Nosferatu: Making of a font

If a typeface could die, might it revive?

Nosferatu is a Romanian word meaning “the undead.” 

Nosferatu is an historical script revival, a vampire font if you will. It carries stories of the Fraktur and Gothic letterforms, as well as memories of the Kurrent and Sütterlin German handwriting. It also tells the story of how the new disc-shaped nib became popular among lettering artists who were in charge of writing the words on the screen for silent movies.

The idea for of this font was initiated at  the ANRT (Atelier national de recherche typographique) in 2022 when Sarah Salomé Delétain was collaborating on Julien Van Anholt’s research on hand-painted silent film intertitles — a typographic analysis of painted intertitles. Sarah Salomé chose Nosferatu from a corpus of movies with various types of lettering, and later collaborated with Jules Durand to complete the font.

This article will focus on the intertitles of Nosferatu : A Symphony of Horror, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau in 1922, as an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897). The author’s widow unsuccessfully tried to get all copies of the film destroyed. It has become one of the most emblematic films of German Expressionism, thanks in part to the unforgettably horrific performance (and makeup) of Max Schreck as one of the first vampires in film history. Shot on a limited budget with only one camera, Nosferatu uses light, shadow, time, type, movement and suspense to portray horror, rather than complex sets or special effects. The special touch of this movie is the role of colors, the films were tinted with green, yellow and red ink, typical of the expressionist aesthetic, it lends to the original lettering a fantastical aura and a slightly bolder appearance.

But first, you should take a moment to appreciate the beauty and darkness of the movie :

https://youtu.be/0RPFnGFoP0Y?si=v-LE83rq2FBv19x6

Secondly, Julien Van Anholt gave a lecture at the Type@Cooper Herb Lubalin Lecture Series in April 2025 on this very subject, which is very worth watching, as it's the only current scholarly work in this niche area. https://vimeo.com/1073551442

The name of the calligrapher in charge of the intertitles is often obscured and in Nosferatu’s case, it doesn’t appear in the credits, but presumably it was Albin Grau who oversaw this design choice. As producer, art director, costume designer, graphic designer, and occultist-in-residence, he was responsible for the look and spirit of the entire film. However, it’s doubtful that he painted the actual intertitles that inspired our Nosferatu revival.

 Grau's meticulous attention to detail is unparalleled, as evidenced by his cryptic contract between Count Orlok and Knock, which he filled with Enochian, hermetic, and alchemical symbols. Although it is clear that there is an inconsistency between the various writing forms featured throughout the movie, it seems most likely they collaborated with

To clarify this point, let’s look at the first posters signed by Albin Grau, which are dark, made in chalk, and display the texts and title on a wavy baseline. The letters are hand-drawn with a blurry mono linear stroke, full caps, and a peculiar triangular horizontal stroke on ‘A’.

On another version of the poster, Grau set the title in Herold a.k.a. Reklameschrift Herold type, cast by Berthold in 1901. Later on, this type was used for the opening title screen of the English version and became the official logo of the movie.

Thus, looking at Grau’s handwriting skills, there is a serious gap with the movie’s intertitle, either those on black background and the manuscripts on green & yellow background, which were executed with great calligraphic mastery. Although there is no doubt about Orlok’s cryptic/esoteric contract that Grau claimed to have done.

It seems likely that Murnau and Grau hired a lettering artist. This person was never credited in the film, and they didn't work on the promotional materials that Albin Grau produced on his own. So the choice of this rounded script was probably a stylistic choice of Grau to integrate the written language of the film into the same occult-inflected Weimar aesthetic. The investigation in this article tends to gather accurate references that help to explain the choice of this calligraphic style for Nosferatu. 

Let's go back to Weimar, when cinema was still in its early days, and directors were fascinated by ghost stories, golems, and vampires. The German expressionist film movement started in Germany in the 1920s, producing the first Gothic horrors movies. To compensate for the absence of recorded sound, the production relied on descriptive intertitles to evoke auditory effects, onomatopoeias and plots such as the "howling of wolves" or "creaking coffins,".

«"The ideal picture needs no titles." 

In other words, the perfect film dispenses with intertitles. This statement by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (1888–1931), made in Theatre Magazine in 1928, succinctly summarizes the German director’s views on intertitles—views he sought to put into practice in his own work. Yet, despite this skepticism, Murnau created films in which intertitles play a pivotal role; they always feel formally right, contributing to the cinematic experience just as the images do.» 

Quote extracted from Julien van Anholt’s thesis, courtesy to him. <3

At its premiere on March 4, 1922, in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Garden, Nosferatu screening was accompanied by a live orchestra performing a newly composed score by Hans Erdmann. It must have been one of the best horror movie experiences of the decade. 

For certain films, a lettering style was chosen to reflect artistic intentions given by the topic. Even in Germany, only a very few intertitles were written in Gothic, and in the case of Nosferatu, the letters are more related with its cursive evolutions, the Kurrent and the Sütterlin.

Let’s begin with the story of the Deutsche Kurrentschrift, also known as Kurrent. This is a German cursive script, its name derives from the Latin currere ‘to run’, which also gave the French word cursive.). It was a commonly used handwriting in Northern European countries sharing the Germanic culture, until the "Antiqua-Fraktur dispute". The script has a strong slant and is written in italics. This makes it hard to read for people who are not familiar with it. It can be hard to tell the difference between some letters because they all have similar strokes. For example, the letters B, C and L all have similar strokes, as do the lowercase letters c, i, e, n, r and v.

There are also different ways to write the letter "s". : 

· the "long s" (initial or medial form) replaces the standard "s" (which is retained only in the final position or in capitals), 

· the Eszett "ß" is a ligature of the long "s" (Es) and the "z" (Zett).

In 1911, the Prussian Ministry of Science, Art and Education (Preußisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Volksbildung) asked graphic artist Ludwig Sütterlin to create a modern handwriting script. The Sütterlin script was introduced in Prussia in 1915, and from the 1920s onwards, they began to replace the old German handwriting (Kurrent) in schools. It can be confusing because the name Sütterlin is used to describe several similar types of old German handwriting. In 1941, the Nazi Party banned all "broken" (fraktur, blackletter) typefaces, including Sütterlin, and replaced them with Italian-style lettering, such as the Antiqua. Futura became the new typeface of Nazi Germany.

The advent of new tools during the early years of the 20th century precipitated the evolution of intertitles and other forms of lettering. This evolution was driven by the need to facilitate the drawing process while maintaining consistency in stroke weight. Charles Mazé's article, 'Essential Forms', published alongside the release of Axo by Abyme, provides a comprehensive exposition on the dissemination of monolinear letterforms with rounded terminals. https://www.abyme.net/revue/essentialforms/ 

« The 'lettres batons', alongside other educational and decorative scripts, were 'encouraged by the commercialisation of round nibs called 'Redis' or 'Plattenfeder' that produce a thin, monolinear stroke named 'Schnurzug' (Mazé, 2023). Fernand Baudin attributes the invention of this nib to Heintze & Blanckertz (in Coline Sunier & Charles Mazé, Dossier Fernand Baudin (Brussels: Prix Fernand Baudin Prijs, 2013), pp. 146–57.) a company that began commercialising this tool around 1912. »

Meanwhile, in the United States, a company known as Speedball commenced production of a disc-shaped nib of a similar nature, which rapidly gained popularity among calligraphers engaged in the creation of intertitles.

During World War I and the Interwar period in Prussia, hyperinflation was prevalent, and the value of the Marks was declining due to an economic collapse. The financial value of money became diminished to the point of being rendered utterly useless. Individuals were no longer able to carry large quantities of money with them. In response to this situation, every town and village of Austria and Germany began to print their own currency, under the name of Notgel (emergency money). The artistic merit of these notes is attributable to the efforts of local wood carvers, calligraphers, and amateur local artists.

A quick look at the wonderful headlines and sub-texts drawn in Kurrent and Sütterlin tells a lot about the visual influence surrounding Murnau and Grau. This very exciting research will be carried on by Jéremy Fiévet at ANRT in the next couple years.

Nosferatu’s caps often appear with double strokes and, on occasion, decorative 'claws' that incise the vertical left stroke, ultimately resulting in the evocation of vampire fangs. This is also arguably attributable to the legacy of a recurring pattern frequently employed as a decorative element in Gothic Textura Quadrata letterforms. Any additional reference close to this decorative element is welcome to broaden the spectrum of this research, feel free to write us!

A few words about our revamp

The main aspect of the source material we kept is the monolinearity with a rounded terminal that is very convenient to draw with a single stroke. However there were many necessary optical corrections to balance density when strokes overlapped, also to accentuate stress and soften some curves. Also the diagonal axis specific to the subheading lettering was kept so the font is considered italic.

The process of selection for the glyphset was pretty difficult as each intertitle displayed variations in terms of ductus, rhythm and details for the same letters. Our goal wasn’t to reproduce the models with fidelity or faithfulness but to seek consistency while including many options, hence the extensive glyhset composed of three stylistic sets.

These sets carry alternate characters for each capitals, as those are often used for emphasis in the film. A roman set was made for the lowercases, allowing a less gothic touch for special needs. Most of the ligatures presented in the intertitles were kept, and a few additions were created to complete the set.

At last, some symbols, such as the skull present in Orlok’s letter, are included, just for fun!

To conclude 

The use of a transitional Sütterlin with Latin cursive influence in Nosferatu can be regarded as a manifestation of the film's avant-garde character. It is noteworthy that this form of writing had been introduced a mere decade prior to the production of the film, and had undergone only a limited number of typographic variations from its original models. The choice of this letter style for a vampire film fits squarely within the broader aesthetic of Grau & Murnau, it carries elegance, mystical aura, and a very German spirit.

Nevertheless, a question remains, as a blind spot identified by Julien during his research, wondering if the directors or studios had a say regarding the style and actual translation of the intertitles—depending on the territory or country and how the theatrical release clearances were negotiated...  

Julien noticed that films were sometimes slightly re-edited for other regions, featuring intertitles in the language of the target audience, changing their type without consultation.  So in a way, this article presents deductions based on the few available informations, and personal interpretations stemming from the clues type history left to wonder.

« Et quand il eut dépassé le pont,

les fantômes vinrent à sa rencontre. »

« Kaum hatte Hutter die Brücke überschritten, 

da ergriffen ihn die unheimlichenGesichte, 

von denen er mir oft erzählt hat. »

“When he was on the other side of the bridge, 

the ghosts came to meet him.”