To kick off 31 Days of Hell, we begin with an excursion into the depths of the incarnations of Nosferatu.
In the beginning of July, 2015 at a cemetery in Stahnsdorf, Germany, a bizarre and deeply disturbing crime occurred: the 83 year old gravesite of the German poster child of silent film direction, F.W. Murnau, was vandalized by grave robbers who proceeded to steal the director’s skull from his crypt. Potsdam police investigating the scene found wax drippings at the crypt, suggesting the crime was the work of Satanists performing an occult ceremony. While not the first of several illegal entries into the director’s gravesite, according to manager Olaf Ihlefeldt who cited instances of vandalism in the 1970s, this is the most extreme desecration yet, leaving police, the Murnau Foundation and the filmgoing community in shock and disbelief. Just what is it about Murnau’s legacy as the grandfather of German Expressionism and creator of the most influential horror film of all time Nosferatu that could possibly have precipitated such a heinous and disgraceful act? Perhaps the question can best be answered by the film itself, which spawned both a 1979 remake and a fictionalized account of the film’s inception in the year 2000. As late as July 29, 2015, yet another remake was announced with The Witch director Robert Eggers at its helm, proving the century old vampire thriller is still completely relevant to this day. With the dreadful news fresh in mind, the Movie Sleuth takes a concerted look at the three films pointing toward a moment in film history that’s still affecting people to this very day.
Nosferatu
(1922 – directed by F.W. Murnau)
Financed by the short-lived production company Prana
Film which declared bankruptcy to evade the inevitable copyright infringement
lawsuit following the film’s release, Nosferatu
arose from a bizarre war experience by producer Albin Grau. While on a tour of duty, Grau encountered a
Serbian farmer who claimed his father was a vampire and a member of the
Undead. The encounter stayed with Grau
and led him to pursue a vampire film project.
After hiring F.W. Murnau to direct the film, the story of Dracula underwent numerous changes in
addition to its title, including intensifying the vampire’s vulnerability to
sunlight. While the subsequent official
adaptation of Dracula by Tod Browning
prominently featured Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the titular role with
slicked back black hair well dressed in a cape, it’s Murnau’s Nosferatu with mercurial actor Max
Schreck in role of Count Orlok viewers to this day still point to as the more authentic
Dracula of the two. With Schreck’s lanky
figure, bat-like pointed ears, bald crane and elongated fingernails, it’s one
of those rare horror monsters where just looking at him will make your blood
run cold. Equally chilling is Schreck’s
movement and piercing eyes which open wide as his bloodlust overcomes his
composed reserve. The way he slowly
walks towards the camera in and out of rooms only adds to the tension, as if
the hunter needn’t run to catch his prey.
Upon release, Nosferatu
was the target of a copyright infringement lawsuit initiated by the Bram
Stoker estate. After the court ruled in
Stoker’s favor all generated prints of the film were ordered to be destroyed
but a few surviving prints still circulating throughout the world kept it from
being banished from existence forever.
In the years since the controversy the film engendered and well after
its director’s untimely death, Nosferatu has
come to be known as one of the top three most influential horror films of all
time. A favorite Halloween costume, a
regular figure in pop culture in everything from SpongeBob SquarePants, rock band tributes from Blue Oyster Cult and
Art Zoyd and even an Orlok origins graphic novel by Louis Pecsi, Count Orlok
and Nosferatu may well be the most
enduringly popular and commercially successful silent film ever made. Much like its titular vampire, it is a work
of eternity that whose grandiose stature only seems emboldened by time.
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Nosferatu
the Vampyre (1979 - directed by Werner Herzog)
Werner Herzog often referred to F.W. Murnau’s
unofficial Dracula adaptation Nosferatu as ‘the greatest film to ever
come out of Germany’ and in 1979, the poster child of New German Cinema wrote,
produced and directed his very own homage to Murnau’s timeless
masterpiece. Following Stroszek by reuniting with volatile
actor Klaus Kinski for their second collaborative effort (the first being Aguirre, the Wrath of God), Nosferatu the Vampyre is both a lovingly
detailed remake of Murnau’s film and a continuation of Herzog’s own obsessions
with torment in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Co-starring veteran actors Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz, it’s one of
the most haunting and realistic vampire films ever made. While paying direct tribute to Murnau’s
iconography including framing shots and setups identically to Nosferatu, this is clearly Herzog’s show
with his finest actor imbuing the fanged nightwalker with empathy and
torment. Where Murnau’s intention was to
evoke abject terror in viewers of the creature of the night, Herzog views the
vamp as a tragic figure begging for death.
Much like Oklahoma!,
Herzog’s Nosferatu was shot twice in
both English and German with all the actors speaking their own lines as opposed
to post-production dubbing. The move
prompted by 20th Century Fox proved to further the film’s box office
potential in international markets, although Herzog years later would profess
his preference for the German release version.
The concept of a remake will always be controversial with purists
decrying the retelling of an already perfect film to be an outrage. What makes this version so unique and
affecting in its own right is the indelible teamwork of Herzog and Kinski, who
only five films together but all are unforgettable expressions of men
struggling with insurmountable outside forces in the world. Not necessarily a horror film in the
conventional sense, Herzog’s Nosferatu with
the only actor who could have played the titular role at its epicenter achieves
that rare feat of truly providing audiences with the knowledge of what it feels
like to be a several centuries old night crawler. Where other movies would have gone for cheap
thrills and jump scares, Nosferatu the
Vampyre stares Kinski’s monster down right in the face as he unleashes a
torrent of anguish via extended, passionate monologues delivered to the
camera. To die at the fangs of a vampire
is terrible indeed but by the end of Herzog’s Nosferatu, we’ve come to realize living forever by feeding on the
blood of others is a fate far worse than death.
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Shadow
of the Vampie (2000 - directed by E.
Elias Merhige)
Begotten
director
E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire presents
a curious what-if. What if Max Schreck,
the actor who played Nosferatu the Vampyre in F.W. Murnau’s enduring monument
of silent film horror, was in fact a real vampire? What if Murnau, the man in charge of possibly
the most important German director who ever lived, was in fact a megalomaniac
who didn’t care how many bodies fell at the fangs of Schreck in order to
realize his vision? Starring John
Malkovich as Murnau and featuring an Academy Award nominated performance by Willem
Dafoe as Schreck, Shadow of the Vampire is
both a brilliant satire about the nature of silent film direction which is
often infamously remembered as an era of filmmaking where blood was shed and
bodies fell at the behest of an artist wanting to achieve the most believable
realization of his vision possible. Less
about Murnau or Schreck’s actual life stories, it’s a fictitious black comedy
that gets to the heart of the recklessness, vanity and disregard for human life
that often went hand in hand with the silent film era.
Produced in part by BBC Films and among the earliest
feature films to be financed by actor Nicolas Cage’s production company Saturn
Films, Shadow of the Vampire turns
our knowledge of the classic Nosferatu film
on its head as a fictionalized historical drama about the silent filmmaking
process.
The film’s cast
features a surprising group of supporting character actors who also give their
all, most notably Udo Kier, Cary Elwes and of all people, Eddie Izzard as the
main hero of Nosferatu. Fans of Izzard will be taken aback by just
how well he plays the part of Nosferatu’s
fearful silent muse, donning aside his comic persona almost completely. Ultimately though, the heart of the film stems
from Willem Dafoe’s stunning performance as Schreck, making him a living
breathing creature of the night with many monologues about his thirst for
bloodsucking Murnau’s crew members’ mistake for method acting. Dafoe’s take on Schreck also allows
interpretation of the vamp as a kind of Marlon Brando type, increasingly
difficult and even unruly despite his inclusion being worth all the trouble in
the end. In a way, Dafoe’s acting is a
force to reckon with all his own and watching his bat-like twitchings of his
head, his animalistic sniffing and oversized fingernails all work to make
Schreck among the most believable and realistic vampire performances ever
created!
Despite only being released into the art-house circuit
with limited bookings, Shadow of the
Vampire received effusive praise from the critics and even won Roger
Ebert’s Special Jury Prize for the 10 Best Films of 2000. While not a literal adaptation of the making
of Nosferatu with many characters in
the film dying at the hands of Schreck who in fact lived long lives, Shadow of the Vampire does a better job
exuding directorial arrogance and the dangerousness of the silent film era than
any documentary ever could. Much like
Mario Van Peebles’ Baadasssss!, it
comes closer to understanding the difficulty of the filmmaking process than
like-minded movies have tried and failed to do.
It’s also one Hell of a vampire movie which both further mythologizes Nosferatu’s place in film history and proves to be a startling darkly
comic entertainment in its own right with a unique take on Max Schreck that
will definitely stand the test of time.
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-Andrew Kotwicki
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