Saturday, October 5, 2019

Nosferatu




Nosferatu
1922
Director- F. W. Murnau
Cast- Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach, Georg H. Schnell, Ruth Landshoff, John Gottowt, Gustav Botz,
            
   This "silent film" is, as far as we know, the oldest surviving attempt to bring the novel of Dracula to the big screen. There are reports that other films existed but they are considered “lost.” The makers didn’t acquire the rights to the book, so the names are all changed, but it is without a doubt Dracula. Some English versions of the film have the names replaced with their counterparts from the novel. It’s irrelevant though. You can skip the narration as it sticks pretty close to the plot of the book and any fan of Dracula will know what’s happening without reading a single thing.
           
    It covers most of the high points of the novel; Harker’s arrival at the castle, Dracula’s trip across the ocean, Mina, sitting on the seaside cliffs, Renfield with his spiders and flies. There is a weird, and funny, scene of the vampire walking around carrying his coffin in his arms. I’m not sure what the point of that scene was but it was re-created in the Klaus Kinski version and was just as weird then. The only big change is the ending. In this version of the story, Mina uses herself as bait, luring the vampire to her bedside and keeping him there with her charms until the sun rises to destroy him.
            

    Another point of faithfulness to the book is in the look of the vampire. Dracula wouldn’t become a sex symbol until almost 10 years later when Lugosi played the character. In Nosferatu they make him more ghoulish looking, though they may have taken it too far. Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula probably looks closest to what Stoker had in mind. As one critic described it, Schreck looked like a “penis with teeth.” At any rate, Schreck looks so creepy that you are willing to forgive a little artistic license.
            
    Nosferatu is the best example of the creepy, creative, and very realistic imagery that directors were capable of in the early age of cinema. Almost a hundred years after it was made, Max Schreck;s vampire is more realistic and scarier than anything that has been done with even the best CGI.
            
    The cast and crew of this movie seemed to suffer a lot of bad fates, mostly due to the rise of the Nazis. The director F.W.Murnau died from a car crash at the age of 42. Schreck himself died of a heart attack at age 56. Alexander Granach, a Jew, fled Nazi Germany to Soviet Russia and then on to America where he died at age 54 from complications from an appendectomy. Ruth Landshoff , a Jew, fled the Nazi’s through several European countries before making it to America but at least she didn’t die until her 60s. John Gottowt, a Jew, was murdered by the SS in 1942. Gustav Botz died young as well at the age of 49.
           
    As far as entertainment goes, it may be a little hard for a modern audience to get into it. Silent films in general moved at a slow pace and would take more time to show things, not just action but mundane things. Plus there are all the breaks to show dialogue and  narration.  A modern audience might feel under stimulated.

 I can’t say that the film is that important to a modern audience as most people, and a lot of horror fans haven’t even seen it. However it’s very important to film makers and different images from this movie keep making their way into vampire flicks, most notably, the vampire rising from his coffin, back rigid, at a 90 degree angle (this was used in Fright Night and the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula just to name two). Nosferatu’s shadow, which seems to have a life of its own, is used to eerie effect in the Coppola version. Then of course, there is the design of the vampire himself; bald, pointed ears, sharpened buck teeth. This design has filtered its way down into vampire pop culture into toys, role playing games and as the vampire in Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of Salem’s Lot. So, while not a particularly important movie to most horror fans, I think the film is indispensable to fans of the vampire genre.



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