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Nosferatu: Eine Symphone Des Grauens
aka Nosferatu ; Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Terror ; Nosferatu the Vampire ; The Twelfth Hour – A Night of Horror; Dracula
Director: Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau
Screenwriter: Henrik Galeen
By Roderick Heath
In the history of film only a few images are granted the rarefied status of becoming instantly recognisable and a lodestone of cinematic meaning. That sort of pop culture stature is particularly uncommon with movies over a century old. Those ranks might include Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Buster Keaton’s deadpan, and Rudolph Valentino in his sheik’s habit, and little else. Oh, and the core images of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, of the titular vampire, with spindly physique, pointed teeth, and bald pate, lurking in grainy footage that looks like it was filmed directly from someone’s subconscious, his angular shadow sliding over walls like a nightmare, his hideous, mysteriously evil visage lurking over a woman in her bed. I remember the first time I saw it, which was not in the film itself but excerpted for the opening credits of a TV show I used to watch when I was about five or six years old, with the vampire’s image appearing under the grandly sonorous tones of the opening of Mahler’s Fifth. The mere fact I can remember that conveys its haunting power. It wasn’t until many years later that I actually got to see the whole film. Indeed, we’re lucky that Nosferatu survives for us, given its notorious history as a film, but survive it did to have an essentially endless impact on Horror cinema in specific and cinema as a whole. Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, born in Bielefeld, Germany, was 34 years old when Nosferatu was released. Murnau’s father, Heinrich Plumpe, owned a cloth factory, giving his son and siblings a comfortable upbringing which they spent indulging literary and theatrical tastes. Friedrich, known for his coldly superior attitude even as a boy, grew up extremely tall and unapologetically queer, and took the name Murnau from a town near Lake Staffel he lived in for a time. Whilst studying at university Murnau became involved with student theatre productions, and the famed theatre director Max Reinhardt was impressed enough when he caught one of his performances that he invited him to train at his acting school.
Murnau’s budding career was halted by World War I, serving at first in the infantry and then as a gunner and observer in the Imperial German Flying Corps, weathering several crashes until a forced landing in Switzerland saw him interned. Murnau spent the rest of the war directing prisoners in plays and writing his first film script. After the war Murnau started a film studio with actor Conrad Veidt, and made his filmmaking debut with The Boy in Blue (1919), a film inspired by Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting, and he quickly captured attention with a string of films in the next few years, many of them lost, including The Haunted Castle (1921) and The Burning Soil (1922). Der Januskopf (1920) first evinced Murnau’s fascination for material in what would eventually be called the Horror genre, and his attraction to darkly psychological and oneiric overtones in a manner that would soon see him adopted as a hero for the fledgling Surrealist art movement. The film, which starred Veidt and featured a young Bela Lugosi in a minor role, also proved the first of Murnau’s attempts to film popular books without permission, as Der Januskopf was a thinly disguised variation on Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Murnau got away with that, in part because German storytelling was already rife with doppelganger-themed stories, and German cinema had been merrily filching from British literary properties like Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales for years already. But when Murnau made Nosferatu, this time a very slightly disguised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he found himself and his movie in trouble. Stoker had died a few years earlier, but his widow zealously protected his estate, and hearing about the movie had a British court move an injunction to seize and destroy every copy of Murnau’s film.
Fortunately, in the chaotic state of Germany in the early 1920s, this order was unenforceable, but it’s one reason why Nosferatu only exists today in a curtailed and, despite restorations aplenty, still pretty rough form. And indeed, Murnau’s oeuvre has greatly suffered from lost work, including his debut and his 1929 Hollywood film 4 Devils. The film’s persecution nonetheless helped make it the first and last production by Prana Film, a studio set up in part by artist and occultist Albin Grau, which went bankrupt. Murnau recovered from the experience of seeing his radical new artwork almost destroyed as those who did see it acclaimed him as a major new filmmaker. The succes de scandale led to him making his ambitious German masterworks The Last Laugh (1924) and Faust (1926), before a move to Hollywood. There he was greeted with the pomp and budgets of a prestige filmmaker, his movies there including Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), City Girl (1930), and Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), before his sudden death in a car crash a week before the latter film premiered, at the age of 42.
Despite its skin-of-the-teeth survival, what survives of Nosferatu is still astonishingly powerful and mesmerising. It’s a film that feels like a transmission from the secret, labyrinthine heart of cinema, a relic and a fount, from which the young but rapidly maturing art form split and forked in various directions, towards genre and art-house, narrative and experimental. Every other film of Dracula is after a fashion a remake of Nosferatu, with, more specifically, Werner Herzog’s 1979 version offered as a specific, sometimes shot-for-shot recreation and reclamation; The Witch (2015) and The Northman (2022) director Robert Eggers is reportedly planning another. Nosferatu followed The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the film that defined the German Expressionist cinema movement, and whilst it absorbed aspects of its example, particularly in exploiting the crude palette of cinematography at the time to use light and shadow as expressive tools and play with form as captured by the camera, but Murnau’s signature choice was to adopt a more solid and realistic approach, shooting most of the film on location and explicitly contrasting solid, palpable places with infiltrations of the nightmarish.
Murnau’s personal artistic preoccupations lay with evoking the most basic and primal side of human existence – love and hate in particular, and attending states from fear and desire to humiliation and greed. His later collaborations with the screenwriter Carl Mayer, who gained his break in movies as the cowriter of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, hinged on Mayer’s feeling for far more everyday experience, and the two found their ideal place of expression in movies that allowed Murnau to extrapolate the extreme, the elemental, from the commonplace. The Last Laugh was a portrait of a hotel’s impressively dressed doorman who finds himself relentless degraded after he gets too old, as a bitter portrait of a Germany battered to its knees after the war capped with a supremely sarcastic triumph. In Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, the central married couple step between extreme states of passion and murderous hate, and the queasy, tormenting mixture of lust and aspiration that almost drives the loving husband to kill his wife visualised as the ghostly wraith of the femme fatale plucking at his heart, and the final survival of the couple weathering literal stormy waters came touched with flashes of transcendental experience. For Faust, Murnau took on the most essential of German stories with a similarly extreme dichotomy whilst also following Goethe’s redemptive arc for its hero, Faust’s pact with the sardonic Mephistopheles finally cancelled and Faust reclaimed by a beautiful male angel. In Murnau’s major films, chased with an obsessive intensity perhaps stemming from Murnau’s obsessive reading of Nietzsche as a youth, the core characters are people who, whether titanic or insignificant in worldly terms, do battle with forces both inside themselves and beyond their control with the twinned promise of either annihilating them or rendering them immortal.
Nosferatu contrasts the later social and psychological analysis and sophistication of Murnau’s films by taking on Stoker’s story and partly revising it, whilst still leaning on its driving notion of evil in literal form, the dread-inducing vampire lurking in the fringes of civilisation and plotting his course to its heart: in Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans the demon lover is a psychic conjuration built around a much less impressive person, here it’s real and wants to eat you up. Murnau, in freely adapting Stoker’s storyline, also transcribed it into something more deeply and specifically German, via the script written by Henrik Galeen, who had already written Paul Wegener’s first tilt at filming The Golem (1915) and would go on to write his second (1922) as well as other essential films of the German Expressionist Horror moment including Waxworks (1924), The Student of Prague (1926), and Alraune (1928). The storyline of their film more or less follows Stoker, but with changes that range from the superficial, with character names changed, to the suggestive and deeply consequential. Jonathan and Mina Harker become Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) and wife Ellen (Greta Schröder). Renfield becomes Knock (Alexander Granach). Professor Van Helsing is split apart, one part becoming Professor Bulwer (Gustav Botz), a scientist influenced by Paracelsus, who gives learned, obscure lectures on life forms like the Venus Fly Trap that live on the bodily fluids of other life forms. Another part is blended with Dr Seward as Professor Sievers (John Gottowt), who serves somewhat unluckily as doctor to the Hutters. Count Dracula himself becomes Count Orlok (Max Schreck), also sometimes referred to as Nosferatu. That word, which has no clear linguistic root, was used in Stoker’s novel as a folkloric Transylvanian term denoting the living dead. Shipowner Harding (Georg H. Schnell) and his sister Ruth (Ruth Landshoff) supplant several of the novel’s supporting characters, with Ruth seeming to be nominated to fulfil the role of Lucy Westenra. What’s most telling about some of this is that these adapted elements are present in a purely vestigial way, in a narrative that otherwise hones away distractions to focus on its central, bizarre romantic triangle – Orlok, Hutter, and Ellen.
So, young Hutter is the real estate agent, resident of the fictitious German city of Wisborg, a locale created with filming about Lubeck and Wismar, sometimes in the 1830s. Newly married to Ellen, Hutter wants to get on with upward mobility, and his employer, Knock, gives him a chance to get in on a major deal, if he’ll travel to Transylvania and arrange a real estate purchase in Wisborg for Orlok. Knock suggests selling to Orlok the large, jagged-roofed structure which lies across a canal from Hutter’s own residence. Hutter, thrilled, rushes home to tell Ellen about his mission and their eminent good fortune, but Ellen is stricken with foreboding which both put down to merely displeasure at being separated for so long. Hutter sets out on horseback and travels across central Europe to the fringe of the Carpathian Mountains, and spends a night in a tavern where the innkeeper (Guido Herzfeld) is disturbed Hutter’s stated goal, and later Hutter finds a book placed in his room entitled, reassuringly, Of Vampires, Monstrous Ghosts, Sorcery, and The Seven Deadly Sins. Hutter starts reading the book and becomes increasingly disturbed, but awakens in the morning to the bucolic scenes of the rural area and forgets it all. After being abandoned by his coach driver, who refuses to go any further, Hutter tramps his way up a mountain path into the high, jagged reaches of the mountains, until he’s picked up by a coach supposedly sent by Count Orlok.
Dracula was written as an epistolary novel – that is, a narrative presented through fake letters, diary entries, and other writings by the characters. This was essentially the classic literary equivalent of a modern found footage movie, designed to create a slightly more credulous attitude through the realistic texture of personal experience and eyewitness account. As if seeking their own device to induce a sense of distanced credulity, Murnau and Galeen present their narrative as an historical account as recorded in an obscure (and imaginary) book entitled A Chronicle of the Great Plague of Wisborg – Anno Domini 1838. The pages of the book provide many of the intertitles of the film, as if dramatizing the recorded events. Cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner’s photography evokes a mood of tranquillity and homey settlement in the environs of Wisborg, with its ivy-clad bourgeois houses and picturesque medieval streets. It’s a vision of a lost Germany, indeed before Germany actually existed, perhaps charged with nostalgic longing for a presumed audience all too rueful of the price of modernity, and also allowing Murnau to skip around technological infrastructure like trains and dip into the last days of a world that travelled no fast than horse or wind. The only note of the unsettling struck in Wisborg comes from the old buildings Knock suggests Hutter sell, lurking across the way from Hutter’s own house like a cancerous polyp amidst the civility.
Knock himself is similarly peculiar and discomfortingly out of place, a leering oddball playing at being the commanding burger, like a hangover from that medieval proto-Germany subsisting in the oncoming industrial age, much as Orlok will represent the intrusion of an even more ancient and alien zone in those sun-dappled streets. Knock is introduced eagerly reading Orlok’s correspondence eagerly, scrawled over with Orlok’s demotic letters and arcane symbols, which hint that Orlok has ensnared Knock’s imagination with promises of cabalistic lore. As a variation on Renfield from Stoker’s novel, where the character was simply an inmate of Seward’s sanatorium randomly chosen to be Dracula’s helpmate and emissary, Knock instead prefigured a common practice of later adaptations of making the character connected to, or sometimes even supplanting (as in the 1931 Tod Browning version), Harker himself as the luckless real estate agent sent to meet the Count. The Hardings are friends of the Hutters who take Ellen in whilst her husband is away.
The film’s first, most memorable title card declares: “Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the midnight call of the Bird of Death? Do not utter it, or the images of life will fade – into pale shadows and ghostly dreams will rise from your heart and feed your Blood.” The mood of gentle morbid menace immediately suggested her is reinforced as Hutter’s journey becomes not merely a physical trip of so arduousness but one that will transgress some barrier of the liminal. “Go quickly, travel safely, my young friend, to the land of ghosts,” Knock tells Hutter, and Hutter himself formulates his journey with enthusiasm to Ellen: “I am going far away to the land of robbers and ghosts.” When Hutter reads the book left for him in the Transylvanian inn, he peruses a particularly vital passage: “From the seed of Belial came forth the Vampire – Nosferatu – which lieth and feedeth on the Blood of Mankind, and, unredeemed, maketh his abode in the frightful caves, graves and coffins filled with accursed earth from the fields of the Black Death.” This passage becomes crucial to understanding the film’s assimilation of Stoker’s story and its twistings of the familiar story and imagery, recasting the vampire as a special kind of evil, connected with the fear not just of disease but of the darkest kind, the epidemic that swept through Europe and decimated its heartlands.
In his remake, Herzog would transmute Hutter’s climb into the Carpathians into one of his rapturous interludes, complete with the opening of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” swirling on the soundtrack and Herzog’s beloved rivers of mountain mist. Murnau’s version is less spectacular but, in its way, more subtly disquieting, shooting in real, rugged peaks of raw stone. Once his coach driver forces him to alight, Hutter crosses a wooden bridge spanning a mountain stream, and a title card reads, “When he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.” Murnau immediately supplies the first of his cinematic coups as he cuts to Orlok’s carriage leaving his high-perched castle and descending to meet Hutter. Murnau clips frame out of scenes of Orlok’s actions to make them fast, stuttering, hallucinatory. He uses under-cranked film to make the advance of the coach unnaturally fast and jangly – which ironically is how just about every silent film would be forced to look when projected at the wrong speed for decades – whilst Orlok’s sharp and startling features leer out from under his guise as the coachman. As it brings Hutter back towards Orlok’s castle, Murnau interpolates a shot printed in negative, the foregrounded elements embossed with silver and the sky a pool of darkness: this is Hutter crossing the last, most profound barrier he’s been destined to cross since leaving his home, the one between natural and unnatural, reality and dream, living and dead.
For extra weird effect, Murnau has driver, coach, and horses all wrapped in black cloth, and the horses wear hoods and masks, making them seem like living statues. Murnau’s take on Stoker’s motifs is illustrated in the barest terms when Hutter and Orlok first meet properly. Each is framed by an arching gateway at the castle entrance, presented as mirror images in effect, Hutter with the forest and daylight behind but with the doors slowly swinging shut once he passes through, Orlok with darkness at his back. Hutter representing the ordinary, the normal man, Orlok his dark antithesis, the twisted thing lurking within the psyche, usually kept at bay by ritual and social norms but reigning in this pocket of existence, and looking for his ticket to escape into the world. Orlok lurches into view, an uncanny figure with a stiff gait, huge, blazing eyes, jutting raptor’s nose and tight-clenched hands with long, claw-like nails, his appearance made slightly more normal by insisting on wearing a cap that hides his nearly hairless scalp and jutting ears. Murnau’s concept for Orlok makes him into a visual rhyme for the rats that follow his plague-ridden trail, a carrion-feeding rodent loaned vaguely human shape. When he’s more completely revealed later to Hutter and others, with head and pointed teeth blatant, he abandons all pretence to moving or acting like a living things, standing unnaturally straight, moving in spasmodic fashion, rising from his coffin bolt upright.
Orlok is, then, conceptually quite a different thing to Stoker’s creation. Dracula, whilst visibly rejuvenated by supping blood in the course of Harker’s visit to his castle, was nonetheless still a normal-looking being, charismatic and sociable, a vampire who could easily, once properly transplanted to Blighty, become a nocturnal guerrilla in a supernatural war, with the signifiers of his strangeness emerging more subtly if, at last, manifestly. Orlok rather represents a distinct continental take on the image of the vampire, something play-acting at being human, and not that competently. Some interpretations of Nosferatu have taken Orlok as an embodiment of anti-Semitic caricature, the image of the insidious foreign invader bringing filth and disease in his wake. Given Murnau’s lack of any such prejudice, and the screenwriter himself being Jewish, that interpretation feels like a product of a desire to interpret just about anything out of Germany between the wars to be rife with signs of proto-Nazism. That said, there persists a discomforting grey zone where folkloric reference and socially prejudiced caricature can intersect, which one evolved from the other becoming blurred and hard to reckon.
Dracula as a story has always been a bit of a double-edged blade in terms of its reflection of social values, even if at the end of the day it exists more fully in the realm of psychological symbolism, a first frisson in a popular culture facing an evolving understanding of the forces lurking within the limits of the psyche thought previously to be immutable. Dracula can be said to at once record a British anxiety before a Europe where different, older, more repressive political paradigms were more the norm than democracy when Stoker wrote his book, with Dracula the spirit of a menacingly dominating and dictatorial spirit anticipatory of elements of German militarism, Nazism, and Stalinism, ideas that subjugate populaces and drain their vitality, just as much as he can be said to represent a more reactionary anxiety before the idea of foreignness itself, Dracula the emblematic foreigner moving in to steal our women. Murnau and Galeen’s alteration to the story, bringing Orlok to German shores rather than English, required the earlier historical setting – in Stoker, Orlok had to reach an island by sea, where Transylvania, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was just a couple of days away by train – and provoked, as if by association, a different sense of social-historical meaning, one invoked by the references to the Black Death. This also connects with the radically different way Murnau approaches the oncoming contest of Orlok, Hutter, and Ellen.
Murnau lets an edge of peculiar comedy, bordering on the satirical, permeate his adaptation, particularly in Hutter’s general obliviousness to the bewildering things all around him. Orlok tells Hutter he’s late, having kept him waiting until after midnight. Hutter eats at Orlok’s dining table whilst the Count leafs through Hutter’s documentation. Hutter perceives the oddness of his host as Orlok peers over the top of a letter from Knock, written in the same esoteric hand as his own, whilst a medieval clock, sporting a figurine in the form of a skeleton raising a cup in sardonic toasting whilst its other hand holds the hammer that rings the bell, strikes midnight. “Your wife has a beautiful neck…” Orlok coos when he beholds Ellen’s portrait, accidentally dropped on the dining table by Hutter, admiration of physical form and raw bloodlust converging in manner that’s wryly blatant in outlining Orlok’s tastes. Hutter’s own cringing before Orlok’s overeager alarm and interest when he cuts his finger whilst slicing bread again nudges comic exaggeration, and later Hutter finishes up literally hiding under the covers of bed when he spies Orlok waiting outside his room, his monstrosity now patent, marching like an automaton with stiff legs and arms, eyes swivelling in their sockets with unnatural focus, his two, rodent-like fangs now exposed in his mouth.
This vignette, whilst touched with black humour, is at the same time one of Murnau’s coups of creepiness, with the first look at Orlok at his most ghoulish generating a sense of the inexorable, Hutter stricken by his defenceless position to the point where he’s reduced to a cringing child before this menace advancing on his room. Hutter’s credulity has already been stoked by further readings of the book from the inn, which describes the monster called Nosferatu who drinks blood, “his hellish elixir of life.” He’s only saved by the finest filament of mystical and emotional connection to a counteracting and salving force – his bond with Ellen, who awakens screaming in her bedroom as Orlok’s shadow falls upon her husband, causing the vampire to retreat. The edge of comedy resurges towards the film’s end when Knock, having gone completely lunatic as Orlok comes into proximity, leading the townsfolk of Wisborg in a wild chase around the city, finally straddling a rooftop to mock and jeer them whilst stones are flung up him in an effort to dislodge him. Here Murnau lets an edge of perverse delight in his representatives of evil, upending the superficial calm of his period setting in a manner that contrasts the ultimate celebration of authority over the lunatic asylum in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari: in Murnau the loonies are loose and play.
Perhaps the most mystique-shrouded aspect of Nosferatu for a long time star Schreck: given that the word schreck means “sudden scare” or “fright” in German, many took took it to be a stage name for another, perhaps well-known actor in heavy disguise. The combination of the film’s aura of the inscrutable and the obscurity of the actor helped give rise to a hardly serious but amusing urban legend that Murnau had in fact employed a real vampire, an idea filmmaker E. Elias Merhige took as the seed for his Shadow of the Vampire (2000): Merhige’s film sported Willem Dafoe as the conniving vampire and John Malkovich as a Murnau too distracted by his art to care about his cast and crew. As silly as the myth was, watching Nosferatu it’s not that impossible to understand. But Schreck was in fact the actor’s real name, a hard-working actor who was by all accounts a bit of an oddball who liked playing grotesques, and whose wife Fanny also appears in the film as a nurse who cares for Hutter. Schreck’s incarnation of this notion of the vampire is emblazoned on the imagination
Murnau dissolves from a suggestive shot of Orlok advancing on Hutter after he cuts his finger to the next morning as “the shadows of the night left Hutter,” to Hutter asleep and slumped in the same chair. He awakens, cheered by the sun if bewildered by his apparent, total solitude in the cavernous castle, and dismissing the two small holes he finds on his throat as the bites of mosquitos. He writes a letter to Ellen mentioning this, and manages to wave down a cautious horseman riding past the castle to take the letter and post it. During the night he has his terrifying encounter with Orlok, and, after Ellen’s awakening somehow wards off the vampire, Hutter survives to the following morning when he goes in search of where the fiend hides during the day. He locates Orlok, stretched out in a sarcophagus in the castle basement, and flees back to his room. From there he looks down into the castle courtyard, witnessing as Orlok loads up a wagon with coffins filled with earth, his labours rendered uncanny by Murnau’s film tricks, combining sped-up motion and skipped frames to render his actions impossibly fast and hallucinatory.
The greater part of Nosferatu’s singular, lingering spell on filmmakers in particular might well stem from these moments when Murnau wields a self-conscious sense of film technique as the essence of the uncanny. To be a film lover is to always be communing with the past, even if only the past of last year, to be seeing the dead. The further one delves back through the ages of cinema, through the high silent era to the earliest, flickering examples of the art captured by the likes of Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers on their tinker-toy cameras, the more powerful and undeniable a feeling comes of gazing at the edge of the liminal, of the recorded, of the captured impression of time, illusory and yet also powerfully real. People long dead, moving, talking, laughing dancing, looking back at the camera to the eye of the operator, the artist, the inventor, the audience, held in the frames of celluloid and transmitted by however many intervening mediums. Nosferatu is likely the oldest film most people who watch it have ever seen, and the way Murnau stamped his imagination on the film courts that sense of communion, that magic encoded in the film’s form: Nosferatu beams out to us from the edge of memory, of the psyche. The images of Orlok reinforce that impression – his shadow slinking across walls, his crepuscular visage looming over hapless, arrested victims or catching moonglow as he gazes out of the dark manse across the water, as if the incarnation of the collective id for all of bourgeois civilisation.
More practically, Murnau’s use of pure camera effect to communicate Orlok’s supernatural power removes the film out of the realm of the theatrical and places it entirely in a cinematic realm. Murnau’s approach recalls the lingering example of Georges Méliès’ mischievous sense of film’s reality-shaping capacity, able to conjure and erase at will, rather than using props or special effects. Even Orlok’s ultimate destruction is finally wrought not with makeup effects or pyrotechnics, but erasing from the film itself, via double-exposure, as if rejected by the subliminal rationality of film, which does after all turn money into light: no room for dream-beings in that equation. This also makes Nosferatu feel like a crucial crossroads for cinema as a whole, marking a moment when playing freely with the very stuff of film could expand the way narrative is communicated and received, and also be done for its own sake. If the first age of cinema, a little less than three decades, of commercial cinema had been a process where the essence of narrative cinema and its most essential devices were invented and pieced together, Nosferatu is an iconographic moment of the third, where that expressive potential could be warped and widened and finally led off down other paths, towards the purely abstract and experimental, the surreal and the associative.
Nosferatu is also a film haunted by history itself, made by people who just weathered a terrible war in a country going through a deep economic and social shock, made all the more subtly terrible in grappling with the horrible persistence of a morbid atmosphere pervading everything, infesting everything. In this regard it connects as much with Abel Gance’s J’accuse (1919), which more directly tackled the theme of the renascent war dead haunting the living, as it does to than with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which portrayed a thrall captive to a manipulative will and the world as an insane asylum. In Nosferatu Murnau and Galeen place far most emphasis on the first quarter of Dracula, turning it into almost the whole movie. That’s understandable given an evergreen complaint about the novel is that it never matches the menacing splendour of Harker’s journey to Dracula’s castle and his experiences there. This is in part because of Murnau’s new emphasis on Orlok as a voyager, setting out from his Carpathian lair to arrive at the Wisborg waterfront – an arrival Murnau declares in the most effectively deadpan way as he notes the derelict, disease-ridden, monster-carrying ship Orlok has come in drifting into view against those quaint Gothic buildings and clean, orderly streets. And Orlok’s voyage has a singular purpose as immediate goal, a rendezvous with Ellen, a meeting both know on some level must come.
So, Murnau shows Orlok’s coffins being borne down river on a wooden raft, a vignette that feels like an incidental rough draft for the folkloric world of Sergei Paradjanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1964). One of Murnau’s most potent choices throughout the film, in contrast to the stylised and setbound evocations of Browning’s Dracula or the ironically humdrum realism of Terence Fisher’s 1958 version, was to film as much in real locales, so the mountains are authentically jagged and the river wild-looking rather than conjurations of the matte artist, and it helps rather than hinders the creation of his rarefied atmosphere, contrasting the oneiric with the realistic but finding ways to make each bleed into the other, perhaps reaching a zenith with that shot of the ship arriving in Wisborg. Orlok’s voyage is staged on a real vessel, as Murnau includes the most famous and essential image Stoker provided of the dead captain tied to the steering wheel, portraying the captain (Max Nemetz) making this fearful choice, one charged with the quality of both accepting and defying fate and evil, after seeing two of his sailors (Wolfgang Heinz and Albert Venohr) leap overboard in abject terror. The sailors, knowing something on board the ship, here called the Empusa, is killing their comrades, descend into the hull to uncover whatever is lurking. One brave man starts hacking at one of Orlok’s caskets with a hatchet, only to stir a horde of rats to pour out. Orlok himself stands up like a flagpole being erected and waves one of his clawed fingers like a chiding schoolteacher, his unreal and malignant physical presence enough to turn stolid men mad.
The Empusa leaves disease in its wake as the rats that slip out from Orlok’s boxes infect the port of embarkation, and once it makes landfall as its destination Wisborg too falls under the plague’s spell, an arrival denoted, in another of Murnau’s visual coups, by a column of mourners carrying coffins of the dead through the town centre. Another hint of Murnau’s deadpan humour arises with the sight of Orlok, poking his head out of the Empusa’s cargo hold with a grin of famished delight, then carries a coffin in awkward fashion away from the waterfront to the domicile Hutter has furnished him with. The next day Harding and other representatives from a maritime association investigate the mystery of the ship and its gruesome crew, and quickly realise that a deadly gift the vessel has left in their town, too late to prevent the plague taking holding in the city. This is another element of the story Murnau and Galeen subtly emphasise, with Orlok either ensnaring the imagination of the petty power seekers of Wisborg, in the form of Knock, or humiliating and entrapping them, like Hutter, or turning their business into a disease-trafficking parody of itself, as he does to Harding and the other shipowners.
Hutter for his part manages to escape Orlok’s castle by tying bedclothes together and lowering himself down the vertiginous wall beyond his chamber window, dropping to the ground below with a combined moan of pain and relief. He spends a spell being cared for in a hospital before setting out in pursuit of the Count. On the way Hutter is tormented by fevers and spectral lunacies, his inner being in turmoil that must last until his dark mirror is finally exorcised, and that can only happen through Hutter losing his beloved, a motif touched with fervent if anxious and reactionary erotic undertones. It’s only in the film’s last portion that Murnau’s intention in his personalised digestion of the Dracula mythos is, and that is to transform it into something redolent far more of a specific German art tradition: that of “Death and the Maiden.” That motif grew out of the classic medieval artistic idea of the Tötetanz, or Dance of Death. The “Death and the Maiden” motif zeroed in the eternal clash of life and death, as visualised through the quintessence of life, a young, beautiful, fertile woman, and the personification of Death, often skeletal, hideous, or at least gaunt and draped in black, and usually male. This association carried a powerful if sickly sexual dimension. Many “Death and the Maiden” artworks were produced in the 1500s, but found a revival in the waning Romantic period of the 1800s and the early Modernist era, as the most well-known today likely being two musical pieces by Franz Schubert, a song he wrote based on a poem with that title, later incorporated into a longer string quartet piece.
Thus, rather than the ironically romantic aspect of Dracula as a seductive presence, that fierce and sexy love child of Bronte’s Heathcliff and Richardson’s Lovelace with a bit of Eurotrash chic thrown in, Murnau presents Orlok as a version of death incarnate, hideous and wizened, setting his sights on Ellen as the embodiment of feminine virtue and selfless good. But she also sets her sights on Orlok, once she begins to perceive the true nature of the tragedy eating at Wisborg and her own marriage, after a shattered and sickly Hutter returns home. One of Murnau’s greatest images is of Ellen waiting on the shoreline for a ship bearing Hutter home, her resting tired and faint on a bench, with ornate crucifixes of a burial ground for those drowned at sea studding the sand about her. Once Hutter is home and the plague spreading in Wisborg, Ellen points out a sight she has becomes privy to, perhaps Murnau’s most genuinely eerie and disturbing, all the more so for its almost subliminal effect: Ellen gestures out of the marital bedroom window to the house across the canal, where Orlok’s white, wedge-shaped head can be seen peering relentlessly out of a high window. “That is how I see it every night!” Ellen declares to Hutter, who tries to laugh off the sight, but cringes in terror when alone, knowing very well who is staring at his window.
A level of clumsiness manifests in Nosferatu on a pure story level, as the film never seems to quite find what all of its characters and their gestures are present for. There are vignettes of Ruth being frightened and Harding being investigative. The introduction of Professor Bulwer, giving his inferring lectures about likenesses in nature, sees him become not a potential Van Helsing but Murnau’s ironic emblem of science as ineffectual in contending with profound problems, locked in a zone of winnowing out miniscule facts. These loose threads still give Murnau space to keep evolving his ideas and deploy sonorous imagery, like Ruth awakening in terror in the night after a breeze rustles her curtains and knocks out a window. A title card notes that “the panic stricken town was looking for a scape-goat: it chose Knock” before the chase for the mad agent begins, suggesting a truly fascinating segue in theme as Nosferaty could become more completely a portrait of a society disintegrating in the face of fear and disruption, even if this doesn’t really lead to much more than Knock’s comic rampage. A rampage which, at least, seems to have left a seed in the mind of both Lang, for Metropolis (1927), and maybe even the makers of King Kong (1933), the rooftops become a battleground where embodiments of anarchy rule and mock the hoipolloi below.
Some of this might have resulted from the film’s many, crude reedits, but most fundamentally it’s because of where Murnau finally drags the storyline. Ellen, having read in her husband’s trusty Transylvanian book that the only way to halt a vampire’s reign of terror is for an innocent woman to willingly offer herself as prey to the monster and keep it enraptured until dawn destroys it. Surveying the columns of the dead out in the street and knowing well the carnage will continue until Orlok is destroyed, and feeling the constant pull of his mesmeric gaze from the windows across, decides that she must be the one to do it. Pretending to be ill, she has Hutter go to fetch Professor Sievers. Most of the film’s most famous and endlessly excerpted images come from its last five minutes, as Ellen prostrates herself on her bed and waits for Orlok to enter, the vampire sneaking up the stairwell into her room and hovering over her: where earlier her lover’s connection to Hutter and the thread of evil fate linking her to Orlok forestalled his attack, now Orlok’s shadow falls over her and the projected form of his outreached hand covers her heart and clenches, Ellen withering under the malign influence. Orlok stoops to drink his fill of his “elixir,” only to slowly raise his head in anxious realisation when he hears the cock crow. Orlok stands just in time for the daw light to fall in through the window and cause him to fade away like a dream of the night. He’s mourned only by Knock, his pathetic and once again imprisoned disciple, whilst a wisp of smoke wafts up from where Orlok stood.
But Orlok was no dream, and the force of dark knowledge he represented, the antithetical side of passion, draining and corrupting, claims its last victim in Ellen herself, who dies in Hutter’s arms whilst the old and bewildered Sievers muses on the scene of pathos. A last title comes from the framing chronicle which notes that the plague vanished along with Orlok, and Murnau offers a last glimpse of Orlok’s castle, freed from whatever illusory enchantment held it, now revealed as a broken ruin. The resolution is, even for 1922, old-fashioned, almost antiquarian in its enshrining of a classically sentimental view of female sexuality and self-sacrifice. Ellen passively offers herself up as the monster’s love object and food, and dies from poison of dark sexuality Orlok left her infested with. With the important corollary that this is also Ellen’s form of strength brought to bear. Nobody else in Nosferatu is even so faintly determined, clear-headed and aware as Ellen, who sits night after night with the demon staring at her and grows in conviction that only a ritual, a display of infinite good, can counter infinite evil. Ellen’s sacrificial gesture is one held profound in Murnau’s art, where the redemptive power of love is constantly reiterated, whether it be for friends in The Last Laugh or Gretchen for Faust and in the ultimate reunion of the couple in Sunrise: Murnau always reveals this crucial sliver of idealistic conviction without any shred of irony, dark as his imagination could become. Nosferatu’s ultimate message is that only love can exorcise the demons of war, pestilence, and ruination gripping Murnau’s homeland. Of course, unfortunately, many chose the very opposite emotion for the task.