Lately I’ve made a habit of perusing my local library for movies and television on DVD. This is mostly because I’m a cheapskate who refuses to pay for streaming services, but that’s not the only reason—the library DVD shelf is also a great place for unexpected finds. While you might have a hard time looking for a particular title, you can stumble across some great opportunities if you open yourself up to them. That is how, just this past week, I encountered a film I’d heard about, but had never really planned to see for myself: F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. I don’t watch a lot of black-and-white cinema, let alone silent films; I’m not normally one for vampire movies, either. But Nosferatu is widely recognized as a classic, a pioneering work of filmmaking that set the stage for the entire horror genre, and on that basis, curious as to what I’d find, I gave it a shot.
The copy I found was the Image Entertainment edition, released in 2001. While the basic contents should be consistent across all versions, you will, depending on the release in question, encounter different soundtracks and intertitles (text slides), as well as post-processing effects such as tints. I watched it with a score composed by the Silent Orchestra, and English-language intertitles translated from the original German. I will refer only to that edition for today’s post; be aware that other releases may vary dramatically in presentation.
Nosferatu was released in 1922 by Prana Film, a small German studio specializing in themes of the occult and the supernatural. Occultist, artist, and Prana co-founder Albin Grau served as producer; the director, F.W. Murnau1, was a former Imperial German Army aviator looking for his big break in the world of cinema. Unfortunately, Nosferatu ended up bankrupting the studio instead. Its tragic flaw: it was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. After Stoker’s widow sued for damages, a court ruled that all copies be burned, and it was only by a stroke of luck that a few prints escaped notice until later, safer decades. Otherwise it would have become a lost movie, like so many others of that era.
The plot of Nosferatu is fairly straightforward. It’s 1838 in the town of Wisborg2, Germany, and Thomas Hutter’s life is going well. Not only does he enjoy a loving relationship with his beautiful wife, Ellen, he’s also moving up in his career as a real estate salesman, where he has just been given an exciting new opportunity. His boss sends him on a mission all the way to Transylvania, where he will negotiate with the reclusive Count Orlok3 to sell a property in Wisborg. Orlok has something of a reputation in that distant, benighted land—legends swirl of ghosts, werewolves, and vampires, and the local carriage drivers won’t go anywhere near Orlok’s castle—but Hutter presses on, confident that it’s all just baseless superstition.
It’s all just superstition, until it isn’t. During his stay at the castle, Hutter discovers his host has some odd habits—such a fondness for daytime naps, a thirst for blood, and most disturbingly, a fascination with a locket photo of Hutter’s wife. According to Count Orlok, Ellen has a beautiful neck. And the property he seeks to buy is just across the street from the Hutters’ residence…
Suffice it to say that Orlok doesn’t stay confined to Transylvania.
While this work may have defined the genre, it isn’t your typical vampire movie. For one thing, Count Orlok’s bite doesn’t actually turn the victim into a vampire, and he himself is implied to have become one by delving too deep into occult magic. For another, the main threat he poses is disease. Orlok brings rats, plague, and pestilence everywhere he goes, even if he’s only hibernating in his coffin, and he kills thousands without once laying a fang in them. He certainly isn’t your elegant Christopher Lee type of vampire, or the sparkly Twilight kind; his final form is straight-up inhuman, a hairless creature with pointed ears and elongated fingers, marching with a slow, stiff gait towards his next kill.
Is Nosferatu scary? I don’t think that’s a fair question, at least if we’re comparing it to more modern horror films. The contemporary tools of the trade, blood and guts and jump scares, are entirely absent here. What this movie does have is a kind of cozy menace. Director F.W. Murnau positively revels in the gothic thrills of this premise: decrepit castles, remote Carpathian mountainsides, vampires who prey on unsuspecting guests during the night. The way he handles doors that open by themselves through stop-motion animation, or shadows crawling over walls, is downright inspired. And stage actor Max Schreck does a magnificent job portraying Count Orlok, granting him a kind of dread inevitability as he moves across the screen.
Watching a feature-length silent movie was a unique experience for me. With only intertitles to convey what characters are saying, not spoken dialogue, so much more rests on facial expressions, body language, and other visual elements. The score by the Silent Orchestra provides some additional help setting the mood. Count Orlok gets an excellent leitmotif when he attacks his victims, and suggestions of distant wolf howls add a lot of flavor to the scenes outside in Transylvania.
I do think Nosferatu could have used more runtime than its 80-odd minutes. Its ending came off as abrupt, almost unfinished, and certain aspects of the plot—such as the connection between Count Orlok and his servant in Wisborg—required piecing together on my part. It’s possible the original intertitles were better about this, conveying events more gracefully. A few moments come close to killing the mood; Count Orlok might be scary when he creeps out of a cargo hold, but he’s not quite as fearsome when he’s scurrying around out in the open with an oversized coffin under his arm. And soon after Hutter arrives in Transylvania, we see a werewolf come out and terrorize his horses—except it’s not a wolf at all, but a small and timid-looking striped hyena, which the filmmakers must have borrowed from a zoo somewhere.
Nosferatu was a fun ride, all told. Do I recommend it to you, the reader? Absolutely. It might be far removed from the slick, fast-paced thrills of modern horror, but don’t underestimate what can be accomplished when primitive technology and a shoestring budget are paired with sweeping creative vision. For the atmosphere alone, it’s worth a watch; its foundational place in cinema is just an added bonus.
Rating: 8/10. Goofy, yes, but charmingly so.
- A terrific name, don’t you think? Has a gothic ring to it, just like the subject of this film. ↩︎
- Not a real location. Most exterior shots were taken in Wismar and Lübeck. ↩︎
- Also referred to as the titular “Nosferatu,” allegedly Romanian for “vampire,” though in this film “Nosferatu” refers more to the kind of creature he is, rather than the individual in question. ↩︎
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