“NOSFERATU: THE NIGHTMARE HISTORY AND TERRIFYING LEGACY OF A CLASSIC HORROR FILM” #WeirdDarkness
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A hundred years ago, a rather strange "want" ad appeared in a German newspaper: "30 to 50 Living Rats."

The ad, which ran on July 31, 1921, was a casting call. The rats were needed for a film that was being shot in the northern German town of Wismar that summer. The film was Nosferatu. If you've seen that film, and many of you have, you know that they got their rats. COVID-19 has made us look at a lot of familiar things with fresh eyes, from a handshake to a doorknob to a grocery list.

certain movies, too, will never look quite the same. One is this early silent movie version of Dracula, which might have been made with the present moment in mind. And no wonder, because it was made during a similar moment. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, Weirdos! I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness,

Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, the strange and bizarre, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode: The 1922 horror classic Nosferatu still turns up on TV and on college campuses every Halloween. And it'll likely show up again somewhere this year as well.

In this episode, we'll look at how "Nosferatu" is terrifyingly relevant even still today, the controversial making of the film, and the lawsuit by Bram Stoker's wife, how the director of the film was involved in the occult, and how you would not have wanted to miss the film's premiere, which was an unforgettable epic event all by itself. That and a whole lot more about 1922's "Nosferatu" on this episode of Weird Darkness.

If you're new here, welcome to the show! While you're listening, be sure to check out WeirdDarkness.com for merchandise, my newsletter, Twitter contests, to connect with me on social media. Plus, you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression or dark thoughts. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Now bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness!

Nosferatu has become a part of pop culture — to an extent that is unusual for a silent film. It was remade by Werner Herzog in 1979. A quirky film about the film, Shadow of the Vampire, in 2000 starred William Dafoe as the actor Max Schreck, whom the film proposed was an actual vampire.

The villain in "Batman Returns" from 1992 was named Max Schreck, the name of the actor who portrayed Nosferatu in the 1922 film. There have been Nosferatu novels, comic books, model kits. In 2019, the supernatural horror series called "Nosferatu" spelled N-O-S the number four, the letter A the number two premiered on AMC. There is even a Nosferatu beer

You may even know something about the film's backstory, which we will go deeper into later in the show. For example, "Shrek" is a word that means "terror," and for decades it was assumed to be a pseudonym. But no, it was the poor actor's real name. How the widow of Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, sued to have the film not only stopped but destroyed by fire, and nearly succeeded in wiping it out of history entirely.

How its director, F.W. Murnau, is considered one of the giants of German cinema. What you might not know is what the rats are doing there in the film. Bats are the animals generally associated with vampires. Certainly that was the totem animal in Hollywood's Dracula starring Bela Lugosi in 1931. This was the movie that set the fashion for the vampire as a suave, diabolically handsome aristocrat. But in Nosferatu, it's rats.

When the vampire's coffin is chopped open, rats come swarming out. When he debarks from a sailing ship after killing the entire crew, hordes of rats follow. Shrek, far from being a debonair nobleman, is even made up to look like a rat. Murnau and his collaborators were not making a movie about a vampire. They were making a movie about a pandemic.

Between 1918 and 1920, Germany lost roughly 287,000 people in the great flu pandemic, the Spanish flu, as it is erroneously called today, which killed 50 million people worldwide. It was a shattering experience for the Germans, as it was for people everywhere. It may even have helped fuel the rise of Hitler and the Nazis. A recent paper by economist Christian Bickel proposed,

"Influenza deaths themselves had a strong effect on the share of votes won by extremists, specifically the extremist National Socialist Party," Bickel wrote. Between the flu, the lost war, economic instability and political turmoil, Germans of the 1920s were spooked. It showed in their films: The Cabinet of Dr. Calgari, The Golem, Warning Shadows, Tired Death and a dozen other creepy titles.

In the case of Nosferatu, the Dracula story became a vehicle, a way to deal with horrors that were fresh in the minds of the German audience. Plague is not a concept that comes up in Stoker's novel. Nor will you find it in the more conventional Dracula movies, the ones with hunky guys in capes bending over the necks of swooning ladies. But it is central to Nosferatu.

The scenes in which the vampire brings death to a captain and his crew and then pilots the ghost ship into the harbor where dozens of rats scurry off to infect the city is almost literally a page from history. "In January of the year 1348, three ships carrying cargoes of spices put in at Genoa, Italy," wrote historian Donovan Fitzpatrick.

They were also loaded with rats, lean and hungry, that scurried down the hawsers and anchor lines and disappeared into the city. The rats died by the thousands, and then the people began to die. It was the beginning of the Black Death, the bubonic plague. In Osferatu, there are quarantines, funerals, stay-at-home orders, all the things that are so familiar to us right now.

There is also, significantly, rumormongering and scapegoating. Near the climax, an escaped lunatic is chased by an angry mob — something you could see today, just because the man wasn't wearing a face mask. In his famed study of German cinema, "From Caligari to Hitler," critic Siegfried Kracauer argued that the vampire of Nosferatu was a tyrant figure, a foreshadowing of Hitler. That may be exactly backward

The vampire, called Count Orlok in the film — it was made out of copyright, which is why Mrs. Stoker sued — is stealthy. An infiltrator, not a conqueror. He is the outsider bearing disease, the snake in the garden, the alien them who brings ruin down on the hapless us. Such scapegoating, as we've seen, was an undercurrent in our 21st century pandemic —

Chinese Americans, Orthodox Jews, and in India, Muslims have been blamed for the outbreak. And of course, in Germany, 99 years ago, there was one particular group that bore the brunt of all such insinuations. Not that Nosferatu is an anti-Semitic film. Several of the actors were Jewish. Others were left-wingers. Murnau, the director, was gay.

But Nosferatu was drawing its themes from our collective unconscious, which is still as active now as it was in 1922. It's worth noting that the Nazis, when they circulated lurid propaganda cartoons about inferior races, often depicted them with rat-like features. Sometimes they were pictured like the vampire in Nosferatu, in the midst of rats.

Nosferatu is old, celebrating its 100th birthday in 2022, but history is said to repeat. And in a time of plague, paranoia, and fear-mongering, alas, everything old is new again. Nosferatu terrified audiences when it was first released, leaving many to go home to nightmares in their sleep. But the film was also a nightmare to make,

The controversial making of Nosferatu, the lawsuit that should have had all copies of the film destroyed, the occult connection it had through its director, what the film added to vampire lore that we still use today, and more, when Weird Darkness returns.

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In the horror genre, few if any movies are as iconic and revered as F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent vampire tale "Nosferatu," brimming with dread and atmosphere. The film is an example of how even the primitive moviemaking of cinema's early days can yield breathtaking results that stick with the viewer forever.

More so, the film's villain, Graf Orlok, portrayed by German actor Max Schreck, has become a timeless and gut-wrenching interpretation of the vampire, offering those who grew up with the clichéd flowing evening wear and smirking arrogance of Bela Lugosi's Dracula an uglier, more haunting interpretation of the undead. But like any movie worth its salt, Nosferatu was a nightmare to make.

The film's production was plagued by financial and legal issues, nearly ruining the lives of some of the people who made it. That we even have the movie at all is a miracle, given that every copy of Nosferatu was ordered destroyed by the German courts. But the film remains a dark classic, exciting cinema fans to this day, and lending an odd sort of validation to the real-life circumstances behind its creation.

German director F. W. Murnau is most often credited for Nosferatu's unique atmosphere and imagery, and rightly so. Murnau would go on to massive success for films like 1924's "The Last Laugh," 1926's "Faust," and 1927's "Sunrise." But equally deserving in praise for the film is Alban Grell, Nosferatu's producer and an experienced occultist.

According to PeoplePill.com, Grau was a member of a hermetic order named Fraternitas Saturni Latin for "Brotherhood of Saturn," referencing the Roman god of time, the harvest, and death, where he used the magic name Master Pasidius. The order was founded in the 1920s in Germany by Eugen Gorsch. Many believe it was Grau's spiritual relationship with the occult that lent Nosferatu its chilling ambience.

One can even see hermetic and occultic symbols in certain scenes of Nosferatu. When Grau started the production company which made the film, named "Prana Film" after the Buddhist concept of prana meaning "breath" or "life force," it was meant to focus on films solely of a spiritual or supernatural nature. Many critics will point out that Nosferatu is a rip-off of Dracula. And to be fair, that's exactly what it is.

Before the widespread popularity of Bram Stoker's novel, vampires were folk legends rather than part of pop culture. But apparently, while Alban Grau wanted to film Dracula, he had become interested in vampires even before reading the novel, when he was stationed in Serbia during World War I.

According to a 1921 article by Grau in "Bun und Film" partially reprinted by vampire research site ShroudEater.com, a Serbian farmer told the producer that his father had become a vampire. The farmer's father had died and was buried without receiving the holy sacraments. A month later, a string of deaths occurred, and then witnesses reported seeing the farmer's father walking around. Locals exhumed his coffin and found it empty.

The next morning, they returned and found a healthy-looking man with teeth so long and pointy that they couldn't close his mouth. A stake was driven through the corpse's heart before it was cremated. While Grau's story might have been a way to drum up hype for his film, Eastern Europe has always been where the legends of vampires as we know them, the blood-drinking, nocturnal undead, have originated.

According to National Geographic, the country was home to some of the earliest European vampire hysteria, in part focused around the folkloric character Sava Sivanovic. That Grau would have heard this story in Serbia makes sense.

Though Nosferatu's creators gave their central vampire a look and feel all its own, many contend that the plot — a young clerk traveling to the old country only to discover a vampire nobleman who covets his beloved — is just Bram Stoker's Dracula with the names changed. This is quite literally true.

Nosferatu was adapted from Dracula. But the characters' names were altered for the simple reason that producer Albin Grau couldn't obtain the rights for the novel from Stoker's estate, according to a piece in Plagiarism Today. According to Forward, the job of trying to dodge litigation fell on screenwriter Henrik Gehlin,

He changed names, settings, descriptions, and even the cast of the story in order to avoid litigation and adapt Stoker's lengthy epistolary novel into a silent film. Count Dracula became Graf Orlok, Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter, Renfield became Nock, and Mina Harker became Ellen Hutter. Many of the novel's supporting characters, such as Professor Van Helsing and cowboy Quincy Morris, are absent entirely.

Unfortunately, the writer's hard work was not enough to keep Prana Film out of legal hot water. The actor playing Graf Orlok, one Max Schreck, has been the subject of rumors over the years. The most common one is that he was in fact a vampire himself, a concept that was turned into the full-length horror film Shadow of the Vampire, starring William Dafoe as the undead Schreck.

While the story is obviously untrue, everything about Shrek did little to dispel these rumors. According to an interview with biographer Stefan Eickhoff in Reuters, Shrek was no supernatural creature, but rather a versatile actor with an unusual temperament. He was a civil servant's son with over 800 screen and stage roles and was a loyal, conscientious loner with no family to speak of.

Schreck was also known for his detached, offbeat sense of humor, leading one of his contemporaries to claim that he lived in his own remote and strange world. Of course, it certainly didn't help his reputation that the word Schreck is German for terror, immediately painting the man as an intimidating figure before you even meet him.

While different depictions of vampires cherry-pick their strengths and weaknesses, fearing a crucifix, casting no reflection in mirrors, transforming into bats, one of the universally recognized tropes is that vampires are killed by direct sunlight. However, this wasn't always a common concept. In fact, Bram Stoker's Count Dracula walks around in the sun. He's merely weakened by it.

It was Nosferatu's climax that cemented the idea of sunlight killing the vampire into the minds of the public. As noted in a piece on Medium, it was F.W. Murnau who came up with the idea of the vampire being disintegrated by the rays of the dawn.

While the poetry of the final scene is laid on thick — the virginal Ellen Hutter sacrifices herself to the vampire so that he, drunk on her innocent blood, doesn't notice the rising sun until it's too late — truthfully, the use of this special effect was just a cheap alternative to a grisly death scene.

The folkloric way to dispense with a vampire involved driving a stake through its heart, cutting its head off and burning the corpse, which wasn't easy to show on screen. The medium piece does make a good point, though. Nosferatu wasn't widely viewed after its release due to it being destroyed via court order.

So, whether the sun as vampire repellent spread quickly among the few folklore enthusiasts who saw the film, or whether Murnau had heard about it in some rare piece of lore, is unknown. For a work of art as atmospheric and macabre as Nosferatu, Grau and Murnau couldn't simply host the world premiere in a movie theater.

Instead, the film was premiered with the kind of event one wishes more horror movies launched with: an epic costume party at a zoo. According to Mental Floss, Nosferatu premiered March 4, 1922, at the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens. Before the film, there was a stage show, including a spoken-word prologue by star Max Schreck himself, followed by a dance number.

After the showing, there was an elaborate masquerade ball complete with gowns, frocks, and suitable costumes to honor such a morbid film. The party, dubbed Das Fest des Nosferatu , raged until 2 a.m., with guests including German filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch and Heinz Schall. As noted by Brenton Film, the party and promotional campaign surrounding the film cost more than the movie itself.

Thankfully, this elaborate event has been recreated to a certain degree today. Austin, Texas, hosts an annual Nosferatu Festival, inviting fans from all over the world to travel to America's City of Bats and celebrate all things vampiric. Given the climate of anti-Semitism in Europe during the first third of the 20th century, it's unsurprising to learn that many saw Nosferatu as an inherently anti-Semitic film.

Jews had for some time been cast as blood-drinking witches by anti-Semites, and the similarities between the vampire Graf Orlok and contemporary stereotypes of Judaism – a long nose, rat-like features, and hunger for innocent Germanic women – lent the movie a bigoted undertone.

One member of the audience in Nosferatu's premiere leaped on this concept: Julius Stryker, who had become chief editor of Hitler's anti-Semitic newspaper Der Stürmer. According to an article from the blog of the Museum of the Jewish People at Beit HaFustat, Stryker was so transfixed by the film that he returned to watch it repeatedly.

Later on, in the pages of Der Sturmer, Stryker would repeatedly use art and prose to conflate Jews with vampires, making Jewish people out to be rat-faced, bloodthirsty plague-spreaders. While it has since been noted that F.W. Murnau was friendly with many Jewish people in the film industry, the feeling that Nosferatu was made to stoke the fear of the universal "other" — a claim often made about Dracula as well — remains to this day.

Nosferatu was a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, with names and references changed to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit. Unfortunately, the makers of the film weren't ready for the sheer tenacity of the enemy they'd made, Florence Balcombe, Stoker's widow.

According to David J. Scull's book, Hollywood Gothic, The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage and Screen, Balcombe was an English rose-style beauty who had once been courted by influential public figures such as Oscar Wilde. After her husband's death, her only real source of income was the royalties from Dracula. His one truly successful book,

When she discovered that Grau and Murnau had made the film, she demanded financial compensation. When they dodged this, she demanded that all copies of their film be destroyed. Despite Nosferatu's producers doing their best to avoid Balcombe's wrath, Stoker's widow won. The German courts ordered all prints and negatives of Nosferatu to be burned in one of the first cases of capital punishment being waged against a film.

However, by then, copies of the movie had been distributed throughout the world and, as one can guess, the fact that Nosferatu is such an iconic film means that it was not entirely lost. Though Nosferatu is considered a cinematic milestone today, at the time it was a risky, money-making venture that had cost a ton to promote.

When Bram Stoker's widow decided to take legal action against Prana Film, producer Alvin Grah had only a few options when it came to avoiding lawsuits. So he chose one of the extreme ones and declared bankruptcy.

Pranafilm's finances had always been precarious, but the threat of litigation and one with actual merit behind it, given Grau's decision to simply make Dracula with the names changed, would have been too much for the production company to bear. According to ScreenPrism, Grau's declaration of bankruptcy made Nosferatu the only feature Pranafilm would ever make.

Meanwhile, TCM says that Grau sold the movie to Deutsche Filmproduktion in order to immediately distance himself from the production. Even after Stoker's widow ordered "Nosferatu Destroyed," the film managed to live on. By that time, copies of the movie had been sent to theaters around the world. Meanwhile, TCM notes that after Grau sold the film to Deutsche Filmproduktion, the company edited it without Murnau's permission.

The result is that many of the copies of Nosferatu that survived were incomplete, re-edited, or had their title cards changed. So every version of the film is different. As reported by Fictosphere, one such unique copy was "The Twelfth Hour: A Night of Horror," a sound version of the film released in 1930 by Deutsche Film Produktion.

Featuring new scenes, a different ending, the inclusion of footage that didn't make the original film, and even a different actor playing the vampire in similar makeup, "The Twelfth Hour" was shown in theaters and on television around the world but is now difficult to find, and stands as a testament to how original movies were re-cut and re-released before the art form was commonplace.

Interestingly enough, even Bram Stoker's widow couldn't kill the vampire, even after she'd ordered it beheaded and burned. According to David J. Skoll's Hollywood Gothic, shortly after she had won her case against Nosferatu, Florence Balcom received an invitation to a private film society screening of F.W. Murnau's Dracula. At the end of the day, the most iconic depiction of Dracula will always be Bela Lugosi in Todd Browning's 1931 film by Universal.

the cape, the widow's peak, the thick Eastern European accent. And yet, for many film critics, Nosferatu's ugly, ethereal depiction of the vampire makes it a superior film to its latter-day, properly licensed descendants.

In fact, renowned film critic Roger Ebert gave the movie 4 out of 4 stars, saying on his website, "To watch F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself." Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons, and more than 30 other films.

The film is in awe of its material. It really seems to believe in vampires. Nosferatu is a better title anyway than Dracula, he adds. Say Dracula and you smile. Say Nosferatu and you've eaten a lemon. We're not quite done. There are a few more facts about Nosferatu that we can sink our teeth into when Weird Darkness returns.

Remember staying up late at night while growing up, watching your local TV station's horror host presenting a terrible B-horror movie, or So Bad It's Good sci-fi flick from the 1950s? That's what the Monster Channel at WeirdDarkness.tv has to offer all day, every day! You can visit WeirdDarkness.tv and immediately be entertained by a horror host and horrible movie. You can even invite your friends to watch with you and use the chat feature to talk about what you're watching.

and our monthly Weirdo Watch Party takes place there as well. Get your frights and funnies 24/7, 365 at WeirdDarkness.tv. Before Bela Lugosi ever donned his Dracula cape, there was Max Schreck's gaunt, pointy-eared and nimble-fingered Count Orlok. As the iconic villain of Nosferatu, a symphony of horror, Orlok represents the earliest surviving attempt to put a vampire onto the silver screen.

He's also the product of intellectual theft. Universally recognized as one of the greatest horror movies ever made, Nosferatu has a complicated legacy because it shamelessly plagiarized Bram Stoker's Dracula. And yet, without this seminal motion picture, the vampire genre that has found success in every medium, from television to young adult novels, might never have taken off. Despite popular belief, Nosferatu was not the first Dracula film.

Stoker's famous novel earned him some welcome praise, but very little cash. The Gothic thriller Dracula first hit the shelves in 1897. Most reviews were favorable. "Persons of small courage and weak nerves should confine their reading of these gruesome pages strictly to the hours between dawn and sunset," gushed the Daily Mail.

Further praise was heaped on by the incomparable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who told Stoker, "I think it is the very best story of diatribe which I have read for many years." Alas, such esteem did not turn Dracula's author into a wealthy man. Although the book sold around 30,000 copies per year for the next three decades, most of its profits bypassed Stoker and went directly to his publisher.

The writer's long-standing debts and poor health kept him in dire financial straits until he passed away in 1911. Ten years later, Stoker's most notorious character made his big-screen debut. Released in 1921, "Dracula's Death" was the earliest attempt to convert the 1897 novel into a motion picture. Mildly put, it was a loose adaptation.

Filmed in Hungary and directed by Carolee Lutje, Dracula's Death tells the story of a young woman who gets a terrible nightmare after she crosses paths with the eponymous villain. Strangely, Dracula himself is an insane musician in this version, rather than a suave aristocrat. No copies of the silent film survive today. Were it not for some recovered publicity photos and newspaper reviews, movie historians might not know that it ever existed at all.

Stop-motion photography helped sell the paranormal aspect of Count Orlok in Nosferatu. At one point, Orlok's coffin closes by itself after the lid levitates off the ground.

An early form of stop-motion animation made this possible. By rapidly showing a sequence of still images in which the lid moves closer and closer to its final resting spot, Murnau was able to trick the viewer into thinking that the inanimate object was actually flying around under its own power. This same technique was also employed during the scene in which Orlok uses his magic to open the hatch of a ship. Count Orlok's abode in the film was, in fact, a real castle,

"Rosferatu" was mostly filmed on location within the German cities of Lubeck and Vismar. However, the Transylvania scenes were shot in northern Slovakia, a place that was significantly closer to home for Murnau and company than Romania would have been. With one exception, all the exterior shots of Orlok's palace really depict the 700-year-old Orava Castle that sits above a fishing village called Oravski Puzimonva.

The very last scene in Nosferatu is a shot of our vampire's Transylvanian home, which has collapsed after his death. To shoot this footage, Murnau traveled to Starad, a long-abandoned Slovakian castle that has been decaying since the 1500s. Many, and I do mean many, different soundtracks have been written for Nosferatu.

This sort of thing often happens for silent films. When Nosferatu premiered in Berlin, it was accompanied by a live orchestral score composed by one Hans Erdmann, which you are hearing a rendition of behind me. No recordings of this original soundtrack are known to exist, although a few restorations have been made. Over the years, Nosferatu has also received several alternative scores spanning a wide array of genres.

Various home video editions of the film now include jazz, electronic, and classical background music. In 2002, the Nickelodeon cable channel, you know, the channel for kids, shows Count Orlok a bit of love. Listeners of a certain age might remember Nosferatu not as a classic horror film, but as the subject of a particularly strange SpongeBob SquarePants gag.

The season two episode, Graveyard Shift, sees SpongeBob and Squidward trying to survive their first 24-hour workday at the Krusty Krab. Things get eerie when the lights start to flicker on and off, seemingly all by themselves. At the end of the episode, who should they find playing around with a light switch but that mischievous rascal Count Orlok? Even by the show's own absurd standards, this joke is a real non sequitur.

Jay Lender, one of the cartoon's longest-serving writers, conceived the bit as an out-of-left-field ending for the episode. In 2012, Lender told Hogan's Alley magazine, "I've had several people say to me that it's the all-time funniest SpongeBob moment.

From a technical standpoint, the most difficult aspect of this joke was finding a usable image of Max Schreck in full vampire regalia. I drove all over town looking for books with "scannable pictures" of Count Orlok. "I searched what little there was of the web back then," says Lunder. "Hours and hours of my life were spent over four seconds of screen time because it made me laugh." And a few bullet-point facts for you:

Ruth Landshoff, the actress who played the hero's sister, once described a scene in which she fled the vampire running along a beach. That scene is not in any version of the film, nor in the original script. The creature in the film that they say is a werewolf during the scene at the inn is actually a hyena. The character of Nosferatu is only seen on screen for a bit less than nine minutes in total throughout the entire film.

And even during those nine minutes, you can only find Count Orlok blinking once, as the actor and director never wanted the creature to blink as it was too humanizing.

And many scenes featuring Graf Orlok were filmed during the day, and when viewed in black and white, this becomes extremely obvious. This is somewhat corrected, though, when watching later edits of the movie, which are tinted blue to represent nighttime scenes.

Thanks for listening! If you like the show, please share it with someone you know who loves the paranormal or strange stories, true crime, monsters, or unsolved mysteries like you do! You can also email me anytime with your questions or comments through the website at WeirdDarkness.com. That's also where you can find all of my social media, listen to free audiobooks I've narrated, shop the Weird Darkness store, find other podcasts that I host, and

And find the Hope in the Darkness page if you or someone you know is struggling with depression or dark thoughts. Plus, if you have a true paranormal or creepy tale to tell of your own, you can click on Tell Your Story. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. The message Nosferatu has for us today is by Jim Beckerman for NorthJersey.com.

The true story behind Nosferatu is by Sam Marcus for Grunge.com. Other Nosferatu facts came from Mark Mancini at Mental Floss and William Burns at Horror News Network. Again, you can find links to all of these stories and the sources in the show notes. Weird Darkness is the production and trademark of Marlar House Productions. And now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. 1 Corinthians 13:12:

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part, then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. And a final thought. Always have hope. Always have faith. No matter how bad any situation is, your miracle can be closer than you can imagine. I'm Darren Marlar, thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.

We all dream, but for some people, what should be a time for their bodies and minds to rest turns into a nightmare from which they cannot escape. Our next Weird Darkness live stream is Saturday night, December 28th on the Weird Darkness YouTube channel. And during the live broadcast, I'll share some of these chilling nighttime stories. T

Tales of shadow people, sleep paralysis, and demons who stalk their victims in that place between dreams and reality. I'll share true tales of prophetic dreams, some joyful, some not. Sleepwalking incidents that are both amusing and disturbing. I'll also share real stories of night terrors so horrifying that sleep

became something to fear and dread for those victimized by the night. You might not want to sleep after joining our next live-screen. It's Saturday, December 28th at 5pm Pacific, 6pm Mountain, 7pm Central, 8pm Eastern. On the lighter side, I'll also be responding to comments and questions live on the air and doing a giveaway of some Weird Darkness merch.

Prepare yourself for our next live scream for chilling tales of what some people must endure in an attempt to get some sleep. Find the details on the live screen page at weirddarkness.com.