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NOSFERATU
aka
NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF TERROR; THE TWELFTH HOUR
(Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens)
Rating: 
Germany. 1922.
Director – Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, Screenplay – Henrik Galeen, Based [uncreditedly] on the Novel Dracula by Bram Stoker, Photography (b&w) – Gunter Krampf & Arno Wagner, Art Direction – Albin Grau. Production Company – Prana Film.
Cast:
Max Schreck (Graf Orlok), Gustav von Waggenheim (Johannes Hutter), Greta Schroeder-Matray (Ellen Hutter), Alexander Granach (Knock), Joh Gottowt (Professor Bulwer)
Plot: 1838 in the peaceful German town of Bremen. Real-estate agent Johannes Hutter is asked to travel to Transylvania to sell a property to Count Graf Orlok. Leaving his wife Ellen, Johannes travels through the haunted Carpathian mountains to the castle of the rat-like Orlok. But once there, Orlok makes Johannes his prisoner and drinks his blood. As Orlok departs for Bremen aboard The Demeter, Johannes tries to escape and return to save Ellen before she falls under Orlok’s influence and the town is overcome by Orlok’s plague.
Nosferatu is quite possibly the most amazing of all vampire films. This is so for several reasons. It is not simply because Nosferatu was the very first vampire film. Nor is it because it survives today despite a lawsuit by Bram Stoker’s widow over its uncredited and outright theft of the plot of Dracula (1897), a suit that ended with an order for all prints of the film to be destroyed. (Luckily for us they weren’t). But Nosferatu amazes most because it was – at least until Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – the most cinematic of all vampire films.
Nosferatu is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Dracula. Or at least of the first quarter of Dracula. Unlike any other adaptation of the novel, more than two-thirds of the story is taken up by the journey to Transylvania. But it is the way that director F.W. Murnau launches into the story that takes one’s breath away. The horrors in the book are about something emerging from the repressions of British rationalism. Murnau on the other hand creates a film that gives the sense that it has wholly abandoned even rationalism and entered into a dark world of an inverted fairytale. Murnau drops some of Bram Stoker’s wilder visions from the Transylvania section – Jonathan’s seduction by Dracula’s wives, the image of Dracula crawling down the wall – but his own images are quite remarkable and indeed his Transylvanian sequences have a far more eerie sense of the otherworldly than Stoker ever achieved. There is the visit to an inn whose inhabitants are steeped in peasant superstition, while outside a prowling wolf scares horses away. And when the coach drops Johannes at the bridge, the driver eerily warns “beyond lies the Land of Phantoms”. The sense of crossing the bridge has the feeling indeed of leaving one world for another, a fact confirmed moments later by the appearance of the black coach where even the rider and horse come swaddled in black. But the most striking feature is Dracula/Orlok who is given a fascinatingly crepuscular performance by Max Schreck – made up with a rat-like face with bald head, protruding ears, exaggerated eyebrows, two protruding front teeth, and a spindly gait where Schreck wears a long black mandarin coat and keeps his arms and long fingernails hunched in front of him by his side. And Murnau accompanies him a wild bag of fantastic tricks – doors opening of their own accord, ownerless shadows creeping up stairways and opening doors, the intensely weird image of Schreck rising from his coffin straight as a board and creepy title cards like [in reference to a miniature of Ellen]: “Is this your wife? What a pretty throat.”
Classically Bram Stoker associated the vampire with a sense of sexual repression that lurked beneath the outward manneredness of Victorian propriety. But the imagery in Nosferatu focuses on death rather than seduction. Dracula/Orlok appears surrounded by rats and even looks like one himself, and his arrival in Bremen is as though he were the Black Plague. The nearest Nosferatu gets to Stoker’s metaphors is the contrast made between the dark blight that Dracula represents and the peaceful innocence of Bremen and Ellen/Mina – but this really harkens back to a purer, more fairy-tale like form of seduction. The whole film is richly aswim in metaphors – contrasts between Renfield and a Venus Flytrap; between a polyp and Orlok: “transparent, without substance, almost a phantom.” Murnau achieves much through striking crosscuts – between the earlier scenes with Johannes as Orlok’s victim and Ellen sleepwalking and between Orlok’s voyage aboard the Demeter, between Johannes’s return home and the waiting Ellen and the imprisoned Knock. The ending where Ellen traps Orlok by her bedside, allowing him to feed on her throat until he forgets the coming of daylight and fades away with the sunrise is nothing short of visually stunning.
The film seen here is the 1992 print, which annoyingly drops the new names given the characters over the book and renames them after their counterparts in Dracula – Dracula, Harker, Van Helsing and so on. But it then has the ineptitude to misspell half of them anyway – Jonathon Harker, who now has a wife Nina instead of Mina.
Nosferatu was remade by Werner Herzog as the quite interesting Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), starring Klaus Kinski as Orlok, who was now legitimately able to be called Dracula due to the fact that Stoker’s Dracula was out of copyright. Over the years much mythology has built up around the film, most notably the (untrue) claim that Max Schreck (whose surname means ‘fright’ in German) was a mysterious figure about whom nothing is known and who never appeared in any other films again. In fact Schreck is reasonably well-biographed and appeared in at least a dozen other films. This myth led to the basis of the film Shadow of the Vampire (2000), which is set around the making of Nosferatu and posits that Max Schreck (played by Willem Dafoe) was actually a real vampire. While a work of fiction, this is nevertheless an excellent film in its own right. The film Shreck (1990) is a vampire film that names its vampire Max Schreck. Batman Returns (1992) and Final Destination (2000) respectively feature a villain and an FBI agent named Max Schreck; while in Targets (1968) Boris Karloff plays an aging horror actor named Byron Orlock; and the vampire film The Breed (2001) features a Graf Orlock. The rat-like look of the vampire has been used in several other films such as Salem’s Lot (1979) and Vamp (1986). Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992) contains a brief homage to Nosferatu.
F.W. (Friedrich Wilhelm) Murnau made several other horror films in Germany including Der Januskopf (1920), a lost adaptation of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; the old dark house film The Haunted Castle (1921); and the fabulous Faust (1926). Murnau next emigrated to the US where he made Sunrise (1927), which is considered one of the greatest of all silent films.
Other adaptations of Dracula are:– Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi; Hammer’s Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) with Christopher Lee; Count Dracula (1970), Jess Franco’s version also with Lee; Dracula (1974), the Dan Curtis tv movie starring Jack Palance that was released to cinemas, Count Dracula (1977), the BBC mini-series with Louis Jourdan; Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella; Francis Ford Coppola’s visually ravishing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), featuring Gary Oldman; Guy Maddin’s silent ballet adaptation Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002); the Italian tv movie Dracula (2002) with Patrick Bergin that updates the story to the present day; and the BBC tv movie Dracula (2006) with Marc Warren.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1997
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