Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germany, 81 minutes
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker
Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner, Gunther Krampf
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroeder, Alexander Granach, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz

I'm going to blame the Universal monster movie franchise for my stubborn confusion in thinking that Bram Stoker's novel Dracula came before Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Actually, Stoker's vampire tale was published in 1897 and Frankenstein in 1818. Among other things, that means this silent movie version by German director F.W. Murnau—more or less officially the first Dracula movie—came only 25 years after the novel, which is comparable today to a movie based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, say, or Donna Tartt's's The Secret History. Dracula had been around awhile, but still might have felt new in 1922. Frankenstein was over 100 years old by that point.

I'm also holding Universal accountable (with Hammer not far behind) for treating the Count Dracula less as a loathsome monster of the night and more in the direction of a Playboy Mansion leisured gentleman, a popular conception of vampires that evolved into George Hamilton in 1979's Love at First Bite and may be extended to include Jim Jarmusch's Adam and Eve in 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive. Note how the word "love" occurs in both titles. Let the Right One In, from 2008, is another recent example. In these pictures the vampire often works as surreptitious seducer (or practical black marketeer, in the Jarmusch, making surreptitious contacts directly with hospitals for blood). But nothing like that is happening in Nosferatu. This Count is not discreetly sucking blood in sexy make-out sessions but is more like the earthworms crawling in the dirt that you spade up when it's time to go fishing. In fact, Nosferatu plays up that aspect of Stoker's novel—Dracula's affinity not just with bats but with other nocturnal vermin and disgusting insects, and especially the way he travels in boxes ("coffins") filled with dirt. It's not the coffins, folks, it's the dirt. Nosferatu even one-ups Stoker by making it plague-infested dirt, complete with swarming rats.



Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski did their best in 1979 for the cause of this vision of the vampire, but before we go any further, I should say something about the silent movie aspect of Nosferatu. Though I appreciate them more than I have in the past, I still find many points of silent films often strike me as distractingly rinky-dink: lugubrious pacing, inconsistent exposition, ridiculously busy plots (in this case I know it comes from the novel), tendencies to hold too long on facial expressions, which themselves often feel artificial in the first place and then are held artificially long, often questionable print quality, and all too easily lost sound designs if they ever existed in the first place. So it's important to remember that Nosferatu is a silent film from 1922 and for most of its length that shows, sometimes painfully. What it is good at is creating an indelible image of a vampire monster and then more generally telling a creepy story. Many of its shortcomings have to be written off as nice tries and/or the invention of cinema. I call them theatricality and try to keep moving along.

Nosferatu is also another classic with an interesting history. It is something of an outlaw film in that it was made without securing the rights from Stoker's estate. Evading copyright infringement is one of the reasons why some of the names have been changed, e.g., Count Dracula is Count Orlok here, which I happen to think is a better name anyway for a vampire from Transylvania. Other changes are more on the order of making the novel work as a movie, the usual problems we still see all the time with adaptations. But the point remained. Prana Film, the producers, never had the rights in the first place. The Stoker family came after them hard, and the judgment, according to the legend recorded at Wikipedia, included destruction of all known prints. But one survived, was viewed and reproduced clandestinely down the corridor of time, and you can guess the rest. In a way that makes Nosferatu not only the first Dracula movie but also because of its legal problems arguably the first midnight-madness style cult picture. Essential viewing!

Wikipedia also says that Nosferatu had an original score written by Hans Erdmann but it is mostly lost now and the movie has since been scored many different ways by many different people. My Kino DVD has two scores. The first was written by Donald Sosin in 2002 with vocals by Joanne Seaton. It features strings, a clarinet, panpipes I think, and some synth keyboard. It felt Bavarian to me. The alternate was composed in 1988 by Gerard Hourbette and Thierry Zaboitzeff, performed by Art Zoyd, a progressive French rock band. It's harsher, more strident and industrial, metal in places, operatic in others, with lifts from A Clockwork Orange effects. It's the one I prefer, but there are so many it would be a fun project sometime to compare more widely.

There are interesting incidentals in Nosferatu—our hero victim Hutter often reminds me of Roman Polanski in The Tenant and Hutter's wife Ellen is an unsettling piece of work herself. She's so sensitive she grieves for flowers picked for her. She looks more like Hutter's aunt or older sister and that is often their interpersonal dynamic too. But for me what counts in Nosferatu are the monster and the dirt, and whenever one or both are front and center—maybe 25 minutes of the run time?—I'm happy with what this movie has to give. Example: a shot from high overhead of a raft fording down rapids in a river by two men with a pile of boxes. Title card: "The raftsmen did not know what an unholy cargo they were steering down the river." It's the spookiest damn raft I have ever seen, short of Aguirre.