What does it do to someone to rest in a coffin century after century? The Vampire from Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s nosferatu (1922) is the incarnate answer to that question. His head is carved into a bald, mummified skull. His ears have become somewhat loose due to lying down a lot. His shoulders look petrified, pushed up and warped, his arms and hands perpendicular to the bone-thin body. As if the undead Count Orlok carries the shape of his coffin with him forever.
This month it is exactly one hundred years ago that Nosferatu, a Symphonie des Grauens had its world premiere. If this very first, unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) is not the scariest vampire movie ever, it is certainly the most uncomfortable. nosferatu is a movie that believes in vampires itselffilm critic Roger Ebert once wrote, and in 2022 that belief is still eerily easy to transfer to the viewer.
The way in which Murnau manages this makes nosferatu into an immortal textbook example of effective horror. Certainly, many tricks can be called dated and the acting of some actors quickly comes across as melodramatic and outdated in today’s eyes. Gustav von Wangenheim is rather boring as a real estate agent Hutter, who travels to Transylvania in 1838 to sell a German house to Count Orlok: a deal with which he inflicts great disaster on himself, his loved ones and his hometown, the fictional harbor town of Wisborg.
But the flat Hutter is not the true main character of Nosferatu. That is Orlok himself, who is after Hunter’s beloved Ellen (“Your wife has a beautiful neck”) and buys the ruins that lie opposite her house. Whenever this figure emerges from the darkness, it pulls the whole into another, pernicious dimension. Few films create such a powerful and elusive evil as nosferatu† And that while the vampire can only be seen nine of the 94 playing minutes.
The fact that those nine minutes make such an impression is in the first place due to the exceptionally physical play of Orlok performer Max Schreck. The actor starred in numerous films until his death in 1936, many of which have been lost, but he will be remembered forever for the role that fell on him like a rotting second skin. Put portrait photos of Schreck next to images of Orlok, the serious German man next to the monster, and you hardly recognize one in the other. What a difference with later, much more human and charismatic Dracula renditions. like that of Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, with the protagonists hinting somewhat in their character. Schreck actually seems to disappear in Orlok, under thick layers of makeup that helped him get as close to the essence of the leech as possible. As theatrical as the acting of the other actors in nosferatu sometimes, that’s how succinct is Schreck’s. You could call it boneless: the angular body movements, the stillness with which Orlok waits for him to strike. It is also striking how often Orlok/Schreck looks straight into the camera, with wide-open eyes that only blink once in the film. His hypnotic power over the viewer is never broken.
When the film team of nosferatu for location shooting in a Slovak mountain village, the bystanders are said to have reacted shocked to Schreck’s presence. “The eerily pale figure of the actor was greeted with horror by the population and shunned like the devil,” a journalist noted in his report at the time. It can be a strong story that usefully contributed to the myth-building around nosferatu – some think that Schreck was actually (or is?) a vampire – but it fits perfectly with the smoke of malice that rises from Schreck’s figure.
That bleak aura is certainly not just Schreck’s credit. Main responsible for Orlok’s appearance was producer, costume designer and art director Albin Grau. Just as screenwriter Henrik Galeen largely ignored Bram Stoker’s novel in the script, Grau dealt loosely with Stoker’s descriptions of his protagonist. Unlike Count Dracula, Orlok doesn’t have a luscious mustache, nor does he have a bunch of curls. The eagle-like nose, the extremely pale skin and thick eyebrows remain.
Grau got the first ideas for his Orlok design when he observed a spider with its prey. This is perhaps most evident in Orlok’s claw-like hands and his long fingernails that seem to flow right into his dead flesh. The two tusks protruding over the lower lip – again something Orlok shares with Dracula – complete Orlok’s rat-like appearance.
It is fascinating how Orlok’s animalistic character is emphasized and magnified. In one of the most memorable scenes, Orlok sneaks across the ship taking him to Wisborg, while Fritz Arno Wagner films him from below, from the cabin. First he walks from left to right and then, almost at a ninety degree angle, from bottom to top. Like a human spider crawling across the screen.
Orlok is constantly associated with repulsive creatures. Naturally, bats flutter over Orlok’s castle and Orlok’s ship carries a load of rats that will spread the plague in Wisborg. Scenes without Orlok also make the link between him and macabre flora and fauna. In the biology classes of Professor Bulwer (a variation on Abraham van Helsing, the vampire connoisseur from Stoker’s novel), the nosferatu is compared to spiders and carnivorous plants, while Bulwer presents his students with an aggressive polyp with tentacles: ‘Transparent,’ he adds,’ almost disembodied… little more than a phantom.’
Indeed, Orlok too has something decidedly otherworldly and ghostly, a quality that Murnau works out in all sorts of ways. In contrast to the scenes in which he just stares ominously or just moves his hand, Murnau comes with wacky, surrealistic accelerated moments. Like when Orlok loads a carriage full of coffins and lies down in the last coffin himself. Time and space seem to have no grip on this subject, which is sometimes in several places at once. He is both the coachman who takes Hutter to the castle in the mountains, and the ashen host who welcomes him there.
The elusiveness of Orlok is emphasized by the many images in which the vampire can appear at any moment but does not. Seemingly empty sets – the caverns of Orlok’s castle, a door that could swing open at any moment, a deserted square – thus become filled with uncanny premonitions. Unparalleled, when it comes to the hint of threat, is the long-held shot in which Orlok’s ghost ship glides slowly into Wisborg harbour. It passes the camera from bow to transom, an unstoppable carrier of evil.
In the nine minutes that the film allows him, Orlok always merges with the darkness around him. Sometimes you can barely tell the difference between the dark background and his blackened torso. He often becomes a shadow himself. Iconic is the scene where Orlok’s ghost invades the home of Hunter’s lover Ellen (Greta Schröder), sneaks up the stairs, opens the door to her bedroom and squeezes her heart. It is an expressionistic play of dark and light that countless horror films imitate nosferatu and which still possesses a chilling beauty.
The influence of Nosferatu on the horror genre cannot be underestimated. This is evident in remakes and tributes such as Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night (1979) and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), as well as the numerous monsters directly inspired by Count Orlok: the bald vampire leader from Salem’s Lot. (1979) for example, or the cyclops-like creature from Pan’s Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006). Jennifer Kents Babadook (2014) also harks back to Orlok, as does the creepy Petyr, who lives in a New Zealand vampire community, from What We Do in the Shadows (2014). Dave Eggers, director of The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), has been hoping to make his own adaptation of Nosferatu for years.
Orlok also pops up outside of horror, for example in three episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants. Couturiers Viktor & Rolf were strongly inspired by Orlok’s costumes and tense attitude in their 2022 spring collection, with models looking deathly whose shoulders were well above their necks. None of this would have happened if Florence Balcombe, widow of Bram Stoker, had had her way: because Murnau had made off with the novel without arranging the rights, Balcombe demanded that all copies of the film be destroyed. The judge ruled in her favor in 1925, but fortunately some of them survived.
visual jump scaresMurnau manages to do even that towards the end of the film. The calm scene of the sun setting into the sea is followed by a sinister medium close-up of Orlok behind the window of his ruin, clawing at the bars. He is a stalker from the other side, who can appear anywhere and anywhere in the film and never really disappears.
That play with Orlok’s elusiveness extends beyond the images. Murnau takes full advantage of that nosferatu a silent film is from the years when the dialogue between film characters had to be conveyed via intertitles. The conventions of the time want you to see the speaker’s mouth move briefly before and after such an intertitle, so that it is clear who is saying what and so that the transition from scene-image to text becomes smoother. That convention is also nosferatu followed, with one telling exception: when Orlok talks, you hardly ever see his lips move. Orlok’s words thus become detached from his appearance. You would almost think that he communicates in a different way or that his sentences only ring in the minds of his human victims, without him having to open his mouth.
How can such a thin monster be reined in? By analyzing it, maybe? The slippery leech off nosferatu makes the film open to all kinds of interpretations. Count Orlok embodies the trauma of the First World War and the subsequent Spanish flu pandemic, say some commentators. With its hooked nose, Orlok closely resembles anti-Semitic caricatures, writes film journalist J. Hoberman in an article for Tablet Magazine, but according to him the film written by a Jew mainly addresses the primal fear of ‘foreign contamination’. ‘In a sense’, Roger Ebert states in his review, ‘Murnau’s film is about all the things we can worry about at three in the morning: cancer, war, disease, madness.’
That’s all right. But intelligent interpretations are of no use if you look straight into those undead eyes.
On 22/4, film journalist and composer Kevin Toma will perform his soundtrack for Nosferatu live in the Melkweg Amsterdam, during genreAmsterdamned film festival.
First time in Berlin
The official world premiere of nosferatu took place on March 4, 1922 in the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoo. But the film was already shown for the first time on 16 February in the Flora and Olympia cinemas in The Hague. The Haagsche Courant then announced ‘the most interesting movie of the season’ as ‘a mysterious movie play in 6 acts. Freely edited from the rom. ‘drasula’ [sic] v. Bram Stoker’. No access for under 18s, unfortunately.