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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror
For the last 70+ years, the silent film Nosferatu has been surrounded in controversy. Released by Germany's Prana-film in 1922, it hadn't been officially licensed by the Stoker estate. Copyright laws were in their infancy, and Prana-film was a company devoted to the art of film, not the business.
The title had been changed, as had the characters and the location. However, it was obviously Bram Stoker's novel on screen. The widow Florence Stoker fought tooth-and-nail to stop Nosferatu's release. Her effort mostly paid off, and Prana was forced into bankruptcy. Fortunately, copies survived and Mrs. Stoker had to sue again. This time she decided that it would be easier to just destroy all the copies. For all her efforts, she failed. Soon it popped up in America and it's come to be thought of a great horror classic.
In the small village of Wisborg Germany, a young solicitor named Thomas Hutter (Wangenheim) is sent by his employer, Knock (Granach) to sell a house to the Count Orlok (Schreck). Knock is obviously not an ordinary man. He has an obsession with blood that Hutter does not notice, and he seems overly dependent upon Orlok.
Hutter abandons his bride Nina and whisks away to Transylvania, where the Count (Schreck) greets him. The Count barely looks human, and he makes short work of Hutter. Soon he's on his way to Wisborg with the diseased earth of his homeland; he brings with him pestilence and death to all that are in his path.
I speak as if Nosferatu has a cohesive narrative to pull it through the film. It does not. That's a strength. Using simple strings of montages, Murnau brought a dreamlike quality to the whole movie. Wise on his part, something like this works well as part of a surreal dream. But there's more to it than this. As part of the German Expressionist movement of the 1920's, Murnau gave us a lot more information than the hour long running time seems to say. Every frame and character movement shows us some new piece of information.
Instead, Nosferatu is told as a dream. Actions happen simultaneously in 4 different areas, and we're able to see it all at once because it's our dream. Time passes quickly for us, and why wouldn't it? After all, in our dreams we have no comprehension of time. Several months pass in the course of the film and it all runs together seamlessly. Areas in the plot seem to make no sense. For example, why would the Nosferatu go to Wisborg by ship? Wouldn't it be quicker by land? The honest answer to this question is "Yes." However, would we have seen any of the Nosferatu's chilling power if he had gone by land?
The characters are compelling, but the strength of the characters do not lie in their convincing portrayals, but in their caricatures. Each character is not a real person, but rather a quality of a person. Combined, the people create different facets to the human psyche. Everyone wants something. Hutter, for all his childlike innocence wants to gain wealth. He sees Knock's obsession with the Count, but he doesn't *SEE* it. Nina, for all her purity and goodness, wants sex. I speak metaphorically, of course. But this is what Murnau was alluding to. She wants to be satisfied, and the Count turns out to be the opposite of Hutter.
What Knock wants, and what the Count wants, is central to the film. We are all killers. I say this without hesitation; without compunction. Every day we kill to survive. A vampire does the same thing. It's a world where we either kill or we are killed, and Knock's desire is to kill so he does not be killed. But Nosferatu is more adept at killing than Knock is, and Knock is quickly locked away in a spiderweb-like asylum. Meanwhile, Nosferatu stands in the center of his web and watched his prey. I mean this figuratively, and also literally. Murnau was a consummate perfectionist of a rare breed. Many shots of the Nosferatu were in the center of the screen, with the vampire at windowsills, seeming to look like a spider on his web.
Much of the basic story has been retained from the original Stoker novel, but the meaning has changed into something unlike anything Stoker ever could have dreamed of. However, there are some similarities. Of course, the most notable of the similarities is the Darwinist approach. Throughout Dracula, we see the vampire as a shape-shifter. He turns into the "meaner things" of life. We see him as bat, wolf, rodent. In fact, there was a scene cut from the novel that shows the Count watching Harker as a wolf before Harker even made it to thecastle. This scene survives in the 1922 Nosferatu. Moreover, Orlok himself grows more beast like in every shot. At first he seems almost human, but as he grows closer to his desired prey, he becomes more and more like some perverse cross between spider, wolf, and man. This is the most beast like of men; this is what we fear.
By the way, "Schreck" means scream. There isn't much in the way of history for the man behind the Nosferatu, and this year it's being played with on the film "Shadow of the Vampire". In it, John Malkovich plays Murnau and Willem Dafoe plays Max Schreck; Schreck turns out to be a real vampire and his "makeup" just ain't makeup.