Europe Endless - Horror: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (Dir F. W. Murnau, 1h34m, 1922)

Once more into the heart of Europe, to face its greatest fears. In this short season of four films, as we retrace our steps across Europe, we will consider German Expressionist cinema, suspense-as-horror in post-War France, the blood-soaked gallio of 1970s Italy, and the icy grandeur of Scandinavian horror. We must start where nightmares start, with the creation of one of European, nay, world cinema's great figures, a legal dispute that would launch another great iteration of the bloodthirsty undead in the form of 1931's Dracula, and a film that haunts horror to this day. We must begin our journey with F. W. Murnau, and the iconic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), loosely adapting the Bram Stoker novel into the great vampire movie in which our heroes must content with plague, death, and the otherworldly form of the titular Nosferatu (Max Schreck). 

Nosferatu loosely adapts Stoker's novel; as with its subsequent imaginative remakes in 1979 (Dir. Werner Herzog) and 2024 (Dir Robert Eggers), names, locations, and the vast majority of the plot is original to the film. The bare bones of Dracula is there, and enough for Stoker's widow to sue, but aside from a surprising reliance on written intertitles, Nosferatu is much darker, more focused on Murnau and Henrik Galeen's native Germany, and against the seductive aristocratic Dracula there is something altogether more Othered, more unseemly to Nosferatu's iteration of the Count. Thus, rather than Jonathan Harker we are introduced to Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) and his arrival in Transylvania to help find the mysterious Count Orlok (Schreck) property. The Count is odd - we will consider his iconic appearance soon enough! - and Thomas soon discovers, through a book in his room, and his subsequent, unsettling, encounters with the Count, that the man is a vampire. 

Against this is the more sexual elements of the film, the predatory nature of the Count, licking at a wound Thomas incurs; with the Count coming across a picture of his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröder), the two are now connected, and Ellen's nights soon become disturbed by her connection to the vampire, and its central battle between Orlok and Ellen's virtue takes shape. As the Count stows away on a ship whose crew become prey for the undead, some of the film's most frightening sequences of claustrophobia, of something killing the crew, set aboard the ship, so Hutter tries to make it back to his native Wisborg, whilst plague rages across the region - the stage is set for a dénouement that will change how the Vampire is viewed forever in cinema. 

Nosferatu, as many, including the great Kim Newman have extolled, is perhaps the horror movie of German Expressionism, and in its creation come many of the tropes of the vampire movie. By 1922, the genre, an extension of North-West European expressionist movements, and, for later films, the spectre of The Great War had already borne such work as The Student of Prague (Dir. Stellan Rye, 1913), The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Dir. Robert Wiene, 1920) and The Golem: How He Came into the World (Dir. Paul Wegener, 1920). Nosferatu, in part, is an extension of this - several of the film's most famous shots, largely involving Schreck as Orlok, do inhabit that realm of darkness and light; yet, its usage of the language of German expressionism is less artificial, less stage-like, and at points strikingly naturalistic, its single, fragile, camera being carried across the German countryside from Wismar to Rostock to Slovakia for many of the Transylvania sequences.

Into this heightened realism, this heady mix of expressionism and naturalism, comes Orlok: he is the film's eerie Gothicism made flesh, a distorted figure, somewhere between human and deeply other, a rat-like figure that would influence the image of the Vampire from here on in, dealing with the occult and the predatory at once. Whilst much of this has to do with real-life occultist Albin Grau, who designed the makeup for Schreck, as well as its sets and its heavy usage of occult symbolism, this is to say nothing of Schreck's otherworldly, unsettling performance. From the emaciated form of the actor, seen best in the iconic staircase sequence, perhaps the greatest shot of German Expressionism, to his unnatural way of moving, accentuated by the occasional use of stop motion to make him spring upward from the coffin, or in the way that he emerges, unblinking and spectral, into doorways or at windows. 

Whilst Herzog and Klaus Kinski would make their Nosferatu pathetic, an undying man wishing for death, and Egger and Bill Skarsgård make their iteration more monstrous and yet more seductive, here there is only a brutal, almost animalistic efficiency. Unlike the Dracula that would be birthed by Florence Stoker's lawsuit against Murnau and the sale of the rights to bankroll it, there is none of the Transatlantic camp sophistication of Lugosi: there is only this hunting creature, and its victims. It's possible to read anti-Semitic undertones into Orlok - though Murnau's own homosexuality and his close friendships with several Jewish men and women, including actor Alexander Granach, who plays Knock, Orlok's servant make this less likely to be intentional. 

What this haunting spectre most manifests is the horrors of the First World War - Schreck, Murnau and Grau all pulling on their experiences of the trenches and the Eastern Front, invoking a blood-drinking vampire of men's lives, of rat-infested mud, and the mass contagion of the Spanish Flu epidemic that soon followed. The undead, the monstrous, the spectre of Death, haunts German Expressionism like few other genres, and at its cinematic apex is Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror: not just the best example, not just the cinematic birth of the Vampire, but the arrival of modern horror cinema as we know it in a frightening, and atmospheric retelling of one of the genre's greatest stories.

Rating: Must See (Personal Recommendation)

Nosferatu can be watched for free here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MMYCJyxO4k and is available on DVD and BluRay from the BFI 

Next week, once more to France, in Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboloques' tale of murder, abuse and  control.