As Robert Eggers scares up NewYear box-office business with his version of a horror classic, Cinema Paradiso examines the 103-year legend of Nosferatu.
In 1922, 1979, and 2024, F.W. Murnau, Werner Herzog, and Robert Eggers respectively succeeded in capturing the crepuscular melancholy and sepulchral chill of a vampire story that dwells on the margins of the horror genre. Unlike the fiendishly suave predators who haunted the Dracula stories produced by Universal and Hammer, the eponymous character in Nosferatu is a grotesque manifestation of the undead, a rat king with a sinister 'under-nature', who spreads disease, decay, and death wherever he goes.
Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) was released in the aftermath of the Spanish flu epidemic that had killed millions so soon after the hideous slaughter of the Great War. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) coincided with the start of the AIDS crisis and, now, Robert Eggers's Nosferatu (2024) arrives in cinemas with memories of Coronavirus still fresh in the minds of audience members who may well have lost loved ones in the pandemic.
Each film has used pestilence, contamination, and parasitism to examine corporeal and moral corruption in casting an allegorical glance over the times in which it was made. Yet the trio also offer insights into the bestial aspects of human nature and force viewers to contemplate their own mortality and confront the grim reality that 'there are things more horrible than death'.
NOSFERATU 1922
Background
Despite claims by some film historians, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens was not the first vampire film. Hungarian Károly Lajthay's Dracula's Death (1921) followed Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) by setting its encounter between a female patient and Count Dracula in an asylum. Yet, despite borrowing the name, this lost film appears to have made no other reference to Irish author Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula, which has been in print continuously since its first publication in 1897.
Although it was not a bestseller, Stoker's tome was known to Albin Grau, the German artist and architect who formed Prana Film in order to produce a vampire picture. While serving in Serbia during the war, Grau had met a farmer who claimed that his father had joined the undead and his ambition to make a film on the subject was fuelled by the grisly fascination he had felt on watching a spider devour a fly.
A lifelong student of the occult, Grau was a member of the Fraternitas Saturni, in which he was known as Master Pacitius. He compared the Great War to a cosmic vampire drinking 'the blood of millions and millions of men' and his knowledge surely influenced the fact that Count Orlok is a creation of the Satanic archdemon, Belial, who is synonymous with pestilence. Similarly, the fact that Orlok and Knock the estate agent communicate in the Enochian language of the angels derives from Grau's familiarity with the coded correspondence of the Elizabethan mathematician John Dee and his alchemist friend, Edward Kelley.
The character of Professor Bulwer is named after the English occult novelist, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, while the fact he refers to himself as a Paracelsian links the narrative to the writings of Theophrastus von Hohenheim, a 16th-century Swiss medical pioneer who used the name Paracelsus and whose 'Prognostications' had influenced the 17th-century Rosicrucian sect that so intrigued Grau and screenwriter, Henrik Galeen. The Austrian, who had once been an assistant to the revered theatrical producer, Max Reinhardt, had been a key figure in the evolution of Expressionist cinema in Germany, as the writer and star of Paul Wegener's The Golem (1914), which had been remade in 1920 by Carl Boese, as part of a flurry of Weimar films - which also included Caligari and Fritz Lang's Destiny (1921) - that dealt with collective and individual insanity, moral corruption, physical decay, the destructive nature of humanity, and the desperate and futile struggle against death. For more details, see Cinema Paradiso's article, 100 Years of German Expressionism.
Like Galeen, Grau, and assistant Werner Spies, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau also had an interest in the occult. He had served on the Western Front before flying several missions for the Luftwaffe. Having survived eight crashes, he became a prisoner of war after a forced landing in Switzerland, where he spent much of his time staging amateur theatricals, with one production winning a national prize. On his return to Germany, Murnau set up a film company with actor Conrad Veidt and had made nine films when Grau hired him to direct Nosferatu. Cinema Paradiso users can see Schloss Vogelöd (1921) on Early Murnau (2016), which also includes Phantom (1922), The Last Laugh, The Grand Duke's Finances (both 1924), and Tartuffe (1925).
Having assembled his creative team, Grau revealed that they were going to base their story on Dracula, which was still a relatively new book in 1921 and, as Stoker had died in 1912, the film-makers hoped to avoid paying a rights fee by changing the character names and switching the setting to the German town of Wisborg in 1838 in an effort to distance themselves from their source. As cinema was still silent, there was no dialogue in Galeen's scenario. However, Murnau annotated his descriptions of the action with suggestions for props, expressions, and gestures, while also appending sketches for character blocking and camera angles.
Plot
Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) is married to Ellen (Greta Schröder), who is saddened when he picks her some flowers from their garden because their living beauty has been lost now they are dead and doomed to wilt away. Hoping to make amends by securing a large commission, Hutter accepts a mission from his Wisborg estate agency boss, Knock (Alexander Granach), to travel to Transylvania to have Count Orlok (Max Schreck) sign the papers relating to his purchase of the abandoned property opposite his own home.
Ellen is distressed by the news and reluctantly agrees to stay with Harding (Georg H. Schnell) and his sister, Ruth (Ruth Landshoff), while her husband is away. He is excited by the trip, however, and laughs off Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt) when he warns him against rushing towards his fate. Hutter also dismisses the concerns of the innkeeper (Guido Herzfeld) and his customers when they learn he is bound for Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains. The coach driver is also unnerved and refuses to take Hutter to the doorstep, forcing him to walk through the rugged countryside until he is collected by a coachman, who takes him at breakneck speed through the final stretch to the castle.
Orlok greets Hutter, who is taken aback by his bald pate, sunken eyes, and long fingernails. However, he readily accepts the count's hospitality and his reasons for not joining him in eating supper. But Hutter is startled by Orlok's response when he cuts his thumb cutting bread and his host tries to suck the blood. When he wakes next morning to find two small puncture wounds in his neck, Hutter puts it down to mosquitoes and expresses no surprise when Orlok comments on the prettiness of Ellen's throat when he sees her portrait while signing the house papers.
It's only when he begins reading a book on folklore that he had found at the inn that Hutter first suspects that Orlok may be a vampire. Consequently, he tries to hide under the bedclothes when Orlok comes to his room under cover of darkness. But he proves powerless to resist an assault that transmits itself to Ellen in Wisborg, who sleepwalks on to the balcony outside her room. She is rescued by Harding, who summons the doctor, who is treating Ellen when she suddenly calls out her spouse's name, as she envisions him succumbing to Orlok's advances.
Trapped in the castle, Hutter goes exploring and finds the coffin in which Orlok spends the daylight hours. But he is powerless to prevent him from loading caskets filled with soil and infested rats on to a cart that drives itself to the harbour. As Hutter climbs out of the window to return home and protect Ellen from his attacker, the coffins are loaded aboard the schooner, Empusa, whose crew have all perished by the time the vessel arrives in Wisborg. Sneaking away, Orlok carries his coffin to the building opposite the Hutter residence.
Days pass and the medical fraternity is at a loss to explain the spate of deaths among the townsfolk. Bulwer puts it down to a plague carried by the rats from the ship, whose arrival has sent Knock into a frenzy at the asylum where he is being monitored by Professor Sievers (Gustav Botz). Ellen, however, finds the book that the ailing Hutter had brought back with him and realises that Orlok is responsible. She discovers that a vampire is vulnerable to sunlight and decides to sacrifice herself to save her husband by inviting Orlok into her bedchamber and delaying his departure so that the dawn can destroy him. Feigning illness, Ellen sends Hutter to fetch Bulwer and opens her bedroom window. Lured into her trap, Orlok starts sucking blood from her neck. However, he loses track of time and is reduced to dust at cock crow, with the closing image showing how his castle has been reduced by ruins by his demise.
Behind the Scenes
As a scheduling conflict prevented Conrad Veidt from playing Orlok, Murnau offered the role to Max Schreck, a 41 year-old theatre actor who kept largely to himself during the shoot and was so unrecognisable in his make-up that rumours spread that he was really celebrated actor Alfred Abel in disguise. As we shall see below, one film-maker had a novel theory about Schreck and why Murnau insisted on giving him the role of a cunningly ravenous vampire.
Although Grau booked studio space in Berlin, he and Murnau were keen to film on location to give their supernatural tale an eerily authentic setting. Shooting began in early July 1921 in Lübeck, where an old salt warehouse stood in for Orlok's newly acquired lodgings. The company moved on to Wismar for the opening shot of St Mary's Church and scenes of the death ship docking at the jetty. For the sequence in which Ellen gazes out to sea from a beach dotted with headstones, Murnau chose List on the island of Sylt before he took a short break in Prague.
Thence, it was off to the Tatras Mountains, although the party was briefly held up after a cooked customs official confiscated Fritz Arno Wagner's camera and demanded a substantial bribe before returning it. In Vrátna, Murnau shot the scene of the carriage dashing along at an exaggeratedly accelerated speed and the woodland sequence that required the carriage to be shrouded in white cloth so that it would photograph as black in the negative image.
When the unit reached the Castle of Oravský Pofzamok, which had been chosen for Orlok's lair, the locals were particularly wary of Schreck in his bizarre green make-up, as this was reputed to be vampire territory and the actor looked far too like a nosferatu for comfort. Incidentally, there is a dispute about whether the name comes from the Greek word, 'nosophorous' (meaning 'plague carrier') or the archaic Romanian term 'nesuferitu', which has been variously translated as 'the offensive one', 'the insufferable one', and 'the undead'.
Progressing through the region, Murnau stopped at Trencín Castle for the climactic ruin shot before making for the River Waag at Rutga to film the scene of Orlok's coffins being transported by raft. Once back in Berlin, the production based itself at the JOFA Studios in the Johannisthal district. Grau himself designed the sets, which were inspired by places he had seen on the road. However, he was also a keen student of art and several Romantic and modern painters influenced his designs, including Caspar David Friedrich, Carl Spitzweg, Alfred Kubin, Emil Nolde, Georg Friedrich Kersting, Wilhelm von Kaulbach, Mauritz von Schwind, Arnold Böcklin, Giorgio de Chirico, Ludwig Kirchner, and Hugo Steiner-Prag. There was even a reference to Rembrandt van Rijn in the sequence in which Bulwer and his fellow medics examine the corpses removed from the Empusa.
Grau also created the printed matter seen on screen, including the mysterious letter from Orlok to Knock, as well as the intertitles, which were sparingly used because Murnau preferred to let his imagery convey any necessary information. He also employed a metronome on the set to control the pacing of the performances, which varied consciously from melodramatic mumming to the more mannered and manic displays of those acting under the influence.
Legacy
Complete with a specially composed score by Hans Erdmann, Nosferatu premiered privately on 4 March 1922 at the Marmorsaal in the Berlin Zoological Garden. Guests were asked to wear Biedermeier costume appropriate to the 1830s setting and the reviews following the public premiere at the Primus-Palast in Berlin on 15 March were largely positive. So keen was Grau for the film to be seen that he spent more on publicity than on the production itself. However, the box-office returns were modest and Prana Film went bankrupt.
Hardly helping matters was the fact that Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, learned that Galeen's screenplay had drawn on her husband's book without acknowledgement. Accusing the film-makers of plagiarism, she sued for sizeable compensation. The case dragged on for three years before the judges found in her favour and ordered that the negative and all German prints be destroyed. Fortunately, however, dupe negatives had been sent abroad and several full-length prints remained out of the clutches of Prana's receivers.
Inevitably, censors tinkered with the footage overseas, where Nosferatu fared somewhat better than it had done at home. It received sharply contrasting notices in New York, however. The Times complained, 'The backgrounds are often quite effective, but most of it seems like cardboard puppets doing all they can to be horrible on papier maché settings.' But the Post opined in reference to a Broadway production starring Bela Lugosi, that the picture was 'infinitely more subtly horrible than the stage edition. Mr Murnau's is no momentary horror, bringing shrieks from suburban ladies in the balcony, but a pestilential horror coming from a fear of things only rarely seen.'
Others have echoed this perceptive analysis down the years, with theorist Béla Balázs suggesting that the action was swept by 'glacial drafts of air from the beyond'. Pauline Kael called it 'superbly loathsome' and continued that 'this first important film of the vampire genre has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity, and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors'. However, whoever wrote the notes for the London Film Society wasn't wholly wide of the mark when they scoffed at the 'ridiculousness' of some of the acting.
Suppressed by the Nazis, Nosferatu slipped from view until Sigmund Kracauer proclaimed it a key work in From Caligari to Hitler, his 1947 book on how Expressionist cinema had prepared the German psyche for National Socialism. Even more influential in the film's rehabilitation was Lotte Eisner's The Haunted Screen (1952), which restored its reputation in enshrining Murnau as the unrivalled master of German film-making. More recently, Cristina Massaccesi has stated in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2016) that Orlok is 'the Ur-Vampire, the father of all undead creatures lurking in the darkest recesses of a cinema screen'.
No wonder Jean Cocteau and Jean-Luc Godard respectively borrowed the negative effect for Orphée (1950) and Alphaville (1965), while dozens of vampire films have followed Galeen's lead in making vampires creatures of the night who cannot survive in daylight. And before you ask, Murnau shot in natural light and relied on tinting to manipulate the visual tone of scenes staged at night or in interiors lit by fires or candles. Sadly, not all current editions of the film apply the tints, which makes the action difficult to follow when nocturnal scenes look day-lit.
As Murnau was gay at a time when same-sex liaisons were illegal, it has often been suggested that Nosferatu is an outsider's study of forbidden love. However, it is open to a variety of readings, as Kracauer demonstrated in averring that Orlok was a Hitlerian figure who mesmerised the masses into doing his bidding. Others, though, have identified anti-Semitism in the count's appearance and in the presence of the rats which figured so prominently in Nazi propaganda.
Professor Tony Magistrale noted how Orlok's acquisition of property in Wisborg might have been seen as 'an invasion of the German homeland by an outside force [which] poses disquieting parallels to the anti-Semitic atmosphere festering in Northern Europe in 1922'. However, in his BFI Classics monograph, Kevin Jackson stated that Murnau 'was friendly with and protective of a number of Jewish men and women', including Alexander Granach. As critic J. Hoberman affirms, 'Nosferatu's script was written by a Jew, Henrik Galeen. The cast included several Jewish actors...[and] there is no suggestion that Murnau or Grau, who weren't Jewish, were anti-Semitic. Indeed, the love of Murnau's life, poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, killed in the war, was the son of a Jewish banker.' No doubt the debate will continue, but it seems clear that no conscious offence was intended by either Murnau or Schreck, neither of whom lived long enough to witness the worst crimes of the Third Reich, as the director was killed in a car crash a week before the premiere of Tabu (1931) and the actor suffered a fatal heart attack during a stage production of Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos in 1936. He would be immortalised as Christopher Walken's Max Shreck character in Tim Burton's Batman Returns (1992) and as the night manager of the Krusty Krab in SpongeBob SquarePants (1999-).
NOSFERATU 1979
Background
Werner Herzog considered Murnau's Nosferatu to be 'the greatest of all German films'. Indeed, he was in awe of both the man and his movie and, having established his own reputation on the periphery of Das Neue Kino with such films as Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970), Fata Morgana (1971), Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Heart of Glass (1975), and Stroszek (1977), he decided to make his own version, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (aka Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979), in an effort to connect with 'legitimate German culture'.
As he later explained: 'Well, for me, as a German film-maker we had no real fathers to learn from and no points of reference. The father generation sided with the Nazis or was forced into emigration, so we were a generation of orphans. And you can't work without having some sort of reference as to your own culture and the connection and continuity and so it was our grandfathers: Murnau, Fritz Lang, Pabst and others who were our teachers, our guidance. And for me Murnau's film, Nosferatu, is the very best German film ever. And I somehow needed to connect to him, had the feeling I had to go back to my own roots as a film-maker. As a homage to him, I choose to make this film.'
Plot Differences
Herzog opened his adaptation with shots of the mummified corpses of the victims of a 19th-century Mexican cholera epidemic. Moreover, in addition to moving the action to 1850, he also opted to return to the names that Bram Stoker had given his characters, as the novel was now in the public domain.
Consequently, the story centres on Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) and his wife, Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), who has misgivings when estate agent Renfield (Roland Topor) sends him to Transylvania to get Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) to sign some documents relating to the purchase of a property in Wismar.
The action follows along similar lines, as Harker is warned at the inn before walking alone through the Borgo Pass to Dracula's castle. Here, the count becomes fixated on Lucy's portrait, which causes her to have nightmares, as her husband becomes the vampire's victim.
With Renfield committed to an asylum after biting a cow and raving about the master's imminent arrival, Dracula loads his coffin aboard a sailing ship and embarks upon a voyage that takes him from the Black Sea port of Varna, through the Bosphorus and the Strait of Gibraltar and along the European coast to the Baltic Sea. During this time, Harker has managed to escape the castle by lowering himself on knotted sheets. However, he injures himself in the process and those taking care of him are puzzled by his seemingly delusional references to black coffins.
In Wismar, Dr Abraham Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast) declares that the ship's crew died of plague and panic spreads when hundreds of grey rats scurry on to the quayside. As the death toll rises, Lucy becomes convinced that her new neighbour, Dracula, is somehow responsible and a book she finds in the returned Harker's luggage confirms her suspicions. She sacrifices herself to save him and the townspeople, who have given up hope and arranged a last supper to bid life farewell. Van Helsing realises that he has to drive a stake through Dracula's heart in order to prevent him from reviving after exposure to sunlight. However, Harker (who had been trapped behind a ring of consecrated communion hosts) accuses him of murdering the count and Van Helsing is escorted to prison, while the now-fanged Harker rips off the cross that Lucy had placed around his neck and gallops off to continue his corruptor's work.
Behind the Scenes
Herzog had first seen the Mummies of Guanajuato while visiting Mexico in the 1960s. He asked the museum's permission to remove the victims of an 1833 epidemic from their glass cases and propped them up against a wall in ascending ages in order to open his film with graphic images of the unchanging tension between life and death.
Denied permission to film in Transylvania by Romanian president Nicolae Ceau?escu, Herzog scouted locations in Czechoslovakia, with Pernštejn Castle standing in for Dracula's covert. The production also spent time in Telc and Lübeck, as well as the High Tatras on the Czech-Polish border, where Harker's walk carries echoes of Herzog's own journey on foot to visit the ailing Lotte Eisner in Paris.
Unable to film in Wismar, Herzog chose Delft as his principle location. However, the authorities refused to allow him to loose 11,000 rats, as they already had a vermin problem and he was forced to shoot these scenes in nearby Schiedam. As he only had a modest budget, Herzog hired a large house in Delft and cast and crew alike had to cope with sleeping on mats on the floor. He later admitted that he found dealing with the local authorities taxing. 'I just tricked them,' he revealed. 'They are natural enemies, bureaucracy and art. You have to out-trick them, outsmart them. I would engage authorities with what they love most: paper. I would fill out pages with random figures, and they couldn't make sense of it but they were engaged. Sometimes some of the things I did with the necessary natural amount of criminal energy.'
Not everyone approved of the company's antics, however. Dutch behavioural biologist Maarten 't Hart criticised the treatment of the laboratory rats that had been imported from Hungary. He claimed that transit conditions had been so poor that the rodents had started devouring each other and things were little better in the barn in which they were kept prior to filming. According to reports, the farmer who had been housing them in a barn had failed to feed them properly and they had turned on each other. When Herzog came to collect the rats, the farmer refused to release them and a pitched battle ensued from which the director was lucky to have escaped unscathed after one of the farmhands drove a crane at him.
This sorry episode wasn't over, however. Despite 't Hart's warnings that the white rats would try to remove the grey dye that Herzog had ordered, the animals were still submerged in hot water and several perished in the process. Then, just as the biologist had predicted, the survivors set about trying to lick themselves clean. Having endured these miseries, the poor creatures were then sold to various laboratories for experimentation.
Herzog's situation was not helped by the fact that the French company, Gaumont, had to withdraw from the project, while his deal with American distributor 20th Century-Fox required him to produce German and English versions of the picture. This meant that he had to shoot many scenes twice, although some were filmed once and dubbed in post-production. He later claimed that while he liked the English version, he thought the German was 'more authentic'.
Herzog also had to deal with the unpredictable temperament of his star. The pair had clashed repeatedly while making Aguirre, Wrath of God. But Herzog knew that only Klaus Kinski could follow in the footsteps of Max Schreck while also making the vampire less of a soulless insect. 'Kinski as the vampire is very human,' the director later divulged, 'someone who wants to participate in human love in human emotion, even in the most simple thing like dying, and he cannot even die. And his profound sadness that he feels because he cannot participate is much more the centerpiece of my film.'
Kinski also had firm ideas on how the character should be played. 'We see Dracula sympathetically,' he reflected. '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. This makes it so much more dramatic, more double-edged.'
Isabelle Adjani also had an interesting take on the dynamic between Dracula and Lucy. 'There's a sexual element,' she told one reporter. 'She is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination - as we all would think. First, she hopes to save the people of the town by sacrificing herself. But then, there is a moment of transition. There is a scene when he is sucking her blood - sucking and sucking like an animal - and suddenly, her face takes on a new expression, a sexual one, and she will not let him go away anymore. There is a desire that has been born. A moment like this has never been seen in a vampire picture.' The same couldn't be said for the ending, however, which Herzog admitted to having borrowed from Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).
As a result of Herzog's recognition of Kinski's unique talent, he was willing to put up with his outbursts. The actor was seemingly charming to his co-stars and Reiko Kruk, the Japanese artist who spent four hours each morning creating his distinctive look. Yet, even though Herzog and Kinski were often reduced to bellowing at each other, they would join forces again on Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Cobra Verde (1987) before Herzog paid tribute to his old adversary in the affectionate profile, My Best Fiend (1999).
Legacy
Influenced by the paintings of Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller and Caspar David Friedrich, the visuals owed much to the genius of cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, production designer Henning von Gierke, and costumier Gisela Storch. Apart from a brief glimpse of the blood on Harker's cut thumb, there is no gore in the picture and no special effects work. However, there is plenty going on beneath the surface.
Whereas the vampires played by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee ruthlessly sought blood to sustain life, Kinski's Dracula longs for death. He regards time as a curse rather than a blessing, telling Harker during their first meeting, 'Death is not the worst. There are things more terrible than death. Can you imagine, enduring centuries.' Yet, at the end of the story, Harker rides off with zeal proclaiming that he has much to do, as the prospect of immortality has yet to become burdensome. This approach to time and mortality is deeply unsettling, as it makes the predator seem pitiable.
Herzog also challenges modern attitudes to Reason and scientific empiricism. Van Helsing insists that the rats are responsible for the plague killing the townsfolk, but Lucy draws her own conclusion on the basis of religious belief and superstition. Similarly, Van Helsing diagnoses the ailing Harker with a brain fever, when he is becoming a vampire and Lucy seeks to protect him by placing a cross around his neck and using crumbled hosts to limit his movements. Rather cruelly, after he recognises the rectitude of Lucy's theories, Van Helsing is arrested for Dracula's murder because the town official regards his insistence that the vampire needed to be staked as superstitious nonsense.
Such hints of bleak humour recur throughout the film, as Herzog pokes fun at human nature and its fallibility. The parody of the Last Supper, as the townsfolk prepare to face the inevitable, is followed by Harker's victory after Lucy's sacrifice. This makes a mockery of her act of selfless devotion and suggests that her purity of heart was futile, while also hinting that she had also been corrupted by the erotic sensation of giving herself to Dracula. In many ways, Nosferatu the Vampyre is a grim fairytale, with the most sobering of unhappy endings.
Herzog considered the film to be about the instability of conventional society. 'It is more than a horror film,' he explained. 'Nosferatu is not a monster, but an ambivalent, masterful force of change. When the plague threatens, people throw their property into the streets; they discard their bourgeois trappings. A re-evaluation of life and its meaning takes place.'
Premiering at the 29th Berlin Film Festival, Nosferatu the Vampyre was well received and favourably compared to Murnau's original. It also earned production designer Henning von Gierke the Silver Bear for Outstanding Single Achievement. Kinski won the Golden Pelican for Best Actor at the Cartagena Film Festival and took the same prize at the German Film Awards. He would return to the role in Augusto Caminito's Nosferatu in Venice (1988), which was billed as a sequel to Herzog's film. However, his behaviour on set was so disruptive that the picture wrapped before the full script had been filmed. As a consequence, it became little more than a cult curio after debuting at the Venice Film Festival.
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE
Caminito's box-office calamity was not the first variation on the Nosferatu theme. In 1930, Dr Waldemar Roger added his own footage to Murnau's Nosferatu to create Die zwölfte Stunde: Eine Nacht des Grauens (aka The Twelfth Hour: A Night of Horror, 1930), which was released with some musical cues and sound effects on synchronised discs. These are now lost, although the Cinémathèque Française has a copy that reveals new footage photographed by Günther Krampf featuring Eduard von Winterstein (whose son had played Hutter) as the innkeeper and Hans Behal as a priest. Following Murnau's lead, Roger also changed the names of the characters, with Orlok becoming Wolkoff, Knock being redubbed Karsten, Hutter turning into Kundberg, and Ellen appearing as Margitta.
Despite this bowdlerisation being in the public domain, it's currently almost impossible to see. The same is true of José Ernesto Díaz Noriega's Manuscrito encontrato en Zarazwela (Nos fera tu la pugnete) , which was released in 1977 and added satirical dialogue to the action to comment on Spain's transition from dictatorship to monarchy. Switching the setting from Transylvania to Galitzia, the action centres on Draculas Navarro and Jonathan Carolus, Prince of Franconia, who are variations on Prime Minister Arias Navarro and King Juan Carlos.
Frustrating as the elusiveness of these titles might be, Cinema Paradiso users need have no such worries about Shadow of the Vampire (2000). In 1953, the Greek critic-cum-film-maker, Adonis Kyrou, had caused a stir by suggesting in his book, Le Surréalisme au cinéma, that Max Schreck had not been acting when he headlined Murnau's film. 'Who hides behind the character of Nosferatu?', Kyrou had written. 'Maybe Nosferatu himself?'
The idea clearly appealed to writer Steven Katz and director E. Elias Merhige, who reimagined the making of Nosferatu as a Faustian pact between Murnau (John Malkovich) and Schreck (Willem Dafoe) that imperilled the other members of the cast and crew. As Murnau shrouds the shoot in secrecy, it's left to Gustav von Wangenheim (Eddie Izzard) to inform his colleagues that Schreck is a stage actor whose commitment to his craft means that he will remain in character at all times and only shoot at night.
Even producer Albin Grau (Udo Kier) and screenwriter Henrik Galeen (John Aden Gillet) are surprised by Schreck's appearance and they become concerned when cameraman Wolfgang Miller (Ronan Vibert) falls ill shortly after location shooting starts in Czechoslovakia. He has to be replaced by Fritz Arno Wagner (Cary Elwes) after Schreck is caught sucking blood from Muller's neck during a power failure on the set. But production continues, even though Greta Schröder (Catherine McCormack) feels uncomfortable around Schreck.
When Murnau returns to Berlin to find new backers, Schreck asks Grau and Galeen to tweak the script to show how lonely Orlok feels and explore the excruciating reality of being dead. Even when they see him devour a bat, the pair are so drunk that they simply believe him to be a remarkable actor. But, when Murnau rejoins the company in Heligoland, he confesses to Grau and Wagner that Schreck is a vampire and that he has promised him Greta for his services. The producer and cinematographer are appalled and conspire to destroy Schreck. Their chance comes when he is incapacitated after drinking Greta's blood, which contains laudanum after Murnau had used it to calm her after she discovers that Schreck doesn't cast a shadow. However, they perish after botching an attempt to expose Schreck to sunlight and it's Galeen who kills the vampire by barging on to the set as Schreck returns to feasting on Greta. They are dismayed by the scene they discover, but all Murnau is interested in is his closing shot.
Presenting Murnau in the white lab coat and goggles that he actually wore on set, this is a knowing revisionist take on the making of a masterpiece. Merhige used a grainy 35mm stock to replicate the look of Nosferatu, while Oscar-nominated make-up artists Ann Buchanan and Amber Sibley not only captured Orlok's visage, but also revealed how actors had to be caked in special greasepaint in order to register on the monochrome film stocks used in the 1920s.
Dafoe was nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Golden Globes and the Oscars and Robert Eggers clearly knew what he was doing when he cast him as Von Franz. But we have a couple more stops to make before we reach the 2024 remake.
First up is NOS4A2 (2019-20), a TV series based on a novel by Joe Hill that feels as indebted to Fritz Lang's M (1931) as Murnau's Nosferatu. This is because Charlie Manx (Zachary Quinto) requires the souls of young children to survive. He deposits his victims in Christmasland, where everyday is Christmas and it's forbidden to be anything but perpetually happy. However, artist Victoria McQueen (Ashleigh Cummings) is on to Manx and possesses a unique power to end his reign of terror.
While this short-lived series is available via Cinema Paradiso, Thomas Hörl's F.W.M. Symphonie (2022) is out of reach. This 39-minute short reflects on the true-life theft of Murnau's skull from his grave in the cemetery at Stahnsdorf in 2015. Vito Baumüller plays Max Schreck in his Orlok guise.
Having successfully used green screen to combine live actors with colorised backdrops from the original film to re-imagine The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (2005), David Lee Fisher turned his attention to Murnau's chiller in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2023), a crowdfunded passion project that took seven years to realise. Having made his name in Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and his Oscar winner, The Shape of Water (2017) and having played The Ancient in The Strain (2014) and Baron Afanas in What We Do in the Shadows (2022), Doug Jones took the title role alongside Emrhys Cooper as Hutter, Sarah Carter as Ellen, and Eddie Allen as Knock.
While the action follows Galeen's storyline, Fisher has added dialogue, which isn't always comfortably handled by his supporting cast. But, while it helped Jones fulfil a dream, this bold retool had the misfortune to coincide with a second mainstream reinterpretation that rather blew it away.
NOSFERATU 2024
Background
Robert Eggers saw Murnau's Nosferatu as a boy and became obsessed with the film and its central character. 'I directed Nosferatu as a stage play when I was 17 years old,' he revealed in an interview. And Eggers followed this high-school production with another for a local theatre before devoting himself to film-making.
In the autumn of 2007, Eggers was seeking to follow up Hansel & Gretel (2006) with a short based on Edgar Allan Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart when he met cinematographer Jarin Blaschke in New York. 'He was doing production design for fashion videos or short films,' Blaschke remembered. 'Sometimes he would be the production designer and I'd be the DoP. Sometimes I'd be on some short film and they didn't have a production designer, and I would say, "Well, there's this guy..."'
Having worked together on the Poe short, Eggers and Blaschke collaborated on the former's first three features, The Witch (2015) The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022). However, Eggers had hoped that Nosferatu would be his second picture and he had started developing a scenario in 2015. While he still relished Murnau's vision, Eggers felt it had been compromised by its digital transfer on to DVD and Blu-ray. 'In the new versions that have been recently restored,' he explained, 'you can see the bald cap on Max Schreck and the grease paint that makes his eyebrows. On the VHS I had when I was a kid, it was made from a degraded 16mm print and you couldn't see any of that stuff, and he was a real vampire somehow. Because the thing was so degraded, it felt like an unearthed archive of the past, and the atmosphere seemed more haunting. To use a word that I seem to be obsessed with, it was "authentic".'
Eager to recreate this authenticity, Eggers wrote a novella that gave each character an extensive backstory before outlining narrative scenes in considerable detail. He joked to Variety that this rough draft 'sucks'. But the process prompted him to shift the focus of the action on to Ellen Hutter. 'She is a victim not only of the vampire, but of nineteenth-century society,' Eggers told one magazine. 'This is Ellen's story. There's a prologue that begins with her childhood and an unexplained but terrifying haunting.'
Plot Differences
In a major departure from the Galeen telling, the film opens with a young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) weeping in the night, as she prays to be delivered from her desperate loneliness. However, her plea is answered by a monstrous form that gains entrance to her bedroom and assaults her with a ferocity that leaves her traumatised.
By 1838, Ellen is living in Wisborg with her new husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), who works for an eccentric estate agent named Knock (Simon McBurney). Eager to make a killing through the sale of Schloss Grünewald to a client in Transylvania, Hutter agrees to travel east, despite Ellen's revelation about a dream in which she had married Death in a chapel full of corpses.
Entrusting his wife to friends, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), Hutter sets out for the Carpathians, where he is repulsed by the sight of some Romani peasants impaling what they claim to be a vampire on an iron spike. Ignoring their warnings about Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), Hutter goes to his castle, where events take the now familiar turn. What Hutter doesn't realise, however, is that Orlok has tricked him into signing a document agreeing to his divorce from Ellen.
While Hutter makes his way back to Germany, having been pursued by wolves and been plucked from a raging river, Orlok sails to Wisborg, where Ellen has been suffering from convulsions that so concern physician Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) that he consults his mentor, Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), who has been exiled to Switzerland because of his dabbling in the occult. Despite Harding's scepticism, he discerns that Ellen is under the power of a Nosferatu and, when Knock is institutionalised, he finds evidence that Orlok is the plague-spreading vampire with power over his patient.
In a twist on the Murnau/Herzog tellings, Knock escapes from the asylum and personally escorts his master to Schloss Grünewald. From here, Orlok communicates with Ellen and informs her that she has two days to make good on the pact she had made during her childhood by divorcing Hutter and becoming his bride. Killing the Hardings to prove he is serious about unleashing plague on the town, Orlok uses Knock to lure Hutter, Sievers, and Von Franz away from Ellen. However, she has been made aware that she needs to sacrifice herself in order to keep Orlok out of his coffin at daybreak - but she is by no means an unwilling victim.
Behind the Scenes
Such was the positive reception for The Witch that Eggers was keen to update Murnau for his sophomore outing, even though he said it felt 'ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting for a film-maker in my place to do Nosferatu next'. Ultimately, the pieces didn't fall into place in 2015, but Eggers had spent 'so much blood on it' that he couldn't abandon the project.
'Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I've been thinking about and looking at for a long time,' he confided in an interview. 'I had read Montague Summers as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes. And so, you're infusing things you're reading with cinematic tropes that aren't there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you're like, 'They're not even drinking blood, they're just strangling people, or suffocating people.'
When he started researching in earnest, Eggers followed links on Pinterest that took him to the libraries where he found books and bibliographies that transformed his thinking on vampirism. Eager to ensure that every detail was authentic, he hired novelist and poet Florin Lazarescu to advise him on the Romanian, Romani, and Dacian dialogue spoken in the film. The screenwriter of Radu Jude's Aferim! (2015) also offered insights into Transylvanian folklore, as well as ecclesiastical vestments and rituals. Consequently, the exorcism scene eschews movie cliché by following the text of The Prayers of Saint Basil the Great.
In order to ensure he cast the right actors, Eggers created digital portraits of all of the characters, putting the faces of his stars into paintings and every location and major set- piece in the picture. At one stage, Anya Taylor-Joy and Harry Styles were in line to play the Hutters, while Daniel Day-Lewis, Mads Mikkelsen, and Willem Dafoe were considered for Orlok. However, Eggers decided to change his mind after casting Bill Skarsgård as Hutter and the Swede spent months working with Icelandic opera singer Ásgerður Júníusdóttir to learn how to control his lower vocal range. He also shed several pounds for the role, which required him to spend six hours a day having prosthetic make-up applied. 'It was like conjuring pure evil,' Skarsgård said of the experience. 'It took a while for me to shake off the demon that had been conjured inside of me.'
When it came to Orlok's look, Eggers was determined to break with tradition. 'I knew he would be a folk vampire,' he said, 'instead of a monster like the Murnau film, or an Anglo-literary vampire like every other Dracula.' As a result, he followed Stoker's lead in giving his anti-hero a moustache, as this would have been as obligatory on a 16th-century Transylvanian nobleman as his long sleeves, furry hat, and high-heeled shoes. Special effects make-up artist David White also pored over medical and historical texts to determine how flesh and bone decay.
Costume designer Linda Muir took up the challenge to reinvent Orlok with enthusiasm. 'Textiles for Orlok had to evoke a past some 250-300 years before the period in which we find all of the other characters,' she explained. 'So I looked at paintings, illustrations, garments housed in museum collections, and books illustrating the Transylvanian military from around 1560 to the mid-1600s. I tried to find as many examples as possible of what a dolman (tunic) or mente (overcoat) or kolpak (hat) or footwear could look like within this period, along with sash, buttons, and embellishments suitable to the clothing of a nobleman of great wealth and privilege. Once completed, Orlok's costuming had to then be distressed (corpsified) inside and out, [because his] centuries of rotting flesh affect the interior layers and the environment affects the exterior.'
Speaking of exteriors, Eggers found it difficult to find the locations he was looking for. 'We scouted Lübeck and Wismar and Gdansk (which was in Germany in that period). They had the architecture, but none of them had a massive amount of streets left intact because of World War Two. Even if we wanted to, there wasn't a city that would have served our purpose.' Consequently, the task fell to production designer Craig Lathrop to construct the film world at Barrandov Studios in Prague. According to Lathrop, the 'beautiful and horrifying script was full of design opportunities, and all of the roughly 60 sets seemed to have something that was oddly tricky and specific. The streets of Wisborg were by far the largest sets we built. I wanted each building to have its own personality. None of the sets are perfectly square or plumb, and on Wisborg's Old Town Street, the medieval houses have a certain amount of sag. We graded all the streets so the characters would move up or down the streets with the exception of the exterior of the Hardings' house (it is on a canal, so that street is flat). By controlling the palate and the dressing, we tried to ensure that when you see the streets in the early scenes, it's a bustling port town. Once the plague arrives, those same streets would feel ominous and frightening.'
Several sets were hinged to come apart midway through shots to allow the camera to pass through them. As Lathrorp revealed, this was the case with Ellen's bedroom in the opening scene. 'Ellen is sitting up in her bed,' he said, 'calling to an unknown spirit. When she gets out of bed and moves toward the window, the wall with the bed alcove split open and swung out of the way with all of the set dressing attached, in a choreographed dance with the camera so that we could end the shot looking 180 degrees in the opposite direction, with a head-to-toe profile of Ellen and Orlok's shadow.'
Shooting began at Barrandov on 20 February 2023, although the crew did venture further afield for scenes at Tremšínem Castle, Pernštejn Castle, and the Baroque Invalidovna complex in Prague. Eggers also wanted to film at Corvin (aka Hunedoara) Castle in Romania. As he explained: 'I think Bram Stoker might have seen an engraving of Hunedoara Castle when it was in disrepair, and that it [might have been] his template for Castle Dracula, so we shot that castle for [Count Orlok's castle] exterior.' The cemetery sequence was also filmed on location, although the mausoleum was specially built and Lathrop had to add 30 extra headstones to give the plot a creepy atmosphere.
Inspired by the same Romantic artists as Murnau and Herzog, Eggers and Blaschke tried to ensure they only shot outdoors in gloomy weather conditions. However, waiting around for suitable cloud formations proved expensive when 200 extras were left sitting around with nothing to do. Lighting the sets for moonlit scenes also caused delays, as Blaschke is such a perfectionist that he had to bounce the light off distant mirrors to make it look as though it had travelled from a natural distance. Even the filming of the rats in the climactic chapel scene was meticulously prepared. 'We made Vacuform rat mats,' Eggers told i-D, and 'these squares of plastic rats that were covered with fake fur that we tiled the floors with. [Then we added] a layer of CG rats on top of that. But there were 2000 real rats. I said 5000 by mistake in another interview. Now it's gone viral.'
Nothing was left to chance. As Eggers had based Ellen's possession sequences on the drawings made by French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, Lily-Rose Depp and movement director Marie-Gabrielle Rotie drew on Butoh dance to make her gyrations feel variously childlike, sensual, and demonic. Reinforcing the latter sensation, make-up artist Traci Loader created a special liquid gore so that Ellen appeared to be crying blood tears.
In a sweeter touch, Eggers modelled the statue of the angel in the crypt on his wife. 'If you look up in one of those inset arches,' he disclosed, 'there's a statue of an angel up there.' Incorporating other nods to Victor Sjöström's The Phantom Carriage (1921) and Jack Clayton's The Innocents (1961), principal photography wrapped on 19 May 2023. The film had its premiere at the Zoo Palast cinema in Berlin on 2 December 2024, with The Hollywood Reporter declaring it to be 'exciting, repulsive and beautiful'. Others claimed it was the perfect horror for the #MeToo era, as Nosferatu is essentially a chilling study of stalking.
Scooping $11.55 million on its opening day in the United States, the picture has been an instant hits with audiences in the UK. Quite how many will fork out for a bottle of Nosferatu Eau de Macabre is a different question entirely. Something seemingly got up the noses of those responsible for the Golden Globes, though. Eggers's film was wholly snubbed, in spite of the fact that other horror titles were recognised, with Hugh Grant and Demi Moore being respectively nominated for their performances in Heretic and The Substance, which is also up for Best Supporting Actress (Margaret Qualley), Best Director, and Best Screenplay (both Coralie Fargeat). Compensation came when the Critics Choice Awards cited Nosferatu for Best Cinematography (Jarin Blaschke), Best Production Design (Craig Lathrop), and Best Costume Design (Linda Muir), and Best Hair and Make-up (Traci Loader, Suzanne Stokes-Munton, and David White). But we shall have to wait and see whether the Academy will follow Pablo Larraín's El Conde (2023), The Shadow of the Vampire, Neil Jordan's Interview With the Vampire (1994), and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) in giving the Oscar electorate something to get their teeth into.
