Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

Director: F.W. Murnau                                  Writer: Henrik Galeen
Film Score: Hans Erdmann                          Cinematography: Fritz Arno Wagner
Starring: Max Schreck, Gustav von Waagenheim, Greta Schröder and Alexander Granach

It’s still beyond my comprehension why the British Film Institute version of Nosferatu has not been made available to American audiences yet. I’ve seen a ten-minute excerpt of the film and it is by far the best version out there, with subtle tinting, hand drawn title cards and, most importantly, a new score by the late James Bernard who had so much success scoring horror films for Britain’s Hammer studios. Bernard’s film score has been available on CD for a dozen years. What the legal holdup on releasing the film in the United States is I can’t even guess, but it honestly makes it difficult for me to enjoy the existing editions available here when I know how much I’m missing.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is, of course, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s unauthorized version of Dracula. Based on Bram Stoker’s classic novel, Murnau attempted to avoid paying royalties by making changes to the plot and characters just as he had done with Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde when he make Der Januskopf. But Stoker’s widow sued, won, and all of the prints were ordered destroyed. Fortunately, by that time the film had been distributed around the world and a number of prints survived. Ironically, by attempting to disguise the original story Murnau made a number of artistic changes that make the film a masterpiece in its own right, and allow it to stand on its own as a film apart from Stoker’s now overwhelming legacy.

Thomas Hutter is a real estate agent who is sent by his boss, Knock, to Carpathia for a client named Graf Orlok. Knock wants him to offer the house across the street from Hutter, which is one of several that are abandoned in Wiesbad. Hutter’s wife, Ellen, has a bad feeling about his leaving, but says nothing to him. On the trip to Orlok’s castle, Hutter meets villagers who fear the castle and Orlok. He is taken halfway to the castle and there he is met by a carriage with a mysterious driver, Orlok himself. At the castle he cuts his finger while slicing bread and Orlok grabs his hand to drink the blood. The next morning, with his host nowhere in sight, he discovers two marks on his neck, and it’s not until the next day that he discovers Orlock in his coffin and realizes he’s a vampire. Meanwhile Orlok has seen a picture of Ellen and so he locks Hutter in the castle and leaves to find her. The rest of the film is a race to see if Hutter can get home before Orlok kills her.

While Nosferatu is often called an Expressionist film, I would argue that it’s not. Most of the sets and exteriors are very realistic, which is what gives the film much of its power. The special effects were already outdated at the time, and yet they work surprisingly well, the most effective being the negative image of Orlok’s carriage as it goes to the castle. Orlok himself is a rat-like creature, diametrically opposed to the Lugosi image that would be created at Universal nine years later. In fact, the farther into the film one goes, especially after Orlok arrives in Wiesbad, the more distorted and nightmarish the film becomes. It’s a brilliant film that still has a tremendous ability to frighten almost a hundred years later. While the Kino version is a good restoration, I feel it has a poor selection of soundtracks and poorly done title cards for dialogue. Until the BFI version comes along I would stick with the Image version which boasts an informative, if droning, audio commentary.

In Andy Klein’s essay on the film for The A List, he spends most of his time rehashing the plot and claiming that Murnau’s film “begs for a Freudian interpretation.” Sigh. Not only is that a pointless idea, but one could make the case that nearly every work of art can be given a Freudian interpretation and so in the end that entire approach really fails to be enlightening any more. He does go on to make a case for an unconscious anti-Semitic interpretation, with Orlok being the Jew who brings pestilence and disease on the community, but he is so apologetic that it sucks all of the persuasiveness out of it. Stoker’s novel is, in fact, an allegory of the outsider as monster who comes into the midst of society and begins to destroy it. It’s an idea that was not only used by the Nazis, but lots of other nations and ethnicities to warn of the dangers of outsiders. Naturally, there’s no evidence of anti-Semitism in Murnau’s work, which Klein points out, because that sub-theme was already there in Stoker’s work. It’s a testament to a gifted director that Nosferatu continues to hold such a high place in film history. I just hope that those of us here in the U.S. will be able to see the definitive version sooner than later.