Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.<\/a>\u201d If you\u2019re unfamiliar, \u201cNosferatu\u201d was an unauthorized retelling of Bram Stoker\u2019s 1897 novel \u201cDracula.\u201d After it opened, Stoker\u2019s widow sued the filmmakers for copyright infringement.<\/p>\n\u201cNosferatu\u201d didn\u2019t have an American release because of the suit. A German court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. Luckily, a few prints survived and circulated in the United States in the mid-20th century. The old movie ran occasionally on late-night television beginning in the 1980s.<\/p>\n
The first Muncie exhibition of \u201cNosferatu\u201d that I found took place on Oct. 25, 1999, at Ball State\u2019s Pruis Hall. Music professor Kevin Purrone provided live piano accompaniment. Then years later, on Oct. 28, 2021, the film screened at Cornerstone Center for the Arts with a soundtrack played live by the Muncie Symphony Orchestra.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s one of my favorite movies. Even though it\u2019s over a century old, the original \u201cNosferatu\u201d is still a creepy vampire tale. It set a standard for horror movies that filmmakers emulate today.<\/p>\n
Vampires remain pop-culture fixtures in the Western world, perhaps because bloodsucking supernatural monsters have haunted folklore for millennia. In Ancient Greek mythology, female night-phantoms called Empusa and Lamia seduced young men and drained away their vital essence. Romans, meanwhile, feared the Strixes \u2014 malevolent demon-birds that ate flesh and drank human blood.<\/p>\n
Medieval Europeans had many strange tales about bloodthirsty revenants and other undead horrors refusing to stay buried. The word vampire derives from the Slavic upi\u00f3r, an undead being said to rise from the grave to feast on human blood.<\/p>\n
The Germans were plagued by Mara, supernatural entities that would come at night to suffocate the living and drain away life. In some traditions, they were called Night Hags or Mare. The word \u201cnightmare\u201d derives from this creature. The Muncie Morning News described them in 1889 as \u201cSaxon demons \u2026 a kind of vampire that sat on a sleeper\u2019s chest. They were said to be the guardians of hidden treasures, over which they brooded as hens.\u201d<\/p>\n
I looked long and hard in historical records for a “true” story about vampires stalking Delaware County residents. But sadly, none exist. If nosferatus ever preyed on Munsonians, no one wrote it down or shared such encounters publicly.<\/p>\n
The closest I found came in 1895, when two South American vampire bats were put on display at the St. John\u2019s Cigar Store in the Anthony Building. The Muncie Morning News described their wingspan as 4 feet from tip to tip. According to the paper, after finding someone asleep, the bats would fasten \u201ctheir claws into his person and never loosen until the last drop of blood is sucked from his veins.\u201d It\u2019s not clear why they were hawking tobacco in the Magic City, but the \u201ctwo blood sucking vampires\u201d drew large crowds of Munsonians.<\/p>\n
Just like today, most Americans understood vampires through media, which at that time meant vaudeville, books and early movies.<\/p>\n
A popular genre then featured vampires as ruinous femme fatales, or \u201cvamps,\u201d who drained young men of their vitality, wealth and morality. The motif was made famous in Rudyard Kipling\u2019s 1897 poem, \u201cThe Vampire,\u201d which was reworked into plays, burlesques and films after 1900.<\/p>\n
In mid-November of 1909, for instance, the Moulin Rouge Girls of the Big Burlesque Company performed the \u201cVampire Dance\u201d in front of hundreds of slack-jawed Munsonians at the Wysor Grand Opera House. The Muncie Morning Star gushed: \u201cThe costuming is lavish, many bewitching and spicy. Gingerly dancing numbers are dispersed throughout.\u201d<\/p>\n
The next year, the Guy Stock Company performed a play titled \u201cThe Vampire\u201d at the Majestic Theater on South Walnut. The Evening Press billed it: \u201cmany thrills throughout; murder being committed by the Vampire, sensation follows sensation with transformation scenes and brilliant electrical effects.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u201cvamp\u201d motif was best represented by the 1915 silent film \u201cA Fool There Was,\u201d starring Theda Bara. The story follows Bara as a vamp draining away the wealth and health of a New York lawyer. The movie debuted in Muncie at the Wysor Grand on Feb. 17, 1915.<\/p>\n
The sultry non-supernatural vamps of the early 1900s gave way to Bela Lugosi\u2019s iconic Dracula of the late-1920s. In 1927, Broadway producer Horace Liveright secured the rights to perform Stoker\u2019s story in the United States. The production opened on Oct. 5 at the Fulton Theatre in New York. Hungarian-American melodrama actor Bela Lugosi starred as the count.<\/p>\n
Universal Pictures bought the rights in 1930. The next year, they released the first Hollywood version of \u201cDracula,\u201d a blockbuster of the early sound era. Lugosi starred, reprising his stage role. In Muncie, the film opened at the Rivoli Theater to much fanfare on Feb. 24, 1931.<\/p>\n
Capitalizing on \u201cDracula\u2019s\u201d success, Hollywood produced dozens of vampire films in the decades that followed. Many of them played in Muncie. In May 1946, the Wysor Grand screened \u201cHouse of Dracula,\u201d starring John Carradine and Lon Chaney. Nearly 20 years later, in November 1965, the Muncie Drive-In on Yorktown Pike featured the Italian B-film, \u201cPlanet of the Vampires.\u201d Then fittingly on Friday, Nov. 13, 1992, Francis Ford Coppola\u2019s \u201cBram Stoker\u2019s Dracula\u201d opened at Northwest Cinema 8 on McGalliard.<\/p>\n
Finally, this past December, Robert Eggers\u2019 overproduced version of \u201cNosferatu\u201d played at AMC Muncie 12. Because, of course, nothing quite says Christmas like a bloodsucking Saxon demon.<\/p>\n
Cornerstone\u2019s next Public Domain Theatre feature is George Romero\u2019s 1969 zombie classic, \u201cNight of the Living Dead.\u201d It\u2019ll play in the E.B. Ball Auditorium on Wednesday, Oct. 15, at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free. In June of 1969, this film terrified Munsonians for the first time at the Ski-Hi Drive-In out on State Road 28. Now it\u2019s back to haunt your October.<\/p>\n
Chris Flook is a Delaware County Historical Society historian and senior lecturer of Media at Ball State University.<\/em><\/p>\nThis article originally appeared on Muncie Star Press: ByGone Muncie: Vampires in the Magic City<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For a few months now, I\u2019ve been attending Cornerstone Center for the Arts\u2019 Public Domain Theatre. Held in the elegant E.B. Ball Auditorium at 6:30 p.m. on the third Wednesday of each month, the series features classic films no longer under copyright protection. Last month\u2019s movie was the 1922 German silent film \u201cNosferatu: A Symphony […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2064006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[374765,385400,360724,385399,312982,385398,377161],"class_list":["post-2064005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-bram-stoker","tag-cornerstone-center-for-the-arts","tag-dracula","tag-german-silent-film","tag-horror-movies","tag-muncie","tag-nosferatu"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/Vampires-in-the-Magic-City.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2064005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2064007,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2064005\/revisions\/2064007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2064006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2064005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2064005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2064005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}