"Nosferatu" (1922)

"Here begins the land of phantoms."

And, with F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922), so also begins the effective history of the vampire in cinema.

Most of my exposure to Nosferatu was in film history and aesthetic/style classes, which always pointed to the film as an example of influential German Expressionism. Though I'd seen many a clip from the film, tonight was the first time I sat down to watch it in its entirety.

As Nosferatu suggests, vampires have been present in cinema from a remarkably early period, but for my generation, it's difficult to approach the topic without making reference to Twilight (2008). I know; even after all this time, there's still a lot of Twilight hate. Even if the portrayal of vampires in Twilight infuriated about as many people as it infatuated, the fact is that it has been a major influence for subsequent films, shows, and novels, and, I suspect, will probably always be the most relevant example of the vampire trend for my generation.

Coming from that background, as well as having a history of doting upon Joel Schumacher's deliciously outrageous vampire tale, The Lost Boys (1985), the idea of the vampire in cinema has always been of interest to me.

Nosferatu is, as promised, just haunting as all my professors claimed. The film has a romance with death and all of its imagery. Phantoms, shadows, coffins, rats, the plague - what more could you ask for from a German Expressionist film?

The story tells of a young German man, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), who goes to visit Count Orlock (Max Schrek) in Transylvania to sell him an estate in Germany. Hutter leaves his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder), at home. While Hutter is at the Count's castle, he begins to suspect that Count Orlock is a nosferatu, a blood-sucking vampire with hidden plans for his guest.

Throughout the film, many of the characters fall into trances or fevers, making the film, itself, rather a feverish piece. Hutter falls into a fever dream and wakes up shouting, "Coffins... coffins filled with earth!" His wife, Ellen, seems to dream of the very things that are happening to her husband, as if she can see him in visions while he is away. These visions make her sleepwalk, often into dangerous situations like nearly jumping off the balcony. The film leaves you with the images of eyes, often wide with laughter, surprise, or, most often, horror. The film is delirious with a pure otherworldliness from which you cannot look away.

When I first made a point to watch Nosferatu, I didn't know if or how the film was related to Bram Stoker's Dracula. Though the similarities in story are now apparent, I wasn't sure how one could have gone from Dracula to Nosferatu, name-wise, until I looked into the word's complicated history. Apparently, the word "nosferatu" is an archaic Romanian term for "vampire".

Which makes a whole lot more sense.

The production history of Nosferatu also sounded complicated. Murnau's film was an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's novel, which is why all of the names are different from the names in Stoker's Dracula story. Unfortunately, changing the names doesn't sound like it helped Murnau and his crew very much, since Stoker's widow later sued the production company for rights infringement anyway. The idea of an unauthorized adaptation of a novel in today's industry would cause so much legal trouble that I fail to even imagine it.

Speaking of books, I'd like to get my hands on a copy of the book Jonathan reads in the film, called The Book of the Vampires. The knowledge inside is always cryptic and leaves you wondering.

Nosferatu also presents a lot of interesting ideas about what constitutes a vampire and how they behave. The film suggests that the plague in Germany in 1938 was actually caused by a single vampire biting and killing people. Count Orlock does not create more vampires the way that Dracula does; instead, Orlock simply kills them, which appears to the people to be some sort of quickly-spreading plague. When I started to wonder why the Count was hauling a lot of coffins filled with dirt around, the film used this interesting intertitle to suggest a rule for the nosferatu vampire:

Nosferatu purports that vampires cannot leave the ground they were buried in behind them because they must sleep in this same ground by day, a detail which has definitely gone out of vogue for subsequent film adaptations.

Summary: For me, the most interesting parts of Nosferatu were understanding the how Count Orlock was different from other vampire characters and the unearthly haunting quality of this simple - and agelessly powerful - dark romance. The magic of doors which open and close themselves, the spookiness of the long spindly fingers of Count Orlock the nosferatu, and the steam of a vampire in the sunrise will stay with me for a long time.