| Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror | |
| Director: | F. W. Murnau[1] |
| Producer: |
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| Screenplay: | Henrik Galeen |
| Starring: | |
| Music: | Hans Erdmann (1922 premiere) |
| Cinematography: |
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| Studio: | Prana Film |
| Distributor: | Film Arts Guild |
| Released: | [2] |
| Runtime: | 63–94 minutes, depending on version and transfer speed |
| Country: | Germany |
| Language: |
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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (German: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens) is a 1922 silent German Expressionist vampire film directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a vampire who preys on the wife (Greta Schröder) of his estate agent (Gustav von Wangenheim) and brings the plague to their town.
Nosferatu was produced by Prana Film and is an unauthorized and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. Various names and other details were changed from the novel, including Count Dracula being renamed Count Orlok then finally Nosferatu, an archaic Romanian word with a suggested etymology of Nesuferitu`, meaning "the offensive one" or "the insufferable one". Although those changes are often represented as a defense against copyright infringement,[3] the original German intertitles acknowledged Dracula as the source. Film historian David Kalat states in his commentary track that since the film was "a low-budget film made by Germans for German audiences... setting it in Germany with German-named characters makes the story more tangible and immediate for German-speaking viewers".[4]
Even with several details altered, Stoker's heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. However, several prints of Nosferatu survived,[1] and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema and the horror genre.[5] [6] Critic and historian Kim Newman declared it as a film that set the template for the genre of horror film.
In 1838, in the fictional German town of Wisborg,[1] [7] Thomas Hutter is sent to Transylvania by his employer, estate agent Herr Knock, to visit a new client, Count Orlok, who plans to buy a house across from Hutter's own home. While embarking on his journey, Hutter stops at an inn in which the locals are frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name.
Hutter rides on a coach to a castle, where he is welcomed by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away. Hutter wakes up the morning after to find fresh punctures on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house and notices on the table a miniature portrait of Hutter's wife, Ellen, an image that the young man carries with him in a small circular frame. Admiring the portrait, the count remarks that she has a "lovely neck." Later, Hutter continues to read a book about vampires that he took from the local inn. He now begins to suspect that Orlok is indeed a vampire. With no way to bar the door of his bedroom, Hutter desperately tries to hide as midnight approaches. Suddenly, the door begins to slowly open by itself; and, as Orlok enters, a terrified Hutter hides under the bed covers and falls unconscious. Meanwhile, at the same time back in Wisborg, Ellen arises from her own bed and sleepwalks to the railing of her bedroom's balcony. She then starts walking on top of the railing, which gets the attention of her friend Harding, who is in the adjacent room. When the doctor arrives, Ellen shouts Hutter's name and envisions Orlok in his castle threatening her unconscious husband.
The next day, Hutter explores the castle, only to retreat back into his room after he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant in the crypt. Hours later, Orlok piles up coffins on a coach and climbs into the last one before the coach departs, and Hutter rushes home after learning that. The coffins are taken aboard a schooner, where the sailors discover rats in the coffins. All of the ship's crew later die, and Orlok takes control. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carries one of his coffins and moves into the house that he purchased.
Many deaths in the town follow after Orlok's arrival, which the town's doctors blame on an unspecified plague caused by the rats from the ship. Ellen reads the book that Hutter found; it claims that a vampire can be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts the vampire with her beauty and offers him her blood of her own free will. She decides to sacrifice herself. She opens her window to invite Orlok in and pretends to fall ill so that she can send Hutter to fetch Professor Bulwer, a physician. After he leaves, Orlok enters and drinks her blood, but the sun rises, which causes Orlok to vanish in a puff of smoke. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband.
Count Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains is later shown destroyed.
Nosferatu has been noted for its themes regarding fear of the Other, as well as for possible anti-Semitic undertones,[1] both of which may have been partially derived from the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, upon which the film was based.[8] The physical appearance of Count Orlok, with his hooked nose, long claw-like fingernails, and large bald head, has been compared to stereotypical caricatures of Jewish people from the time in which Nosferatu was produced.[9] His features have also been compared to those of a rat or a mouse, the former of which Jews were often equated with.[10] [11] Orlok's interest in acquiring property in the German town of Wisborg, a shift in locale from the Stoker novel's London, has also been analyzed as preying on the fears and anxieties of the German public at the time.[12] Professor Tony Magistrale opined that the film's depiction of an "invasion of the German homeland by an outside force [...] poses disquieting parallels to the anti-Semitic atmosphere festering in Northern Europe in 1922."
When the foreign Orlok arrives in Wisborg by ship, he brings with him a swarm of rats which, in a deviation from the source novel, spread the plague throughout the town.[13] This plot element further associates Orlok with rodents and the idea of the "Jew as disease-causing agent". It is also notable that Orlok's accomplice in conspiracy Knock is a Jewish realtor, who acts as the vampire's fifth column in the Biedermeier town of Wisborg.[14] There were other views – writer Kevin Jackson has noted that director F. W. Murnau "was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women" throughout his life, including Jewish actor Alexander Granach, who plays Knock in Nosferatu.[15] Additionally, Magistrale wrote that Murnau, being a homosexual, would have been "presumably more sensitive to the persecution of a subgroup inside the larger German society". As such, it has been said that perceived associations between Orlok and anti-Semitic stereotypes are unlikely to have been conscious decisions on the part of Murnau.
Murnau and Grau gave Orlok in the film a demonic lineage and an occult origin: Orlok is the creation of Belial, one of the Satanic archdemons. Belial in Psalm 41:8–10 is also associated with pestilence, with Orlok in film being the very manifestation of contagion, rats pouring out of his coffins onto the streets of Wisborg, spreading Black Death.[16] Orlok’s link to Belial is also highly significant because Belial is ‘one of the demons traditionally summoned by Goetic magicians’ – making Orlok someone who practiced dark sorcery before becoming a vampire.[17]
Orlok and his servant Knock are communicating in occult language – the documents between Orlok and Knock are written in Enochian language (angelic language, recorded in the private journals of English occultist John Dee and his colleague English alchemist Edward Kelley in late 16th-century Elizabethan England).[18] [19]
The character of Professor Bulwer in the film is named in reference to English occult novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton.[20] The idea of astral entities, arising from the dark thoughts of human beings, responsible for epidemics that call for blood sacrifices in order to prevent them, is also closely linked to that of the alchemist Paracelsus, whose figure is partly embodied in the film in the character of Professor Bulwer (who is mentioned in the film to be Paracelsian himself). This is made concrete in the film in the plague epidemic that spreads through the city of Wisborg, which cannot be remedied by scientific methods, but by the blood sacrifice of a woman, thus destroying forever the dark being responsible for this catastrophic situation.[21]
The idea for making this vampire film saw its genesis in the war-time experience of producer Albin Grau. Grau served in the German army during the World War I, known as the Great War, on the Serbian front. While in Serbia Grau encountered a local farmer who told him of his father, who the farmer believed had become an undead vampire. F. W. Murnau, director of the film, also saw considerable action in World War I – not only as a company commander in the muddy trenches of the Eastern Front, but also later in the air after he transferred to the German air service. He survived at least eight crashes. Max Schreck who portrayed Count Orlok also served in the trenches of the Great War with the German army. Little is known of his war-time experience, but there are some signs he may have dealt with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Colleagues commented that he preferred to keep to himself. He was known to take long walks in the forest alone, often times disappearing for hours at a time. He once stated that he lived in “a remote and incorporeal world”. Thus it is considered that the turmoil of 1920s Germany and the war-time experiences of those who produced the film left their marks on the production of the film.[22]
As Lotte Eisner, a dedicated occultist, wrote: "Mysticism and magic, the dark forces to which Germans have always been more than willing to commit themselves, had flourished in the face of death on the battlefields" – these forces were intrinsic to the shaping of cinema's first vampires. Albin Grau himself also linked the war and vampires: "this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions and millions of men". Belial as well is the link between war and contagion, as Orlok is linked directly to the Black Death and many critics have linked Nosferatus disease-bearing rodents to the transmissible sickness associated with trench warfare in which rats flourished. As noted by Ernest Jones in his psychoanalytic study of nightmares, vampire legends proliferate in periods of mass contagion.[23]
The studio behind Nosferatu, Prana Film, was a short-lived silent-era German film studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and occultist artist Albin Grau,[1] named after a Theosophical journal which was itself named for the Hindu concept of prana. Although the studio's intent was to produce occult- and supernatural-themed films, Nosferatu was its only production,[24] as it declared bankruptcy shortly after the film's release.
Grau claimed he was inspired to shoot a vampire film by a war experience: in Grau's apocryphal tale, during the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the undead. As a lifelong student of the occult and member of Fraternitas Saturni, under the magical name of Master Pacitius, Grau was able to imbue Nosferatu with hermetic and mystical undertones. One example in particular was the cryptic contract that Count Orlok and Knock exchanged, which was filled in Enochian, hermetic and alchemical symbols. Grau was also a strong influence on Orlok's verminous and emaciated look[25] and he also designed the film’s sets, costumes, make-up and the letter with the Enochian symbols. He also was responsible for film's advertising campaign, creating movie posters and advertisements. Grau’s visual style was also deeply influenced by work of the artist Hugo Steiner-Prag who had illustrated other texts with esoteric subjects such as Gustav Meyrink’s Golem and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1907).[26]
Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen, a disciple of Hanns Heinz Ewers, the task to write a screenplay inspired by the Dracula novel, although Prana Film had not obtained the film rights. Galeen was an experienced specialist in dark romanticism; he had already worked on The Student of Prague (1913), and the screenplay for (1920). Galeen set the story in the fictional north German harbour town of Wisborg. He changed the characters' names and added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship. Galeen's Expressionist style screenplay was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism, such as those by Carl Mayer. Lotte Eisner described Galeen's screenplay as "German: voll Poesie, voll Rhythmus" ("full of poetry, full of rhythm").[27]
Actor Conrad Veidt was offered the role of Count Orlok, he previously already worked with Murnau, yet he had to decline for scheduling reasons. In the search for an alternative the choice finally fell on the then-still-unknown actor Max Schreck.[28]
Filming began in July 1921, with exterior shots in Wismar. A take from Marienkirche's tower over Wismar marketplace with the served as the establishing shot for the Wisborg scene. Other locations were the, the Heiligen-Geist-Kirche yard and the harbour. In Lübeck, the abandoned Salzspeicher served as Nosferatu's new Wisborg house, the one of the churchyard of the Aegidienkirche served as Hutter's, and down the Depenau a procession of coffin bearers bore coffins of supposed plague victims. Many scenes of Lübeck appear in the hunt for Knock, who ordered Hutter in the Yard of Füchting to meet Count Orlok. Further exterior shots followed in Lauenburg, Rostock and on Sylt. The exteriors of the film set in Transylvania were actually shot on location in northern Slovakia, including the High Tatras, Vrátna dolina, Orava Castle, the Váh River, and .[29] The team filmed interior shots at the JOFA studio in Berlin's Johannisthal locality and further exteriors in the Tegel Forest.[1]
For cost reasons, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner only had one camera available, and therefore there was only one original negative.[30] The director followed Galeen's screenplay carefully, following handwritten instructions on camera positioning, lighting, and related matters.[27] Nevertheless, Murnau completely rewrote 12 pages of the script, as Galeen's text was missing from the director's working script. This concerned the last scene of the film, in which Ellen sacrifices herself and the vampire dies in the first rays of the sun.[31] Murnau prepared carefully; there were sketches that were to correspond exactly to each filmed scene, and he used a metronome to control the pace of the acting.[32]
The original score was composed by Hans Erdmann and performed by an orchestra at the film's Berlin premiere. However, most of the score has been lost, and what remains is only a partial adapted suite.[1] Thus, throughout the history of Nosferatu screenings, many composers and musicians have written or improvised their own soundtrack to accompany the film. For example, James Bernard, composer of the soundtracks of many Hammer horror films in the late 1950s and 1960s, wrote a score for a reissue.[1] [33] Bernard's score was released in 1997 by Silva Screen Records. A version of Erdmann's original score reconstructed by musicologists and composers Gillian Anderson and James Kessler was released in 1995 by BMG Classics, with multiple missing sequences composed anew, in an attempt to match Erdmann's style. An earlier reconstruction by German composer Berndt Heller has many additions of unrelated classical works.[1] In 2022, the New York Times wrote about Dutch composer Jozef van Wissem's new score and record release for Nosferatu. Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance incorporates electric guitar and distorted recordings of extinct birds, graduating from subtlety to gothic horror. "My soundtrack goes from silence to noise over the course of 90 minutes," he said, culminating in "dense, slow death metal."[34] A new score for full orchestra and piano was commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra from its former composer-in-residence Sebastian Chang. It premiered, played live with the film in October 2023. https://sebastianchang.com/nosferatu-new-film-score-world-premiere/
Shortly before the premiere, an advertisement campaign was placed in issue #21 of the magazine German: Bühne und Film, with a summary, scene and work photographs, production reports, and essays, including a treatment on vampirism by Albin Grau.[36] Nosferatu opened in the Netherlands on 16 February 1922 at the Hague Flora and Olympia cinemas.[37] Nosferatu premiered in Germany on 4 March 1922 in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Garden. This was planned as a large society evening entitled German: Das Fest des Nosferatu (Festival of Nosferatu), and guests were asked to arrive dressed in Biedermeier costume. The German cinema premiere itself took place on 15 March 1922 at Berlin's German: Primus-Palast.[1]
The 1930s sound version Die zwölfte Stunde – Eine Nacht des Grauens (The Twelfth Hour: A Night of Horror), which is less commonly known, was a completely unauthorized and re-edited version of the film. It was released in Vienna, Austria on 16 May 1930 with sound-on-disc accompaniment and a recomposition of Hans Erdmann's original score by Georg Fiebiger, a German production manager and composer of film music. It had an alternative ending lighter than the original and the characters were renamed again; Count Orlok's name was changed to Prince Wolkoff, Knock became Karsten, Hutter and Ellen became Kundberg and Margitta, and Annie was changed to Maria.[1] This version, of which Murnau was unaware, contained many scenes filmed by Murnau but not previously released. It also contained additional footage not filmed by Murnau but by a cameraman, Günther Krampf, under the direction of (also known as Waldemar Ronger),[38] supposedly also a film editor and lab chemist. The name of director F. W. Murnau is no longer mentioned in the credits. This version, lasting approximately 80 minutes, was presented on 5 June 1981 at the Cinémathèque Française.[39]
Nosferatu brought Murnau into the public eye, especially when his film Der brennende Acker (The Burning Soil) was released a few days later. The press reported extensively on Nosferatu and its premiere. With the laudatory votes, there was also occasional criticism that the technical perfection and clarity of the images did not fit the horror theme. The Filmkurier of 6 March 1922 said that the vampire appeared too corporeal and brightly lit to appear genuinely scary. Hans Wollenberg described the film in photo-Stage No. 11 of 11 March 1922 as a "sensation" and praised Murnau's nature shots as "mood-creating elements."[40] In the Vossische Zeitung of 7 March 1922, Nosferatu was praised for its visual style.[41]
Nosferatu was also the first film to show a vampire dying from exposure to sunlight. Previous vampire novels such as Dracula had shown them being uncomfortable with sunlight, but not undeath-threateningly so.[42]
The film has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 97% based on 63 reviews, with an average rating of 9.05/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "One of the silent era's most influential masterpieces, Nosferatus eerie, gothic feel – and a chilling performance from Max Schreck as the vampire – set the template for the horror films that followed."[43] In 1995, the Vatican included Nosferatu on a list of 45 important films that people should watch.[44] It was ranked twenty-first in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema" in 2010.[45]
In 1997, critic Roger Ebert added Nosferatu to his list of The Great Movies, writing:
In 1993, the 15th episode of the Nickelodeon series Are You Afraid of the Dark? featured a "special" screening of Nosferatu. After the screening, Count Orlok emerges from the screen into the real world and begins stalking victims in the theater.
The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, directed by E. Elias Merhige, is a fictionalized take on the making of Nosferatu.
In 2022 an exhibition Phantoms of the Night. 100 Years of "Nosferatu" opens in Berlin.[46]
The short movie F.W.M. Symphony, directed by Thomas Hörl, released in late 2022 is a homage to Nosferatu, and also depicts the theft of Murnau's skull from his family tomb in 2015.[47]
Nosferatu only entered the public domain worldwide by the end of 2019. Despite this, the film had already been subject to widespread circulation via a sped-up, unrestored black and white bootleg copy.[48] Beginning in 1981, the film has had various different official restorations, several of which have been issued on home video in the U.S., Europe and Australia. These versions, which are all tinted, speed-corrected and have specially recorded scores, are separately copyrighted with respect to new copyrightable elements. The most recent restoration, completed in 2005/2006, has been released on DVD and Blu-ray throughout the world, and features a reconstruction of Hans Erdmann's original score by Berndt Heller.[49]
In 1977, Spanish amateur filmmaker José Ernesto Díaz Noriega added humorous and iconoclastic dialogues to the film. His adaptation or détournement, titled Manuscrito encontrato en Zarazwela or Nos fera tu la pugnete, was based on a S8 mm print of the English version. "Observing the curious coincidence of the fiction that is related in the film with history",[50] Díaz Noriega adapted Nosferatu
A 1979 adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula by director Werner Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampyre, starred Klaus Kinski (as Count Dracula, not Count Orlok).[52] The only connection between the films is the title.
A remake by director David Lee Fisher was in development after being successfully funded on Kickstarter on 3 December 2014.[53] On 13 April 2016, it was reported that Doug Jones had been cast as Count Orlok in the film and that filming had begun. The film would use green screen to insert colorized backgrounds from the original film atop live-action, a process Fisher previously used for his remake The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005).[54] While the film hasn't secured a distributor as of 2023, it had a premiere at the Emagine Theater in Novi, and will see a limited release in other theaters.[55]
In July 2015, a remake was announced with Robert Eggers writing and directing. The film was intended to be produced by Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen for Studio 8.[56] In November 2016, Eggers expressed surprise that the Nosferatu remake was going to be his second film, saying "It feels ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a filmmaker in my place to do Nosferatu next. I was really planning on waiting a while, but that's how fate shook out."[57] In 2017, it was announced that Anya Taylor-Joy would be featured in the film in an unknown role.[58] However, in a 2019 interview, Eggers claimed that he was unsure as to whether the film would still be made, saying "...But also, I don't know, maybe Nosferatu doesn't need to be made again, even though I've spent so much time on that."[59] It was reported in September 2022 that Eggers' remake would be distributed by Focus Features, with Bill Skarsgård set to star as Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter. Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult and Emma Corrin will also be part of the cast.[60] The film wrapped principal photography on May 19, 2023.[61] The film's first teaser trailer was released on June 24, 2024 and it confirmed that the film will be released on December 25, 2024.[62]