His silhouette precedes him: spindly limbs and a long black coat, fingernails like claws; an alien shadow that has hung over the cinema for 100 years.
FW Murnau’s silent film “Nosferatu” and his villain, Count Orlok, celebrate their centenary this year. The film returns to theaters across Europe, and festivals, conferences, art exhibitions and live music screenings are planned around the world to pay tribute to the undying influence of “Nosferatu”, which lives on as a fairy tale, a meme and a cinematic revenant.
Over the decades, “Nosferatu” has inspired filmmakers, artists, musicians, and designers, with Orlok’s figure popping up in places as varied as the video game “Red Dead Redemption 2” and as a visual joke in an episode of “SpongeBob SquarePants.” Werner Herzog released his hauntingly romantic remake, “Nosferatu the Vampyre,” in 1979, while E. Elias Merhige’s “Shadow of the Vampire,” released in 2000, reimagines the film’s production as its lead actor, Max Schreck, actually does. a vampire. Orlok even served as an unlikely muse for Dutch fashion designers Viktor and Rolf, who sent a ‘Nosferatu chic’ collection down the catwalk in Paris this year.
But while it’s celebrated for its ingenuity today, moviegoers were almost denied the chance to watch “Nosferatu” — due to a dispute over how new his ideas really were.
“Nosferatu” begins with an unsuspecting young couple. Thomas Hutter leaves his wife, Helen, and his home in Wisburg, Germany, to sign a tenancy agreement with Orlok, a mysterious count who lives in a castle in the mountains of Transylvania. Orlok is eccentric, then sinister. He refuses food. He sleeps during the day, in a box, on top of a pile of other boxes. When Hutter accidentally cuts his finger, Orlok tries to suck blood from his hand. The final straw is when Orlok comes across a photo of Hutter’s wife; praising Helen’s “nice throat,” he sets out by boat to Wisburg to stalk her and feast on the townspeople’s blood.
If this plot sounds familiar, it’s because it’s nearly identical to that of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula† with some minor changes. When Stoker’s widow, Florence, heard about the film, she tried to sue, but found that the production company for ‘Nosferatu’, Prana-Film, was out of money. (Prana-Film spent a huge amount of money promoting the film – more than the shooting itself.) After three years in court, a Berlin judge ruled that every copy of the film must be destroyed.
The order was tracked in Germany, but prints of “Nosferatu” had already arrived in the United States, where “Dracula” was in the public domain. Murnau died in 1931 at the age of 42 in a car accident and did not live long enough for his film to become a cult classic. everywhere.
“With silent-era movies, it’s often hard to find even a few shots or newspaper clippings,” said Jon Robertson, a producer at Eureka Entertainment, the distributor that brings “Nosferatu.” to cinemas in Great Britain and Ireland this year. “Back then, people saw movies as expendable. It was like how TV broadcasts are now; they would just make the movies, and if no one wanted to see them after a few months, they threw them away.”
The version of the film shown this year has been restored by Luciano Berriatúa, a film director and historian who pieced it together from leftover copies and repaired the print frame by frame, using photo-cleaning tools and automation to remove vibrations and scratches.
“Old film was printed on nitrate,” Robertson said. “It has a strange, shimmering glow that can’t be replicated, thanks to the way chemicals react when light hits it. This adds to how beautiful ‘Nosferatu’ is.”
While the film set Murnau on the road to a career as a Hollywood author, its producer, Albin Grau, also played a vital role in creating the strong visual identity of ‘Nosferatu’. Grau, a trained architect and practicing occultist, was responsible for the storyboard sketches and for Orlok’s costume design, including false teeth, ears and signature claws, along with the signature black overcoat. Starting from portraits of Dracula as a sophisticated urbane, Schreck, the actor, brought to life a new archetype: the vampire as an outsider, who embodies the fear of contagion and death.
While other German Expressionist films of the era, such as Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, using highly stylized indoor sets, much of ‘Nosferatu’ was filmed outdoors, with shots inspired by Caspar David Friedrich’s coastal paintings. The film was inspired by a number of artists; handwritten notes in the script refer to works of German Romanticism, while Grau’s set designs reflect art by Francisco de Goya, Alfred Kubin and Franz Sedlacek, and Hugo Steiner-Prog’s illustrations for the silent film “Der Golem”.
An exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, “Phantoms of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu”, scheduled for December, will bring together works that inspired the film and that in turn inspired the film, including posters designed by Grau.
Frank Schmidt, one of the curators of the exhibition, said “Nosferatu” began to inspire artists shortly after its release, especially in France. “The surrealists discovered the film themselves,” said Schmidt. “André Breton mentioned as the key scene the intertitle that comments on Hutter’s passage in the realm of the spirits.” Mentioned in Breton’s 1928 book “Surrealism and Painting” and in “Communicating Vessels”, from 1932, the line in question appears – “And when he had crossed the bridge, the ghosts came to meet him” – appears during the latter part of Hutters journey to Orlok castle. It is a threshold crossed by a human rather than a vampire, signaling a narrative shift from reality to a world of nightmares.
Music is another part of ‘Nosferatu’ afterlife. It has long been shown in concert halls and nightclubs, as well as in cinemas, remixing, reinterpreting or replacing the original score by German composer Hans Erdmann. Film composer James Barnard created a new orchestral score in 1995 and Berlin-based DJ Shed debuted with a techno “Nosferatu” soundtrack at Berghain nightclub in 2013.
In May, Jozef van Wissem, a Dutch composer and avant-garde lutenist known for his collaborations with film director Jim Jarmusch, will perform a live score during a “Nosferatu” screening at a large church in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance will feature 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.”
Orlok himself has also been remixed and reinterpreted, featuring an army of equally pale, hairless, bloodsucking villains in TV series and movies. Simon Bacon, a scholar from Poznan, Poland, is the editor of a new book, ‘Nosferatu in the 21st Century’. It was published in August and traces the evolving legacy of “Nosferatu” since the year 2000: “It starts with looking at movie adaptations, with examples from artistic, to sci-fi, to comedy,” said Bacon, listing the master in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the angel in Netflix’s “Midnight Mass,” and Petyr, the elder vampire in the comedy series “What We Do In the Shadows,” among the descendants of Orlok.
Bacon said his book goes on to discuss “the ways in which the film can be read in terms of fears around contagion and mental illness, and ends by looking at how different media have developed the story — music, gaming, film techniques and even execution.”
There have long been rumors of an evolution of “Nosferatu”, but it has yet to take place: Robert Eggers, the director of the films “The Witch”, “The Lighthouse” and ‘The Northman’ is linked to a remake. His plans were first announced in 2015, but they fell through and were re-announced several times.
In an interview, Eggers said he still wanted to remake the film, but couldn’t say when it would go into production. “It would be a shame if it never happened because I put so much time into it,” he said, “and I’ve come close more than once.”
Eggers first discovered “Nosferatu” in elementary school in rural New Hampshire, he said. He recalled asking his parents to drive him to a mall to order the film on VHS, then waited a month for a grainy video to arrive. While it lacked the clarity of a remastered edition, the poor-quality recording made Schreck’s performance as Orlok all the more sinister, Eggers said.
“The video versions gave rise to the idea that Max Schreck was actually a vampire,” he said, “but in the restored versions you can see the bare cap and the grease paint.”
When his “Nosferatu” is eventually made, Eggers said he would like to explore the defining elements of the story. “There are certain things that set it apart from ‘Dracula’, which you can identify as ‘Nosferatu’ and not just Robert Eggers’ ‘The Vampire’,” he said.
A retelling that builds on a century of folklore and film history. “My approach has always been to understand the time period in which the film and the story take place, and to do so with as much truth as possible,” Eggers said.
‘So, what does it mean to be an undead count living in the Carpathians? That’s my way in.”