An exhibition celebrating the legacy of Germany’s most famous vampire, Nosferatu, is offering free entry to visitors who donate their blood.

Blood donors given free entry at Berlin vampire exhibition

Phantoms of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu is currently showing at the Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg gallery in Berlin, and the show organisers are doing their own bit for the blood-sucking cause. In partnership with the Red Cross, who are hosting a blood donation centre on specific dates at the site, the exhibition is offering free entry to donors.

The exhibition will run until April 23, 2023. Sanguine gallery goers looking for a freebie can head down to the gallery on January 12 and further, yet unannounced dates, where Red Cross staff will be there to carry out their vampiric duties. 

What is the legacy of Nosferatu in German culture? 

100 years after its release, Nosferatu is still Germany’s biggest horror hit, but its success did not come unchallenged. Premiering at Berlin’s Marble Hall in 1922, the silent expressionist film took Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a major influence. Following a copyright court dispute initiated by Stoker’s widow, it was ruled that all copies of the film should be destroyed. 

What is now considered a masterpiece of German cinema can still be enjoyed today thanks to a few surviving replicas. In a story now as old as time, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s film sees a stowaway Nosferatu, played by the aptly-named Max Schreck, bring a plague to the port of a German city. Only the blood of a young woman can remedy the disaster which ensues. Ellen offers her “schönen Hals” (beautiful neck) to the parasite, but just as Nosferatu sets to sink his teeth in, day breaks and he vanishes in a puff of smoke.

The new Berlin exhibition looks at how Nosferatu has shaped the culture that followed it, in everything from surrealism to The Simpsons.