Turning 100 – Nosferatu
“Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the deathbird calling your name at midnight? Beware you never say it – for then the pictures of life will fade to shadows, haunting dreams will climb forth from your heart and feed on your blood”.
One hundred years ago, audiences were faced with one of the earliest film incarnations of the vampire, or more befitting for this rendition’s ancient evil, the Nosferatu; Count Orlok. The Transylvanian Count means to take residence in the idyllic town of Wisborg, Germany, and so unsuspected real-estate agent Hutter is sent, against the better judgement of his pure-hearted and worrisome wife Ellen, to close the deal at the Count’s vast castle in the Carpathian Mountains. This is of course essentially the plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which director F.W. Murnau and writer Henrik Galeen chose to adapt without the relevant copyright to do so.
Still, the unauthorized adaptation premiered in 1922, and shortly thereafter all copies were ordered destroyed by the Stoker Estate, so that the bastardization might never see the light of day. Instead, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror has endured in all its grandiose shocks more than nearly any other silent film. Its legacy measures far beyond what it pinched from Dracula, and the derivative plot has never been the true draw. In fact, among adaptations of the book, Nosferatu is refreshingly stripped back, eliminating most extraneous characters and focusing on what was obviously its most novel element; the terror of the vampire.
Since Bela Lugosi’s landmark 1931 portrayal, Dracula has been acted largely as suave, playing up the psychosexual elements of the character’s unrelenting thirst. Even the ostentatious and strange Gary Oldman of the 1992 version reverts to a younger, virile suitor when on the prowl. So, most renditions of the Count are debonair, frightening because their seductiveness clouds their threat, but the vampire here is a pestilence, the more traditional walking corpse of folk horrors. Imagery often pairs Orlok with rats, especially promotional posters of the time which also emphasize his animal eyes, beads of light in the sunken dark of his face. These rats are key to the plot; they bring a plague with Orlok as he slumbers below deck in coffins filled with soil from graves cultivated with Black Death, en route to Wisborg, where his victims are mistaken for the infected. The fixation with illness has not seemed so apt since the time of the film’s release (the Spanish flu had only tempered two years prior). Orlok’s rat-like appearance and alien nature tapped into the zeitgeist of anxieties in post World War I Germany, and much of the same visual lexicon was used to demonize Jewish citizens, though it is unlikely that the film was meant to play into anti-semitic sentiment, considering the involvement of Jewish talent, and the director’s documented friendship with several Jewish men and women.
So much of Nosferatu’s power is down to the chilling look of Orlok, played by Max Schreck in inhumanly slow creeps and leers. He is not a hunter who pounces forcefully, but an inescapable doom. Characters don’t ever seem to run from Orlok, they are mesmerized with fear, and can only crouch in corners as he makes his approach, all the while keeping eye-contact, often with the camera and so, the viewer. Schreck only blinks once throughout the film, and it is easy to see why an urban legend developed about the actor being a real child of the night.
Orlok is only on screen for about 9 minutes, proving that even during the genre’s inception, it was the unseen horror which disturbed us most. Each time we see Orlok descend upon his petrified prey we are left to imagine the ordeal they undergo. We only see him feed once, at the climax of the film, even then shrouded in shadow, abstracted into only his pale white head, gleaming eyes and long talons, dug into Ellen’s head. As much as Nosferatu is a quality production for its time, it is these individual moments of brilliance which now govern and inspire its legacy on horror cinema.
Its strongest influence may be in helping to codify cinematic suspense, which arises when we know something is desperately wrong, but the characters do not. Over and over again the film develops this sense of foreboding; in Ellen’s seemingly telepathic anxieties, in the strange Knock’s insistence that the Count move in across the street from Hutter, in the villagers who are scared stiff at the mention of Orlok, in the book’s warnings of unholy creatures, in Orlok’s obvious sinister intent, in Hutter’s rebuffing of all warnings. This is modern horror storytelling coming into being. Special Effects are a staple of the genre, and they are here too; if a little quaint. Tinting the image a dark cyan color to indicate nighttime when scenes were shot in broad daylight, inserting a shot from a negative print for a ghostly look, conveying superspeed through stop-motion, doors which open on their own, dissolves to make the monster disappear, casting a hyena as a scavenging werewolf, and one puff of smoke when the Vampire is extinguished by the sun’s rays (a convention established for the first time here).
Despite being maybe the most famous entrant into the genre, Nosferatu is not the most robust example of German expressionism. Its performances are comparatively restrained (excluding vampires and madmen), and Murnau made use of naturalistic sets and location shooting. These settings are integral to the film’s atmosphere, consider the opening shot: the hustle and bustle of the pristine Wisborg from above. Contrast this with the isolated, barren and dilapidated ruins of Orlok’s gothic castle. Carefully built tension may have collapsed under the artificial look of true German Expressionism, and this realism is a foremost tool in Nosferatu, used to lend credence to the hallucinatory phenomena of its scares. Devices like the diary entry accounts, shifting the setting from London to a provincial German town, with German characters, all imparted a sense of immediacy to viewers of the time.
One sequence in the film intercuts a madman in an asylum with scientific explanations of the carnivorous Venus fly trap, affirming the audience’s fear of untamed nature, and postwar acquaintance with mental illness (remember that many still believed in superstitions like the vampire, and Galeen was only inspired to write the story after a wartime encounter with a Serbian farmer who confessed to his own father being one of the living dead).
The extended plague lockdown sequence was another touchstone in recent memory for audiences in 1922, with its procession of coffins being lead through town. Germans will have been thoroughly unsettled not only because much of the film’s extenuating action seemed so plausible, but because it seemed so familiar.
What is expressionistic is the suggestive imagery, especially the film’s shadow play, exemplified in the indelible shot of Orlok’s silhouette creeping up the staircase, stalking Ellen, or when that same shadow clasps her heart (a sequence timed out so precisely that a metronome had to be employed on set to satisfy Murnau). A less famous moment exemplifies the consuming dread Nosferatu aimed to capture: The town is gripped by paranoia. A woman sits by candlelight, writhing. Afraid she may be ill, her husband leaves to find the town doctor. She seems aware the beast is near. The foul breath which carried his cargo across the sea blows out a candle, and the film’s tint shifts to night.
Inspiring 100 years of innovation and revision is a heavy tax, and revisiting the film, you’ll likely find that it won’t scare you. At best you may be creeped out. Orlok himself, however, does not date, because the character is not an individual, but a living (or undead) embodiment of so many of our mortal preoccupations. The predatory, the demonic, all things diseased or insane, and the heart of them all; death. The Nosferatu is the inevitable specter.