"...I suspect that...when a hundred more recent vampire films are forgotten, they’ll be debating the merits of Murnau’s Nosferatu in 2084. The not-dead? An understatement..."

The original "Dracula" movie (the one that's available for viewing, at least) was, of course, not the classic 1931 Universal movie.  It was the 1922 German version, Nosferatu, a film that broke copyright law just as it broke cinema conventions.  Despite attempts to kill it, this filmic vampire has not only survived, but thrived, in both video and DVD forms.  We'll examine these in the following article that unearths... 

By DON MANKOWSKI

And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.

Certainly, Thomas Hutter must have had second thoughts about his business enterprise as the strange coach bore down upon him. With eerie supernatural speed it came, as he stood by the lonely road just beyond the narrow pass in the Carpathian Mountains.

At the urging of his employer back in Wisborg, Germany, young Hutter had agreed to travel deep into central Europe, deep into "the land of phantoms," in the hopes of selling a local estate to a rich but eccentric Transylvanian. It meant that Hutter would have to leave his dear wife, Ellen, for quite some time, but he saw this as a chance to better their lives.

Doubts must have plagued him as he entered the vehicle at the bidding of the dark, muffled, rat-faced driver. Plagued him as the conveyance turned and shot off on its return path, moving unnaturally through a landscape of ghostly white trees rearing up against abruptly blackened skies.

But there was to be no turning back, as the otherworldly cab delivered Hutter to the grounds of a decaying castle. The young real estate agent determinedly stalked through the gates to meet his host.

The man was clad in black, including an incongruous cap that would befit a bishop or a rabbi. He was tall and thin, almost emaciated. But hunched, with bulging shoulders. Deep set, staring eyes blazed under his bushy eyebrows.

Still, the man, Graf Orlok, was cordial, in a stiff, formal manner. He had looked over the deeds that Hutter had brought with businesslike aplomb, and had set for his guest a sumptuous dinner table. Hutter must have warmed to the idea that everything was going to work itself out.

That is, right up until he clumsily cut his finger with a bread knife, and Orlok snapped for the wound at the sight of his blood.

Does it all sound familiar? Of course it does.

The place was Germany, and the year was 1922, between the two great wars. Filmmaker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau had directed the first surviving adaptation of Bram Stoker’s influential 1897 novel Dracula. The film was Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (i.e., Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror). That’s not a throwaway title: one of the earliest horrors, this silent film is very much a symphony, an intricately planned work.

Hutter finds himself a prisoner in the castle, and learns that Orlok sleeps by day in a coffin and prowls the night seeking the blood of the living. He’s a four hundred year old vampire, one of the "not-dead," or to use the folkloric term, a nosferatu. Never mind that Stoker’s Dracula got younger as the story progressed: as unsettling as was his initial appearance, Orlok devolves into something truly monstrous.

He displays a huge dome of a bald head, the only hair a few wild tufts over his long, pointed ears; talon claws where his hands should be; and sharp, rat-like teeth at the center of his thin-lipped mouth, which is framed by unnaturally pale skin and a huge, hooked beak of a nose. He glides about his domain in spectral fashion, as curtains part and doors open for him in defiance of natural law. Orlok is something of a caricature of Stoker’s Dracula, recognizable under selective distortions.

The original premier program for Nosferatu.

Hutter’s employer, Herr Knock, is somehow under Orlok’s control, and it was he who schemed to use Hutter to bring his "master" to Wisborg. Somehow, Ellen’s love protects Hutter from the vampire even at their great distance. Orlok had admired the small photograph of Ellen that Hutter carried, and the three will be psychically connected forevermore, something that the film will emphasize via then-innovative intercutting of scenes.

With a cargo of extra coffins, Orlok travels to Germany by land and sea. He brings pestilence, embodied in a legion of rats, and survives the voyage by feasting upon the crew of sailors. Once the ghostly ship glides into Wisborg, Orlok establishes himself in the old house that Knock had designated for him, just across the street from the home of Hutter and wife Ellen. Along with the plague-carrying rats, the vampire preys upon the town, threatening to turn it into a city of the dead. There are already incessant funeral processions. (The word "nosferatu" actually derives from plague-carrier terminology: it was Stoker who first associated it with the undead.)

Hutter has since escaped the castle, and made his way back home. Fighting off his shock-induced delirium, he will enlist the aid of wise Professor Bulwer, a man with knowledge of the vampire.

However, in a nod to feminism astonishing for its time, it is Ellen who saves the day, saves it from the encompassing night. She invites the vampire to her bedside and permits him to partake of her blood, until the distracted fiend is trapped and destroyed, evaporated by the rays of the rising sun. Hutter mourns Ellen, but with her sacrifice, vitality is restored to the region.

Its story a simple one, the power of Nosferatu dwells in its images. Murnau’s art director, Albin Grau, was an occultist. Together they achieved expressionism despite having to use actual sets rather than studio constructions. Editing and camera tricks are invented on the spot. Night and shadow, nature and the underworld are constantly at odds. Every shot has extraordinary depth and range. There is always something lurking beyond our sight. The vampire frequently enters the picture through a frame, as if from another plane of existence. Orlok’s appearances are a virtual slide show of striking artwork.

Max Schreck (whose surname means literally "fear" or "terror") is absolutely perfect as Orlok. Greta Schroeder nicely enacts the lovely, tragic Ellen. Gustav von Wangenheim is quite hard to take as Hutter, with his embarrassingly dated techniques. (Films of this epoch did tend to paint their characters broadly, and Nosferatu is relatively restrained in this regard). Still, Hutter begins clumsy and childlike, and will be believably transformed by the grim events. Alexander Granach, who plays Knock, is the only actor who had much of a future in film, as a character player.

Providing an assessment that cannot be improved upon, a Hungarian film critic, Bela Balazs, wrote that the film evoked "a chilly draft from doomsday."

Although Bram Stoker had died in 1910, his estate still controlled the rights to the already immortal vampire tale. Murnau had his scriptwriter Henrik Galeen change the London setting of the latter part of the story to his native Germany, rolled the time back the plague year of 1843, and altered the names of the characters. Still, the film was suppressed through Florence Stoker’s enlistment of British and international authorities. Legal judgment was that all copies should be destroyed. This effort was incomplete, but the film was doomed to an underground existence, as if it could survive only by night. It would be Prana Films’ alpha and omega. Murnau (1888-1931) had just begun a promising American career (with the much acclaimed Sunrise, 1927) when he was killed in an auto accident.

In the early Sixties, when the film was merely forty years old, there was an American television program that presented classic silent films in half-hour condensations, with background narration for a new audience. It was under these circumstances that I first met Nosferatu after a fashion, on a weekly installment of Silents Please! Along with many of my peers in that "Famous Monsters" generation, I had already viewed the 1931 Dracula in television broadcasts and the 1958 Horror of Dracula in a theater. I suspect that many of them wrote this one off as a curio, but I began a fascination with the film that has lasted for another forty years. Indeed, it has always been my favorite silent film.

This vignette version was about the only way that one could see Murnau’s film in those days, unless one happened to have access to some college class or film society that had a French print in their possession. Bad splices resulting from poor care take a terrible toll on a film that uses carefully constructed frame-to-frame counterpoint as does this one.

It’s a freewheeling adaptation, but the early scenes are close enough to the novel that they’re often used to illustrate video discussions of the book. (The fidelity plus the fact that you’d have to pay royalties to use scenes from the Universal or Hammer adaptations!)

Sometime during the 1940s, the Cinematheque Française put together a print from copies that had survived the wrath of Stoker’s widow, and perhaps as an act of defiance, they substituted Stoker’s character names on the new intertitle cards. Graf Orlok was now Count Dracula, Knock was Renfield, Bulwer would be Van Helsing. The Hutters became the Harkers, although their Christian names lost a bit in the translation as "Jonathon" and "Nina" rather than Jonathan and Mina. Still, the German locale was identified as Bremen, (although recent restorations place the action in Wisborg).

New York’s Museum of Modern Art translated the French titles (the source of the quotation that opened this article), and maintained this film through the decades. Iowa-based Blackhawk Films made rental copies available about 1972, and some of us finally managed to see the thing in its entirety (for the most part) as one in a "great films" series on the Public Broadcasting System.

As the film was never legal to begin with, copyright protection was out of the question. Once the home video revolution was in full swing, just about every impecunious video label offered a VHS (or Beta) release of Nosferatu, almost always derived from one of the circulating Blackhawk prints in various states of disrepair.

I’ve heard it estimated that a substantial majority of all the silent films ever produced simply don’t exist any more. A huge percentage of those that did survive the ravages of time on nitrate and celluloid are almost totally forgotten. Against this backdrop, Nosferatu’s popularity after more than eight decades is truly a testament to its power.

Homage to the Nosferatu iconography pops up in films down through the years. George Melford’s alternate Spanish-language Dracula of 1931 features a swipe or two. The vampire hunter portrayed by Roman Polanski in his film Dance Of The Vampires (a.k.a. The Fearless Vampire Killers, 1967) is a send up of "Hutter." The television adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979) featured Reggie Nalder as an Orlok-inspired vampire.

In Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead And Loving It (1995) we get to see Leslie Nielsen’s Dracula pivot out of his coffin as stiff as a board, whereupon he bangs his head on a hanging lamp. In Waxwork II: Lost In Time (1992), a time-tossed character stumbles through a recreation of the Nosferatu milieu. Batman Returns (1992) depicts a dark metropolis named Gotham City, and its villain is named Max Schreck.

Werner Herzog mounted an elaborate remake in (pale) color and wide screen in 1979. The film does a nice job of establishing something of that mythic imagery and sense of dread that characterizes the original. He lifts a few images from Murnau’s film, and contributes some striking new ones in the same style.

In a Schreck-like makeup, Klaus Kinski is quite impressive in a sympathetic portrayal of a very forlorn vampire. Herzog’s film exists in two versions, German (Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht) and English (Nosferatu the Vampyre), with the dialogue scenes actually filmed twice.

With impressive Netherlands settings, it’s a superb effort, but somehow still worlds apart from the 1922 film. Unfortunately, the script restores the "Dracula" nomenclature to the characters (e.g., Isabelle Adjani plays "Lucy"). This is a mistake: Orlok deserves to exist on his own terms, not subsumed under the generic Dracula mantle. Kinski later appeared again as Nosferatu (so named this time out) in an almost forgotten semi-sequel, Nosferatu a Venezia (i.e., Nosferatu In Venice) some seven years later, a beautiful though incomprehensible film.

An ambitious 2000 project was Shadow Of The Vampire, directed by Elias Merhige. It’s about the making of Nosferatu, but takes the outrageous stance that the mysterious Max Schreck was a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) hired for authenticity. Obsessed director Murnau (John Malkovich) has to deal with his very problematic star and get his film into the can before Schreck drains his cast and crew of their lives. Leading lady Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack) truly gives all for her art.

Merhige’s film is certainly a bold and interesting take on the subject with a nice period flavor, but I’d have settled for a factual documentary of the production of the classic film and its legal wars, a truth stranger than fiction.

(For the record, Max Schreck (1879-1936) did have an existence outside this one film, although shots of him out of character have proven elusive.) Now and again, a clip from the 1922 film will be integrated with the new footage in Shadow.

(Is there anything wrong with this title or the concept? Classical vampires don’t show up on photographs, and they don’t cast shadows. Murnau wanted shadows, and so ignored—to great effect—that bit of folklore, thus repealing that rule forevermore in the cinema. Orlok does show up in a mirror, but no one seems to have cared.)

However I might enjoy their efforts, I still find that Kinski, Nalder, Dafoe and other portrayers are still human beings in makeup. Only Schreck suggests something from another dimension, another world.

Just about every new version of Dracula claims to be the most faithful to the original concept. Very much on its own terms, Nosferatu remains just that. 

In retrospect, it’s not too surprising that my generation of Americans has little regard for silent motion pictures. You never saw a silent broadcast on a network or a major local station. They were relegated to Saturday morning and specialty slots on fringe channels. They were usually projected at the wrong speed, something that worked for comedy but was fatal to drama. They were shown without musical scores, or with inappropriate ones. They were shown via old prints in poor condition: how much of that chiaroscuro you see is the result of artistic design, how much of bad contrast?

Those that relied upon limited use of colored film stock (to be discussed) for their moods had lost that feature. Certainly, it required determination to appreciate silent films.

However, with the advent of multiplying cable and satellite outlets, and of home video, a renaissance is possible. A quiet one, to be sure, but isn’t that appropriate?

As I said before, no legal protection accrues to Murnau’s film. Anybody who owns a print of it can exhibit it, or put it on a tape or disc and sell it. Sometimes, it seems as if everyone has done so. (There’s even an internet copy that you can download if you have the patience.) New intertitle cards, color tints and musical scores, however, are protected, and it’s these elements that make the variant versions so interesting. The discussion that follows is mostly limited to DVD releases.

Madacy Home Video offers a good, clean print, nicely framed, with new main titles. A jazzy orchestral score by Peter Schirmann is rather good; it actually tries to follow the action instead of just vamping (bad choice of words?) to the appropriate mood. Maybe that’s frowned upon by purists, but I like it. Alpha Video has a traditional print with an unaccredited orchestral score. Both of these go for about $7.

Can’t beat that, eh? Well, for the same price, Diamond Entertainment pairs it with a foggy Phantom of the Opera (the Lon Chaney version). The Navarre/Real Values disc will cost you perhaps $10, but they go Diamond one better by adding a murky Metropolis to create a triple feature.

All of these "nosferati" hail back to the Blackhawk Films version via various prints thereof, and all of them feature the same intertitles with the names of Dracula, Harker and Nina restored to book specifications.

They’re all untinted, presented in stark black and white. Indeed, until the restorations of the 1990s, the film had always been shown in this manner, and critics had always marveled at how the vampire is able to lurk about in what appears to be broad daylight. Some apologists had explained that this harkened back to Stoker, whose Count could indeed operate by day, though with limited effectiveness. The explanation, of course, is that blue tints are supposed to be used to suggest night for Orlok’s outdoor scenes.

Diamond and Navarre offer different, uncredited musical scores, mostly organ solos, with Diamond’s heavy on swipes from Bach. They’re adequate. All of these suffer from speckles, splices and the usual glitches to which old film is heir. The Alpha and Madacy discs show evidence of greater care in the transfer; the other two are overscanned. (You will note that the opening titles are clipped at the edges. A common benchmark is the memorable scene wherein Orlok rises catapult-fashion from his coffin on the ship, and just how much of his head is cut off at the top of the frame.)

Murnau’s film has so much going on at the corners and the edges that these are rarely expendable. The Diamond displays some bad contrast as well. If you want a bargain basement look at this film, I’d have to suggest going with the Madacy, with Alpha as second choice, unless the idea of getting a poor copy of another classic or two appeals to your sense of thrift. (The Navarre has stunning chapter-select screens, but alas, they’re impossible to navigate!) I clocked these presentations in the range of 79-81 minutes, and that’s a good thing.

Why? Most of the earlier videotape releases of these films ran a scant 62-64 minutes, because they were transferred via a projector running the film at the modern "sound" speed of 24 frames per second (fps). Now, silent-era films were often shot with a camera hand-cranked by the cinematographer, and often shown via projectors hand-cranked by employees who were supposed to follow explicit instructions but often didn’t, resulting in a bewildering variety of running times. Comedies used to be cranked slower when photographed, resulting in speeded-up action when projected at standard rates. This serves to produce the frenetic, quirky-jerky motion that we associate with the Keystone Kops, and it can be fatal to a dramatic movie.

I believe that experts prefer that silent films be run at 18-20 fps, and that’s evidently what was done for these DVD releases. I can’t boast of having senses acute enough to readily detect the 33% difference between 18 and 24 fps except in a very general feel of the flow, but some critics claim that it is significant, so you might want to take this into account when selecting an edition.

A recent entrant into the Nosferatu Stakes is one from Father Time Productions called Movies’ First Monsters. The disc contains the first-ever home video release of the 1910 version of Frankenstein. As that particular tidbit runs barely thirteen minutes, a presentation of Nosferatu accompanies it. This turns out to be the same version we’ve been discussing, but it’s unusually sharp and clear, and nicely framed (in fact, it’s slightly windowboxed) for a change. The new David Hunseder small-orchestra score is nice. This edition goes for about $20.

A classy looking three-film package, "German Silent Masterworks" from Triton Multimedia teams Nosferatu with Murnau’s comedy The Last Laugh (1924) and Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920) for about $15. (The last film is presented totally silent, with no music or effects. Bah!) Their Nosferatu print is the same as Madacy’s, with the same score, and I really can’t see paying more for this set. I understand that Elite Entertainment offers this same version in a really overpriced ($45) set with poor copies of Der Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919). These Schirmann-scored Nosferatu copies are the faster-cranked (24 fps) versions, probably to accommodate the score (which dates back to the sixties at least) without distortion.

Grapevine Video has a Nosferatu for about $15. Its new main titles and intertitles manage to mix the Stoker and Galeen character names! It’s tinted in limited fashion and reasonably clean (close to the 18 fps standard), with an okay piano-and-organ score. You also get a comedy short subject, "The General Store, with Bobby Dunn," which I have yet to sit through.

Arrow Entertainment’s version ($10-15) is titled Nosferatu: The First Vampire. It features a three-minute introduction by David Carradine. Now, his father was one of the best screen Draculas, but David’s cue-card reading contributes zero to the experience (he does swing a sword-cane for effect). You get an indifferently tinted print (24 fps speed), new intertitles, and a goth-rock score by some people known as Type O Negative.

Although I am not particularly enamored of such new musical forms, this kind of radical reworking doesn’t bother me, not so long as the original version remains available in some form. (If you let me rework the film, I think that I’d replace that ridiculous speeded-up coach ride with a parallel version done in excruciating slow motion for a new emphasis on the supernatural aspects.) It just might introduce a new audience to an appreciation for the film, a good thing. This release includes a vampire-themed music video by the group.

Going first class, there are three recent reconstructions of which you should take note.

Kino Video released a marvelous VHS edition in 1991, finally restoring the title to Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror. They used the "correct" 18 fps projection speed, color tints based upon research, a nice organ score by Timothy Howard, new title cards closer to the original: the names Orlok, Hutter, Ellen and so on, with the action set in Wisborg. Despite what many reviewers say, this version contains no additional footage over and above what we’ve been accustomed to.

There’s also the Image Entertainment DVD of 1998, that’ll run you about $20. It’s similar to the Kino VHS, but with a few new title cards, and an additional music score option (an electronic one by The Silent Orchestra). Extras include a travelogue of still-existing locations (the "NosferaTour"), a gallery of stills, and an analysis of the famous "negative" carriage ride.

There’s a feature-length professorial commentary by Lokke Heiss. It’s been criticized, perhaps fairly, as "too Freudian," but surely a film of this importance deserves academic analysis. Since about Day One, analysts have been detecting sexual subtexts in the film. One declared that the rigid, pointy form of Orlok represented an ambulatory phallus. I’d hate to see one of the cinema’s great icons reduced to the status of a "dickhead," so I’ll avoid this discussion. There are also political interpretations, both anti-Nazi (Orlok prefigures Hitler) and anti-Semitic (Orlok embodies a Jewish plague)!

The indefatigable David Shepard spearheaded this restoration as well as the previous one. Apparently, this version has been enhanced and re-released as of 2002, keeping it neck-and-neck (ouch!) with the item to be discussed. (Both Shepard versions turn up on the Turner Classic Movies channel from time to time.)

Finally, there’s a new 2002 Kino on Video release. It has a new color tint scheme (with nice use of deep blue), based upon more research, two new musical scores (which, forgive me, seem interchangeable), and new title cards. More importantly, newly rediscovered footage has extended some scenes and reintroduced other, minor ones. Although no one element makes a striking difference, the overall effect is palpable. Although there is no commentary track, the disc has a photo gallery plus long, intriguing excerpts from some other Murnau films. This one retails for about $25, but is well worth it.

It’s quite possible that there never will be a truly authoritative cut. In 1930, a sound version of the film Die Zwölfte Stunde (i.e., The Twelfth Hour) was released in Germany. It has additional footage, some perhaps shot by Murnau. Historians differ as to how much of this material ought to be restored to Nosferatu. It may not be an improvement, but surely we should have a chance to see it. Henrik Galeen’s hand-written intertitle cards featuring idiosyncratic sketches are rumored to exist as well.

For Nosferatu’s Diamond Anniversary in 1997, James Bernard composed an original score for the film. Bernard is remembered for his stunning music for the Hammer vampire films beginning with Horror of Dracula in 1958. So far, his themes have only accompanied theatrical and television presentations, without an official video release in the United States. This score is available on CD, and I urge all of you to give it a listen. As we might hope, it’s bombastic and sinister, yet with its lovely moments. I sincerely hope that it will accompany a good restoration one day. That might be the definitive Nosferatu.

Definitive that is, for at least a little while. I suspect that after eighty-one more years, when a hundred more recent vampire films are forgotten, they’ll be debating the merits of Murnau’s Nosferatu in 2084. The not-dead? An understatement.

(Don Mankowski is based in central Florida, but we suspect that he sleeps in his native Chicago soil by day. Check out his Website.)

Thanks, Don!  Yes, you're right...Nosferatu is one un-dead creation that will remain un-dead, as long as folks care about cinema.  And, if a truly definitive version of the film hasn't been released yet, we can always hope.  After all, we have the example of Metropolis to encourage us.  Perhaps, in 2084, film buffs will be debating the merits of the latest "definitive" version of Nosferatu as opposed to the "new" restoration of London After Midnight.  

Article copyright © Don Mankowski

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