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You can’t keep a good vampire down…at least not at the box office, as writer/director Robert Eggers’ sanguinary shocker Nosferatu finished its Christmas week debut with a solid $40 million-plus performance, good for third place overall. That’s not too shabby for a film that’s a remake of a silent picture not too many 21st-century audiences have seen. Yes, nearly a decade before Bela Lugosi slowly walked down a cobweb-covered stairway and uttered the immortal introduction “I am…Dracula,” Bram Stoker’s classic tale of the undead Count who leaves his ruined castle hideaway and falls for a human woman was first brought to the screen by director F.W. Murnau in the 1922 German production Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
That Murnau’s haunting translation even exists to be remade is something of a cinematic miracle. The film was the first–and, as it turned out, only–production from Prana Film, a fledgling German studio whose spiritualism-leaning founders intended to make supernatural-themed works. After failing to secure the screen rights to Stoker’s 1897 novel from the late author’s family, the industrious folks at Prana went ahead and shot their own unauthorized version, changing the names of the characters and moving the setting of the story’s second half from England to Germany.
In spite of these perfunctory revisions, the Stoker estate successfully sued the filmmakers, and a court ruled that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. As luck would have it, a few prints survived, and the movie’s quasi-illegal status led to bootleg copies spreading, fittingly, like plague rats. By the early 1980s and the dawn of home video Nosferatu was readily available on tape and later on disc, well before it officially entered the public domain in 2019.
Set in 1838 Germany, the film has young solicitor Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) dispatched by his enigmatic employer to Transylvania to finalize the sale of an estate in the fictitious town of Wisborg to the mysterious Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Imprisoned in Orlok’s remote castle, Hutter learns that his “host” is a vampire (the fangs, bat-like ears and fingers, and taste for blood made it a pretty safe guess) and manages to escape, but not before the Count sets off on a Wisborg-bound boat along with his coffins and a small army of rats. Meanwhile, Thomas’s death-obsessed wife Ellen (Greta Schröder) is haunted by visions of Orlok and fears for her husband’s life. Thomas returns home, but as the town is beset by deaths in the vampire’s wake, Ellen discovers she can end Orlok’s plague by willingly giving herself to him and keeping him away from his coffin past sunrise. Orlok is lured to Ellen’s bedside and takes her as his final victim before the dawning rays of the sun destroy him (This key piece of vampire lore originated here. In the novel Dracula was incapacitated by sunlight, but it wasn’t fatal.)
As what is arguably the first example of vampire cinema (don’t be fooled by those Theda Bara “vamp” films), Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror more than lived up to its subtitle while helping set the tone for its legions of successors. While it lacks what today’s viewers would consider “scare scenes,” the film has a number of eerie and innovative shots (Orlok rising straight up from his coffin onboard the ship, or climbing the stairs to Ellen’s bedroom with only his shadow visible, and the Count’s final “fadeout”) that certainly must have given goosebumps to 1920s viewers still shaken by the real-life horrors of World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic. It also followed in the Expressionist style of such other German works as Robert Wiene’s 1920 exercise in insanity The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Murnau’s own The Haunted Castle, released the year after. And the chiropteran countenance of title star Schreck has remained a pop culture fixture, its influence seen everywhere from Salem’s Lot to Batman Returns and from What We Do in the Shadows to Spongebob Squarepants.
More than a half-century after the original movie narrowly escaped destruction, another idiosyncratic German director, Werner Herzog, would offer up his own homage to Murnau’s chiller. Teaming once again with actor Klaus Kinski (the second of their five stormy film collaborations), Herzog’s 1979 release Nosferatu the Vampyre followed the basic plot of its predecessor, but was able to use the character names from Stoker’s Dracula, the book having entered the public domain in the interim. Here Kinski’s Count Dracula is less the malevolent force of Schreck’s Orlock and more a tragic figure ready to end his supernaturally-prolonged existence. As the actor once said, “He is a man without free will. He cannot choose, and he cannot cease to be. He is a kind of incarnation of evil, but he is also a man who is suffering, suffering for love.”
As the object of Dracula’s desire, Mina Harker, Isabelle Adjani depicts her heroic self-sacrifice as also being a form of sexual liberation. “She is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination, as we all would think,” Adjani explained. Bruno Ganz’s Jonathan Harker, on the other hand, is depicted as falling more and more under the Count’s thrall, shunning sunlight as he recovers from his captivity and reacting to his wife’s death in a manner very different from the 1922 picture. Director Herzog pays tribute to some of Murnau’s most memorable sequences while adding his own decadent flair and filming the scenes in russet-colored earth tones that evoke the dirt of a freshly-dug grave. Fun fact: Herzog wanted to shoot the German scenes in Wismar like the original, but had to settle for the Dutch town of Delft as Wismar was still on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain.
Kinski would return to the role of the Count–now sporting a full head of hair!–in Italian producer Augusto Caminito’s 1988 pseudo-sequel Nosferatu in Venice, also known as (among other titles) Prince of the Night and Vampire in Venice. Plagued by numerous on-set clashes between Kinski and original director Mario Caiano that led Caminito to finish helming it himself, the film follows a resurrected Nosferatu (no longer called Dracula for some reason) searching the City of Bridges for a woman who will willingly give herself up to him and thus allow him to finally die (which, of course, was basically the plot of the 1979 version). Despite the presence of Kinski and co-stars Donald Pleasence and Christopher Plummer, the picture received mixed reviews and sank faster than a leaky gondola in the Grand Canal.
Perhaps the most unusual movie concerning Count Orlok and company was director E. Elias Merhige’s 2000 dark satire Shadow of the Vampire. Set during the filming of the 1922 Nosferatu, Shadow stars John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau, whose obsession with detail and authenticity has led him to locate and cast an actual undead bloodsucker (Willem Dafoe), whom he names “Max Schreck,” in the title role. Tensions arise on the set as the vampire-turned-thespian cannot control his need to feed and begins preying upon the crewmembers. As the body count rises and Schreck’s true nature is in danger of being revealed, Murnau must decide if completing his work justifies the cost. And just in case you’re wondering, the real-life Friedrich Gustav Maximilian Schreck (1879-1936) was a well-known stage and film leading man whose on-set behavior allegedly had folks wondering if he was merely acting. As far as we can discern, Schreck–whose surname means “fright” or “terror” in German–has yet to rise from his grave.
Into this century-plus tradition of otherworldly suspense and passion, director Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse) has released his own take on Nosferatu, featuring Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult as Ellen and Thomas Hutter, and Shadow of the Vampire’s Dafoe as occult specialist Professor Von Franz (Need I say that Dafoe plays him as a little bit manic?). It’s a lush rendition of the silent film, dripping with 21st-century body horror and eroticism that stays just this side of necrophilia. Incidentally, Eggers and the studio were quite secretive about the look of Skarsgård’s Orlok, and while his makeup is a departure from its pale-skinned predecessors it effectively conveys the idea that you’re watching a living corpse in action (although–SPOILER ALERT!–it did remind me at times of an undead Al Swearengen from Deadwood).
One thing is certain after over 100 years of putting shivers up the spines of movie audiences: Old Nosferatu never die…
…they just fade away.