Songfacts®:

• With a foreboding organ and ominous strings, this telling of the vampire tale Nosferatu brings Saxon into the gothic realm. "If you're going to sing about Dracula, it has to have that gothic, velvet-top-hats, women-in-huge-ballgowns feel. I think that image and that atmosphere comes across well with the song," lead singer Biff Byford said in a Songfacts interview.
• The song begins in waltz time (3/4), which is why it's subtitled "The Vampires Waltz." Said Byford: "In a lot of the Dracula films down the years, there have been scenes where people are waltzing, usually in Victorian times or Georgian times, dancing in a ballroom, and you can't see the vampire in the mirrors. And, in the middle of the song, it goes into a sort of spacey feel, and I sing:
  
  Beneath the abbey vaults
  We danced the vampire's waltz
  
  I wanted to call it something other than just 'Nosferatu,' so people get an idea of where I'm coming from with the song."
• The word "Nosferatu" is a synonym for "vampire" first mentioned by Emily Gerard a 19th-century author best known for the influence her collections of Transylvanian folklore. It was later popularized by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula. Biff Byford told Overdrive about "Nosferatu":
  
  "It's a great story, isn't it? It was written in Yorkshire in a place called Whitby. It was a small fishing village on the East coast. It was very popular - still is very popular with the Victorians, and Bram Stoker wrote the novel there, 'Dracula', 'Nosferatu', yeah? It sort of inspired me. I used to live there. Twice a year they have a gothic fair there, a gothic festival, and it's all around the Bram Stoker thing. And also a friend of mine, a film director asked me to write a song about vampires, basically, and that's the song that we wrote, 'Nosferatu.'"