BONUS Review & more : Nosferatu
NOSFERATU (1922)
“It will cost you a bit of effort, a bit of sweat … and perhaps a bit of blood.” — real estate broker Knock to his agent, Hutter
The director was Germany’s F.W. Murnau, whose other silent classics include Faust, The Last Laugh, and Sunrise. The latter was made in Hollywood. His life was cut short by an auto accident in Santa Barbara in 1931, when he was 42 years old.
Murnau uses every special effect in the book. (Of course, the book was a lot shorter in 1922.)
The plot of Nosferatu (subtitled A Symphony of Horror) is “freely adapted” from Dracula, with the characters’ names changed (the vampire, portrayed by Max Schreck, is Count Orlok) and the main location shifted from London to Bremen. The motion picture’s and the novel’s endings are as different as — well, day and night.
Nevertheless, this plagiarism led to legal action by Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, who sought to have all prints of Nosferatu destroyed.
The hideous Orlok is an emblem of plague, always attended by a platoon of rats.
Screenwriter Henrik Galeen also labored on the 1914 and 1920 versions of Der Golem (he codirected and costarred in the former) and Paul Leni’s magnificent Waxworks (1924). He directed the 1926 remake of the Poe-inspired Der Student von Prag.
A few readers might have seen the Werner Herzog-Klaus Kinski remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979). Two or three might have seen Shadow of the Vampire (2000), with John Malkovich (as Murnau) and Willem Dafoe (as Schreck), a fictionalized and fantasized account of the making of the 1922 classic.
“Nosferatu remains effective. It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us. It shows not that vampires can jump out of shadows, but that evil can grow there, nourished on death. In a sense, Murnau’s film is about all the things we worry about at three in the morning — cancer, war, disease, madness.” — Roger Ebert
“The vampire myth … adapts to every genre. The disease-carrying hero can refer to the bubonic plague or to AIDS; his state of eternal unrest holds meaning for the religious and the godless.” – Caryn James in The New York Times (1993)
Some readings “have included speculation as to whether the film metaphorically reflected the prevalent anti-Semitic attitudes of Weimar Germany, or whether perhaps the vampire’s abject and terrifying qualities mirrored Murnau’s sense of ostracism as a gay man in that place and time.” – Ruth Goldberg
“The rich complexity of Murnau’s film, including its intricate, stunning visual textures and narrative patternings, makes it a valid model of cinema rarely equalled today.” — Phil Hardy (1986)
“A chilly draft from doomsday.” — Béla Balázs
“Generally described as combining almost equally the magnificent and the absurd.” — Ivan Butler
“Crude, unsubtle and illogical.” — Carlos Clarens
“The narrative style is rather poor, and the film drags in many spots.” — Silent Films, 1877-1996 by Robert K. Klepper
“It is the sort of thing one could watch at midnight without its having much effect upon one’s slumbering hours. … The backgrounds are often quite effective, but most of it seems like cardboard puppets doing all they can to be horrible on papier-mâché settings.” – The New York Times (1929)
Trivia time: During the making of Nosferatu, a casting call of sorts ran in a German newspaper, the Media Worker Gazette: “A film recording is looking for 30-50 live rats immediately at high prices.” (I thank my Germanophone friends Chris H., Chris W. (R.I.P.), and Peggy T. for their respective translations. I used small portions of each.)
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And I've attached the song after which I intend to name my blog, or whatever the online version turns out to be! In case you can't make out the faux Black English words of the introduction, I will translate: "Holy mercy! Oh, I say there! Frankenstein has got himself a den where he, uh, entertains all our friends there. Folks, y'all see, that come there, they're never, never seen again."