Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (AKA Nosferatu the Vampire)

Dir: F. W. Murnau

1922

*****

F. W. Murnau's early horror is utterly sublime and Max Schreck's portrayal of Nosferatu is still one of the most terrifying collection of images committed to film. It's quite an achievement for a film's horror to resonate so clearly nearly a century after its release. Warner Herzog's remake is definitely worth watching if you liked this, though, as much as I love Klaus Kinski’s take, you can't beat Max Schreck's awesome performance. Schreck's Nosferatu is the epitome of creepy, the first and best, still one of the most frightening bad-guys in the history of cinema. His performance was so good in fact that rumors started that Schreck was in fact a Vampire in real life (this is explored brilliantly in the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire). It's even more frightening to think that it could very easily have been lost forever, after Bram Stocker's estate sued and secured a court order that every copy be destroyed under copyright law. I personally find Murnau's direction to be the most compelling adaption of Dracula and Schreck's Nosferatu certainly the most terrifying. The rawness of Schreck's Count Orlok is something far scarier than Count Dracula's typical depictions in my opinion, this version being the only one that has actually given me nightmares. Schreck's performance, Murnau's German expressionist direction and Fritz Arno Wagner's astonishing cinematography make it one of the greatest horror films ever made. It begins in 1838, where Thomas Hutter lives in the fictional German city of Wisborg. His employer, Knock, sends Hutter to Transylvania to visit a new client named Count Orlok. Hutter entrusts his loving wife Ellen to his good friend Harding and Harding's sister Annie, before embarking on his long journey. Nearing his destination in the Carpathian Mountains, Hutter stops at an inn for dinner. The locals become frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name and discourage him from traveling to his castle at night, warning of a werewolf on the prowl. The next morning, Hutter takes a coach to a high mountain pass, but the coachman declines to take him any further than the bridge as nightfall is approaching. A black-swathed coach appears after Hutter crosses the bridge and the coachman gestures for him to climb aboard. Hutter is welcomed at a castle by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away. Hutter wakes up to a deserted castle the morning after and notices fresh punctures on his neck which, in a letter he sends by courier on horseback to be delivered to his devoted wife, he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house across from Hutter's own home in Wisborg and notices a photo of Hutter's wife, remarking that she has a "lovely neck." Reading a book about vampires that he took from the local inn, Hutter starts to suspect that Orlok is Nosferatu, the "Bird of Death." He cowers in his room as midnight approaches, but there is no way to bar the door. The door opens by itself and Orlok enters, his true nature finally revealed, and Hutter hides under the bed covers and falls unconscious. At the same time this is happening, his wife awakens from her sleep, and in a trance walks towards the balcony and onto the railing. Alarmed, Harding shouts Ellen's name and she faints while he asks for a doctor. After the doctor arrives, she shouts Hutter's name, remaining in the trance and apparently able to see Orlok in his castle threatening her unconscious husband. The doctor believes this trance-like state is due to "blood congestion". The next day, Hutter explores the castle. In its crypt, he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant. Hutter becomes horrified and dashes back to his room. Hours later from the window, he sees Orlok piling up coffins on a coach and climbing into the last one before the coach departs. Hutter escapes the castle through the window, but is knocked unconscious by the fall and awakens in a hospital. When he is sufficiently recovered, he hurries home. Meanwhile, the coffins are shipped down river on a raft. They are transferred to a schooner, but not before one is opened by the crew, revealing a multitude of rats. The sailors on the ship get sick one by one; soon all but the captain and first mate are dead. Suspecting the truth, the first mate goes below to destroy the coffins. However, Orlok awakens and the horrified sailor jumps into the sea. Unaware of his danger, the captain becomes Orlok's latest victim when he ties himself to the wheel. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carrying one of his coffins, and moves into the house he purchased. The next morning, when the ship is inspected, the captain is found dead. After examining the logbook, the doctors assume they are dealing with the plague. The town is stricken with panic, and people are warned to stay inside. There are many deaths in the town, which are blamed on the plague. Knock, who had been committed to a psychiatric ward, escapes after murdering the warden. The townspeople give chase, but he eludes them by climbing a roof, then using a scarecrow. Meanwhile, Orlok stares from his window at the sleeping Ellen. Against her husband's wishes, Ellen had read the book he found. The book claims that the way to defeat a vampire is for a woman who is pure in heart to distract the vampire with her beauty all through the night. She opens her window to invite him in, but faints. When Hutter revives her, she sends him to fetch Professor Bulwer. After he leaves, Orlok comes in. He becomes so engrossed drinking her blood that he forgets about the coming day. When a rooster crows, Orlok vanishes in a puff of smoke as he tries to flee. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband. The last scene shows Count Orlok's ruined castle in the Carpathian Mountains, symbolizing the end of his reign of terror. The studio behind Nosferatu, Prana Film, was a short-lived silent-era German film studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and occultist-artist Albin Grau, named for the concept of prana (which is a Hindu philosophy that includes yoga, medicine and martial arts). Although the studio's intent was to produce occult and supernatural-themed films, Nosferatu was its only production, as it declared bankruptcy in order to dodge copyright infringement suits from Bram Stoker's widow Florence Balcombe. Grau had had the idea to shoot a vampire film, the inspiration of which had risen from a war experience in the winter of 1916, when a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the undead. Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen, a disciple of Hanns Heinz Ewers, the task to write a screenplay inspired by Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, despite Prana Film not having obtained the film rights. Galeen was an experienced specialist in dark romanticism and he had already worked on The Student of Prague in 1913, and the screenplay for Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam in 1920. Galeen set the story in the fictional north German harbour town of Wisborg. He changed the characters' names and added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship, and left out the Van Helsing vampire hunter character. Galeen's Expressionist style screenplay was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism, such as those by Carl Mayer. Lotte Eisner described Galeen's screenplay as full of poetry and full of rhythm. Cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner only had one camera available, and therefore there was only one original negative. The director followed Galeen's screenplay carefully, following handwritten instructions on camera positioning, lighting, and related matters. Nevertheless, Murnau completely rewrote 12 pages of the script, as Galeen's text was missing from the director's working script. This concerned the last scene of the film, in which Ellen sacrifices herself and the vampire dies in the first rays of the Sun. Murnau prepared carefully; there were sketches that were to correspond exactly to each filmed scene, and he used a metronome to control the pace of the acting. In contrast to Dracula, Orlok does not create other vampires, but kills his victims, causing the townfolk to blame the plague which ravages the city. Orlok also must sleep by day, as sunlight would kill him, while the original Dracula is only weakened by sunlight. The ending is also substantially different from that of Dracula; the count is ultimately destroyed at sunrise when the Mina analogue sacrifices herself to him. It is a miracle that the film survived and brilliant that it did as it is, along with 1922’s Haxam, the first and greatest film of a genre.