The evolution of vampire movies seems to have followed two parallel tracks. The 1931 movie Dracula made Bela Lugosi the archetype vampire image for a series of Universal films and pop culture characters like Count Chocula that followed. The 1922 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror used the same source material and spawned two remakes, the latest of which will open nationwide on Christmas Day, plus a movie about the making of the original movie.
The 1922 Nosferatu was the first production of the new German movie company Prana-Film, and as such, they spent as much money promoting the film as they did making it. The first newspaper reviews of the film were more about the party thrown after the premiere than about the film itself. The company soon went bankrupt, and it's a miracle that we have any existing copies of the film at all. That can't be said about earlier films based on the novel Dracula. Read up on the production of Nosferatu in a trivia list at Mental Floss. The most bizarre story is about the 1979 Werner Herzog remake, the one with all the rats.
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