‘My dreams are heavy in this desolate castle…’
Whilst not quite as sophisticated as Metropolis or as influential as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, F.W. Murnau’s expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu is still rightly being lauded on this the 100 year anniversary of its release. Murnau took Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel Dracula and changed the names in a fruitless attempt to avoid legal action, but the monster he created has endured as pervasively as anything from the silent era…
Count Orlok (Max Schreck) is excited about the purchase of a new property. He’s also rather too excited about his real estate agent Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Hutter’s innocent wife Ellen (Greta Schröder). He also hates sunlight and drinks people’s blood. Odd chap.
You’ve seen Nosferatu. You might not think you have, and you might not have seen all of it, but the image of the deadly count framed by an arched doorway, or peering over the prone body of Ellen, or his shadow slinking up the staircase, are as embedded in cinematic history as Chaplin’s walking stick and Eastwood’s cigar. This is due to the extraordinary vision of F.W. Murnau, who worked diligently to ensure that his incarnation of Count Dracula would be the final say on cinematic vampires, but also thanks to a chilling and iconic performance from his leading man Schreck (a name which is, incidentally, the German word for ‘terror’ – nominative determinism at its finest).
Naysayers will say that a silent German film from 100 years ago cannot possibly be frightening today, and while it has obviously lost some of its raw power over time, I defy anyone to watch the moment in which the dreaded vampire stares directly into the camera without feeling a shiver down their spine. What can’t be denied is the performance of Schreck, and neither can the assertion that he is still the greatest onscreen representation of Count Dracula ever rendered to film.