The original screen Dracula – Nosferatu – was supposed to be destroyed. Not by sunlight, a stake through the heart or a generous helping of garlic, but at the command of Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence. She had learned about the film Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror) following its lavish premiere at Berlin Zoo on March 4 1922. Florence – sometimes remembered by the history books as a curmudgeonly spoilsport – was outraged at the flagrant copyright infringement on Stoker’s Count.

It’s true: Nosferatu, the German silent classic directed by FW Murnau, was undeniably a Dracula knock-off – an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel with the names changed and the plot whittled down. Among the excised elements was Stoker’s polymath-turned-vampire killer Van Helsing. Florence Stoker was intent on destroying every copy of the film. But in true vampiric style, Nosferatu wouldn’t stay dead.

One hundred years on, the monstrous image of Nosferatu’s Graf Orlok (played by Max Schreck) – bulbous head, rat-like teeth, pointy ears, extended clawed fingers – remains both chilling and influential, second only to Bela Lugosi’s suave, tux-wearing Count Dracula as the go-to vampire archetype. Released a decade after Bram Stoker’s death, and just under a decade before the 1931 version of Dracula starring Lugosi, Nosferatu – in genre history terms – is the head vampire: the screen Dracula from which all others have spawned in the last century.

“Arguably, after the novel, it’s the single most important iteration,” says Kim Newman, critic, author and Dracula expert. “Nosferatu, because it was the first proper vampire movie, invented all the vampire clichés. Every time you see the hero go into the Transylvanian inn and he says he’s going to the castle, and all the peasants cross themselves and cringe with fear, that’s imitating Nosferatu. Murnau visualised scenes that we’re still doing.”

Nosferatu was also inspired by a supposedly true story, as told to the film’s producer and designer Albin Grau. During his time as an infantryman in the First World War, Grau met a Serbian peasant who said that his father – killed in a blood feud and buried without sacraments – haunted the village as a vampire. When the father’s body was exhumed, for the express purpose of being staked through the heart, it was perfectly preserved – with two front teeth protruding pointedly over the bottom lip.