SpongeBob SquarePants Writer Explains Season 2's Bizarre Nosferatu Cameo

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SpongeBob SquarePants writer Jay Lender explains the origins behind the show's bizarre Nosferatu cameo. The Nickelodeon animated comedy series first premiered in 1999 and is still on the air, currently in the middle of season 13. The show received praise from critics on the way to becoming immensely popular with audiences of varying ages, particularly for its unusual sense of humor.

One notable example of its strangeness comes in SpongeBob season 2 episode 16, titled «Graveyard Shift.» The story sees SpongeBob and Squidward forced to keep the Krusty Krab open 24 hours, and to entertain himself, Squidward tries to frighten his chipper colleague with a story about the «Hash-Slinging Slasher,» only for each of the three warnings he invents to actually happen. Though both are temporarily terrified, two of these phenomena prove to have perfectly normal explanations, while the third — flickering lights — is attributed to Count Orlok from the 1922 silent film Nosferatu, who the characters scold as if he is a known prankster.

Related: SpongeBob SquarePants: The Krusty Krab's Hidden Rooms & Passages Explained

This was the first encounter with the horror cinema classic for many young viewers, and in an interview with Polygon, Lender reveals how the absurd bit came to be. The SpongeBob SquarePants writer says there was originally a character named Floorboard Harry introduced earlier in the episode, with feeding him being one of SpongeBob's responsibilities, and that he would have been the one flicking the light switch at the end. When the first joke ended up being cut, however, Lender reworked the ending by drawing on a childhood memory of seeing a Nosferatu image in the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Check out his