and bits per pixel and rejects broadcast captures, AI upscales, colorized and frame-interpolated copies, wrong cuts, and frames whose shape the film never had. The downloaded file was verified byte-for-byte against Archive.org's published size and MD5, and the torrent was generated from that exact file.

Silent-era runtimes are advisory — projection speed was never standardized, so the same print runs materially longer or shorter depending on the transfer's frame rate. Runtime was weighed accordingly rather than used as a hard filter.

Watched end to end (2026-08-25). The bytes prove we fetched the file the report names; the watch confirmed it is the right print.

Public domain in the United States by expiry of the full copyright term: published 1922, and every work published that year entered the US public domain on January 1, 2018, at the end of the 95-year term — renewal history is moot. As a German import the URAA restoration question is documented rather than waved at: even where the URAA restored a foreign work's US copyright, the restored term is the same 95 years from publication, and it has equally expired. No route back to protection exists for the film itself. The picture and its accompaniment are verified separately: whatever score the chosen print carries is a separate work on its own clock, cleared at print selection and documented in the Print Report before this page ships a torrent. The famous court-ordered destruction is a European copyright story (Stoker estate, Germany) and has no bearing on the expired US term.