User:Andrzejbanas/Nosferatu

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror
Directed by	F. W. Murnau
Screenplay by	Henrik Galeen
Based on	Dracula by Bram Stoker
Starring	Max Schreck Gustav von Wangenheim Greta Schröder Georg H. Schnell Ruth Landshoff Gustav Botz Alexander Granach John Gottowt
Cinematography	Fritz Arno Wagner
Music by	Hans Erdmann
Production company	Prana Film G.m.b.H.
Release dates	17 February 1922 (1922-02-17) (Rotterdam) 4 March 1922 (1922-03-04) (Berlin)
Country	Germany
Language	Silent film

Plot

Nosferatu (1922)

In 1838, in the fictional German town of Wisborg,[confirm] Thomas Hutter is sent to Transylvania by his employer, estate agent Herr Knock, to visit a new client, Count Orlok, who is planning on buying a house across from Hutter's own home. While embarking on his journey, Hutter stops at an inn in which the locals are frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name.

Hutter rides on a coach to a castle, where he is welcomed by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away. Hutter wakes up the morning after to find fresh punctures on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house and notices on the table a miniature portrait of Hutter's wife, Ellen, an image that the young man carries with him in a small circular frame. Admiring the portrait, the count remarks that she has a "lovely neck." Later, Hutter continues to read a book about vampires that he took from the local inn. He now begins to suspect that Orlok is indeed a vampire. With no way to bar the door of his bedroom, Hutter desperately tries to hide as midnight approaches. Suddenly, the door begins to slowly open by itself; and, as Orlok enters, a terrified Hutter hides under the bed covers and falls unconscious. Meanwhile, at the same time back in Wisborg, Ellen arises from her own bed and sleepwalks to the railing of her bedroom's balcony. She then starts walking on top of the railing, which gets the attention of her friend Harding, who is in the adjacent room. When the doctor arrives, Ellen shouts Hutter's name and envisions Orlok in his castle threatening her unconscious husband.

The next day, Hutter explores the castle, only to retreat back into his room after he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant in the crypt. Hours later, Orlok piles up coffins on a coach and climbs into the last one before the coach departs, and Hutter rushes home after learning that. The coffins are taken aboard a schooner, where the sailors discover rats in the coffins. All of the ship's crew later die, and Orlok takes control. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carries one of his coffins and moves into the house that he purchased.

Many deaths in the town follow after Orlok's arrival, which the town's doctors blame on an unspecified plague caused by the rats from the ship. Ellen reads the book that Hutter found; it claims that a vampire can be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts the vampire with her beauty and offers him her blood of her own free will. She decides to sacrifice herself. She opens her window to invite Orlok in and pretends to fall ill so that she can send Hutter to fetch Professor Bulwer, a physician. After he leaves, Orlok enters and drinks her blood, but the sun rises, which causes Orlok to vanish in a puff of smoke. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband.

Count Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains is later shown destroyed.

Themes

Anglophone scholarship on Nosferatu primarily focuses on the films relation to the traditional arts: specifically, comparisons to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula and romantic painting. Secondly with regard to issues of gender and sexuality in the figure of the vampire, and third with how the film is construed in its historical context. Some non-anglophone scholars, such as Luciano Berriatúa have traced the film to its occultism.

Expressionism and romanticism

The shadow of Count Orlok walking up the stairs in a dramatic moment in Nosferatu. Film historian Lokke Heiss wrote that the scene has become a defining image used to represent German expressionist cinema.

European art critics of the early 1900s used the words "expressive" and "expressionism" to differentiate and separate current painting styles that moved away from Impressionism. Between 1910 and 1914, art movements that collectively would be later termed as expressionism began flourishing in Germany, with its ideas and themes moving into other mediums such as cinema and theatre. Discussion of expressionist cinema generally emphasizes the visual elements such as the low-key lighting and dramatic shadows.

Following the positive critical reception of Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) in Germany, the film became exceedingly popular in countries such as France. The film is visually dynamic, featuring visual ranging from crooked roofs, inclined surfaces and other stylized sets, leading to several similarly stylized productions to follow such as Genuine (1920), From Morn to Midnight (1920) and Raskolnikow (1923). Summarizing these follow-ups, art and film critic Rudolf Kurtz said in 1926 that "Caligari struck a chord. Its successors have not managed to resonate more richly or more powerfully." Film historian Lokke Heiss said that only a few other directors working in Germany such as Fritz Lang and Paul Leni followed-up these works by assimilating elements of The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari by using the stylization associated with expressionism to show the emotional and psychological state of their characters. Murnau's Nosferatu would follow this small trend. Heiss described these films as being stories featuring psychological conflict where actions are internalized and filmmakers were freed from the need to recreate mimetic or realistic images. By 1922, Nosferatu's visual stylization of these films had become what Kurtz described as more subtle than Caligari and its early follow-ups. In more dramatic moments in the film, Nosferatu becomes a shadow play, where figures offscreen stand next to a source of light and suggest malevolent force which cannot be described. Heiss stated that scenes in Nosferatu produce scenes so memorable that certain moments, such as the shadow of Count Orlok walking up the stairs, have become defining images used to represent German expressionist cinema.

Caspar David Friedrich's Mondaufgang am Meer (1822). Works of Friedrich such as this were described by Luciano Berriatúa as being among the greatest influence on Nosferatu.

Luciano Berriatúa said Murnau's greatest influence on the film was the work of Caspar David Friedrich. In 1906, during the time Murnau was studying art, a major exhibition took place that brought the artist out of obscurity. Onward, the work of Freidrich became respected in Germany. Berriatúa wrote that Murnau was able to apply Freidrich's style to impose the presence of dark forces of nature on the viewer's subconscious. For other shots, such as horses being terrified by hyenas, Berriatúa suggested that Murnau was influenced by the drawings of Alfred Kubin, such as Die Hyäne (1920), in which the hyena is presented to us as a vampiric being and devours human corpses in cemeteries. At the Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection on the films 100th anniversary, an exhibit titled "Phantoms of the Night. 100 Years of Nosferatu" also placed focus on how the film was influenced by work by Kubin, Friedrich and Francisco de Goya were influences on the film.

The Vampire

Count Orlok's alterity including physical features such as a hooked nose, long claw-like fingers, his association with rats and the plague, origins in Eastern Europe, have been read as anti-Jewish stereotypes. Many of these elements trace back to the novel, where Count Dracula has been repeatedly read as having antisemitic metaphors. Some present in the book are not included in the film Nosferatu the Count's stalking of children, aversion to Christian symbols, and his greed.

In her book on Weimar era cinema, Katharina Leow said that this kind of imagery in Nosferatu was worthy of scrutiny, but found that regarding the film as being a potential precursor to films like Der ewige Jude (1940) was unwarranted. Leow found it unlikely that Murnau who lived with his partner's Jewish family and worked with Jewish screenwriter Henrik Galeen and work with the two prominent Jewish actors John Gottowt and Alexander Granach would have developed Nosferatu as a propaganda effort. Orlok also lacks several elements of antisemitic caricatures, such as swarthiness, hairiness, large jug ears, bulbous thick lips or a short or puffy stature that generally display as a stereotypically "Jewish" appearance.Leow wrote that Orlok's physiognomy resembles more closely the hook-nosed mummies of Egyptian pharaohs than 19th-century Jewish caricatures.

Occultism

The period between the 1870s and the 1930s saw a surge of occultist ideas and practices across the Western world. The fascination with the occult permeated throughout European society. Artists, including filmmakers, engaged with occultist thought and practices. For occultists, the visual arts held the promise of making occultist theories perceptible to the senses, summarized by Theosophist Franz Hartmann who said that "This spirit of light, called the soul of the world (the Astral Light), is a spiritual substance, which can be made visible and tangible by art." Nosferatu was produced by filmmakers who had interests in the occult. Murnau had a lifelong fascination with the occult, screenwriter Galeen was associated with New Rosicrucianism, and Albin Grau was a senior officer of the Berlin Pansophical Lodge, a New Rosicrucian magical order. Letters between Orlock and Knock in the film are full of text taken from authentic old grimoires and paracelsian treaties.

Berriatúa stated that at the core, the film exudes a paracelsian theosophical conception of the world, such a plague that is not only brought in by rats, but also personified by Count Orlok as a dark force of nature.

Genre

When asked about Murnau, director Edgar G. Ulmer said Murnau was not enthusiastic about fantastical films, and after seeing Nosferatu, Ulmer felt it was influenced by the films of Mauritz Stiller.

Retrospective reviews commented on the films status as a horror film, with William K. Everson in Classics of the Horror Film (1974) describing it as "quite possibly the first screen's first real horror film." Author and film critic Kim Newman wrote in The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies (2018) that the film was the only Dracula adaptation be primarily interested in horror, that even more so than Caligari the film was "a template for the horror film."

Production

Background

Prana-Film logo.

Albin Grau, an architect and artist, was heavily involved in the world of German occultism. At the end of January 1921, in association with the businessman Enrico Dieckmann, Grau founded his film production company and called it Prana Film GmbH, using a Sanskrit word roughly translatable as "breath of life" and a symbol replicating the traditional yin and yang circle. The aim of the company was to make create films with a supernatural theme. Nine films film set to be made, but only their first film announced, Nosferatu, was made. German cinema has had made films with supernatural themes prior to Nosferatu. These include Stellan Rye's The Student of Prague (1913), Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen's The Golem (1915) and Richard Oswald's Unheimliche Geschichten (1919) and Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

Pre-production

In 1921, Grau said in Bühne und Film he was inspired to develop the film from a story he heard while in Serbia in 1916, when a farmer told him that his own father had risen from the dead as a vampire. Grau was responsible for the film's sets, costumes, intertitles, make-up, and the promotional campaign for the film.

Galeen wrote the screenplay for Nosferatu. Galeen was a former journalist who had worked for theatre director Max Reinhardt before starting a career in film as a screenwriter and director in 1913. David J. Skal commented on Galeen adapting Dracula (1897) and on being "faced with adapting a lengthy, rather wordy Victorian novel as a silent film", Galeen "deftly excised everything except the visual, metaphorical, and mythic."

Director F.W. Murnau had also worked with Reinhardt. Under Reindhardt, Murnau had befriended actor Conrad Veidt. In 1914, Murnau enlisted in World War I, arrived back in Germany from in 1919 after being a prisoner of war in an internment camp in Andermatt. Since returning, he had began directing through a company he had set up with Veidt. Murnau was actively involved in all phases of pre-production. Murnau added very little to the final script. For example, Murnau writes a different way Count Orlok leaves the ship Galeen wrote that the coffins opens slowly as the vampire climbs out while Murnau changed it to the canvas gliding away from the hatch. In the final film version, the Count is shown without a coffin rising up slowly and stiffly in a supernatural manner. While Murnau was preparing Nosferatu in July 1921, he was hired by Erich Pommer to work as a director for Decla Film.

Among the cast was Gustav Von Wangenheim. Von Wagenheim was the son of celebrated stage and film actor Eduard von Winterstein. His first film was in Passionels tagebuch (1916) (transl. Passionel's Diary) and following it, often played roles where he was a handsome young hero. In Nosferatu, Von Wanghenheim plays the young carefree estate agent who encounters the the Count Orlok portrayed by Max Schreck. Schreck's biographer Stefan Eickhoff said that outside Nosferatu, the actor himself "remains somewhat shrouded in mystery." Schreck was in 800 stage and screen roles. There is little mention of him in the memoirs or anecdotes of the many people he had worked with. Ruth Landshoff who was not a professional actress at the time. Murnau noticed Landshoff on her way to school and went to great lengths to meet her and her mother to get permission for her to take part in the film in the role of Ruth during holidays.

Filming

Filming commenced on Nosferatu in August 1921. The film was shot between Germany (Rostock, Wismar, Lübeck and Tegel forest) and the former Czechoslovakia (Vrátna dolina, Orava Castle and Dolný Kubín). Interior sequences were shot in Berlin in the Jofa-Atelier studios.

Eduard Kubat, who worked with Murnau on Nosferatu and his film Die Austreibung (1923) said Murnau was a "very strong willed director, and even with colleagues as distinguished as Karl Freund he always put his own personal imprints on the work." Wagner echoed this, saying that on set with his collaborators he was polite and never authoritative. Murnau received 25,000 Reichsmark for directing Nosferatu.

Fritz Arno Wagner, the cameraman and director of photography on Nosferatu said that for F.W. Murnau, the directing of a film depended on the camera angles, image framing and lighting. The film features wide variety of simple special effects. These include a prosthetic makeup, lighting and editing techniques, mechanical and camera effects such as multiple exposure, stop motion, and accelerated motion. German filmmakers utilized these effects for a display of set extensions and magical incidents, but Leow said that they were also used in employing them to convey thoughts and emotions, with Carl Hoffmann describing them as being able to "render pictorially all the script's thought content."

Filming ended in October 1921. According to an article in Der Film from October 1921, the final scenes were shot at the studio. These scenes were shot outside with three ships. A plane is parked on the ground to have its engine turn on the propeller have the sails flutter in the wind.

Music

The film was the first film score made by Hans Erdmann. Erdmann was a conductor composer and music critic, later editing the journal Film-Ton: Kunst. His score was performed at the Berlin premiere. The complete score is considered lost. A contemporary review in Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger at the film's premiere in Berlin, commented that the original score was Erdmann composed an original score for the film, which one critic described as a "sophisticated reflection of the feature film."

A shortened version of his score was published in 1926 as Fantastisch-romantische Suite which runs at 40 minutes. The first expansion of this score was undertaken by the German composer and conductor Berndt Heller, who debuted his score in Berlin during a restoration screening of the film in 1984. Heller has since expanded upon this score for a full orchestra with the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation endorsing the score. The foundation has misidentified the score as Erdmann's original score on several home video adaptations of the film. Film historian Enno Patalas described the expanded score in 2002 as emphasizing the fairy tale nature of the film and not the more horrific aspects. In her book Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (2016), Cristina Massaccesi called the score "very much of its time" recalling German and Austrian romantic styles, similar to those of Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Alexander Zemlinsky.

A score was done by James Kessler and Gillian Anderson who researched Erdmann's original orchestrations housed in the Library of Congress leading Kessler to compose new music in the style of Erdman which accompanied a new restoration of the film in 1995. Hammer Films composer James Bernard created an original score for the film in the 1990s. It performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra and is featured on the British Film Institute (BFI)'s DVD and blu-ray. It was Bernard's final score for a full-length film.

Release

The Marmorsaal Theater (pictured in 1900) where Nosferatu had its Berlin premiere.

Prior to the release of Nosferatu, a Berlin correspondent for Variety reported that the promotion for the film was "one of the most expensive publicity campaigns yet waged in Berlin for the showing of a single feature." Prana-Film even hired airships to promote Nosferatu.

Nosferatu was first screened to the public at Rotterdam in The Netherlands on February 17, 1922. The premiere in Berlin on March 4, 1922, was part of an elaborate Fest des Nosferatu (transl. Festival of Nosferatu). The Berlin premiere was held at Marmorsaal Theater on Kurfürstendamm. A report in the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung reported that the Marmorhaus "was full to bursting and literally not a single empty seat could be found." The screening began with Hans Erdmann conducting Heinrich Marschner's "Vampire Overture", from the opera Der Vampyr (1828). Following the screening, there was a ballet performance by Elizabeth Grube of the State Ballet company.

Nosferatu had been advertised that it was ready for distribution in the United States as early as 1924. The Film Daily announced that a film titled Nosferatu the Vampire will have its American premiere at Film Guild Cinema in New York on May 18, 1929. It was postponed until June 1. The screening of the film was done in order to take advantage of the reputation Murnau had gained; in particular from Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927).

Sound release

Nosferatu was readapted in 1930 for sound film, under the title Die zwölfte Stunde (transl. The Twelfth Hour) and was subtitled Eine Nacht des Grauens (transl. A Night of Horror). This version includes includes a new character, a priest, played by Hans Behal and featured extra scenes of dancing and banqueting at a long table and one where a young peasant girl roars with laughter a village conjuror whos hen lays a constant stream of eggs. This version included sound through a combination of film and gramophone record. Patalas said that the new scenes were included to provide justification for the use of music. Wagner told film historian Lotte H. Eisner he did not know anything about the new scenes and vouched that Murnau did not know about this version of the film. Eisner echoed the director was unlikely to have had anything to do with this version as he was busy with other projects in the United States. In the book The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972 (1989), James C. Robertson cited that Murnau had directed directed a film in 1920 titled The Twelfth Hour based on Dracula, with Robertson citing a review in the film magazine Close Up from January 1929 from Oswell Blakeston. Matthew E. Banks in The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire (2024) suggested that the film in question was most likely Nosferatu, despite Blakeston naming actors such as Werner Krauss and Alfred Abel appearing among the cast. The Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation suggested the film viewed was Die zwölfte Stunde.

Reception

Contemporary

Newspapers responded to audience reception in Berlin to the film. Vorwärts reported that "Because rational people do not let themselves be duped by unearthly creatures very long, the audience quickly preferred to move from the poisoned atmosphere of slavish submission (to horror) to the clean air of a carefully considered chuckle." The 8 Uhr-Abendblatt expanded on this, stating that when a hearse moved at high speed or when Count Orlok runs around his coffin "as if her were in a cartoon" gave the audience laughter, that otherwise "the atmosphere is uniform and the impact strong". Other publications such as Lichtbild-Bühne wrote that "“One can be assured that a few women who attended the premiere of Nosferatu had a bad night" Der Tag reported that at the end of the screening, "The applause was lively and well deserved."

Film historian Gary D. Rhodes described the reception following the Berlin premiere were "collectively more positive than negative."

Outside of Germany, French author André Gide wrote in his journals in 1928 that Nosferatu was "a film that was completely spoiled." Gide commented that Nosferatu's constant emphasis on terror and suggested the film would be superior if Orlock were portrayed as an inoffensive young man at first, stating that "if he shows his teeth at the outset, it becomes nothing but a childish nightmare." In the United States following its release in 1929, "V.S." of Daily Worker found the film derivative of either the play or novel Dracula and the film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari concluding that "this one sends you out insulted, and ashamed of whatever yielding to the glamor of the photography you may have felt, because of the childishness of the plot." "S. M. S." of The Billboard found that the film "hold to some degree the salient incidents" of the introduction, but "soon loses itself in a slough of strained hocus-pocus proceedings that tend to raise the hair on edge in the worst way." and that "Little cinema patrons will alternately shudder or giggle over it." Mordaunt Hall in The New York Times complimented the backgrounds the performance by Gustav von Wangenheim while finding the film film "not especially stirring [...] this would-be spine-chiller neglects little in its desire to make somebody or other look around for werewolfs, ghosts or vampires." The German-language American newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung found that much of the film had been edited while still finding it to be "a deeply disturbing film that effects the viewer in a way which he will not soon forget afterwards."

Many critics commented on the performance of Schreck as Orlok. S. M. S. found Schreck was "made up in the most terrifying screen characterization since Lon Chaney's Phantom struck fear in theater-goers' hearts." but found that continuity of the film was so amateur that this effect quickly wore off. Hall wrote that Schreck's movements were "too deliberate to be lifelike."

Retrospective

In her book on Murnau published in 1965, Eisner wrote that Nosferatu was "for a long time unappreciated." In British film magazine Sight & Sound, Theodore Huff said that while Murnau was "unquestionably one of the great masters of the screen" in an overview of Murnau's career dismissed Nosferatu as a "crude picture" with simple, one-dimensional quality to its characters and was no more profound than the American film productions Dracula (1931) or Frankenstein (1931). Eisner responded to overview in 1965, saying that Gustav von Wangenheim who played Hutter and Greta Schröder who played Ellen were never great actors and that Murnau had not yet acquired the masterly technique with actors that was to be evident in his more mature works. Eisner continued that Murnau managed to make Schreck, a normally undistinguished actor "a tragically ambiguous character" while Granach as Knock occasionally over did his facial contortions, but was "always naturally exuberant." Film historian Carlos Clarens, in his book An Illustrated History of the Horror Film (1967) reflected on Gide's response to the film as being heavy-handed and absurd and unimaginative saying that "all of which it is. However, F. W. Murnau was incapable of directing a totally uninteresting film." Clarens found the film benefitted from good location shooting while finding indoor sets as "flat and uninteresting". He described the story as robbing the vampire of its aura, showcasing scenes of the vampire piling up a cart so fast that it was ridiculous and that Schreck lacked the subtlety of Bela Lugosi as in Dracula (1931), despite the look of Orlock giving the film "its few chilling moments."

William K. Everson in Classics of the Horror Film (1974) complimented the films fast pace for a location shooting and concluded that the film was "a remarkable achievement, especially given the prevailing standards in Germany at that time - is still one of the very best Vampire essays." Everson commented that the only let down was the over-acting from Granach.

Legacy

Restorations and revival screenings

Unlike some of Murnau's other films, Nosferatu was never a lost film. This was largely due to Henri Langlois and the Cinémathèque française who preserved a copy of the second French version that was dated 1926 or 1927. A print of this version was shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1947 where foreign-language intertitles were translated into English; a normal procedure during this period. This version had names changed to match Stoker's novel, such as Hutter becoming Jonathan Harker and Orlok becoming Count Dracula. This version was returned to Europe, and distributed in Germany in the 1960s with German intertitles but keeping the changed names.

Interest in older films began happening in the 1960s. Along with the screening on Silents Please in 1961, Boxoffice magazine published an article stating after the success the New Yorker Theatre revival programming, the Bleecker Street Cinema in Greenwich Village would specialized in "unusual revivals" of mostly foreign-language films including Metropolis (1927) The Three-Penny Opera (1931) and Nosferatu. The New York Post commented Nosferatu drew more of an audience at the Bleecker than the films of Sergei Eisenstein at the Bleecher, writing that audiences "get on line for the same things, sex, horror, violence, except they want them in subtitles." Further New York locations began running revivals of silent films following this, including The Charles and The Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society run by Everson.

An early attempt at a restoration of Nosferatu was made in 1980 which restored missing and stylized intertitles. While the Cinémathèque française print of the second French version of Nosferatu was in black-and-white, Patalas said that the film was likely tinted in color on its release as it was common in Germany at the time to do so, and that a splice in the Act 5 of the film where a candle is blown indicated sections that were printed separately. In the mid-1980s, Luciano Berriatúa of the Filmoteca Española found a colored copy of the 1922 French version of the film which indicated scenes where had originally been colored. The Cineteca di Bologna underook a reconstruction in 1994 which used a black-and-white negative and had all damaged, incomplete, missing shots replaced with two other nitrate prints from two prints from the second French version, and Die zwölfte Stunde. This version had prints that were 400 meters longer than the 1,562 meters of the previous versions making no more shots missing from the original 1967 meters of length. A 1997 restoration was performed by Cineteca di Bologna and the Munich Film Archive while another was performed between 2005 and 2006 by Berriatúa on behalf of the FWMF. The latter restoration retrieved shots from prints from the Bundesarchiv (BArch) which were drawn from Czech export prints from the 1920s and further re-implementation of original intertitles from the BArch. Missing intertitles on this print were redesigned and can be recognized in the Eureka release when they are marked with FWMS at the bottom corner of the screen. Both the 1997 and 2000s restorations utilize the original intertitles designed by Albin Grau.

Television and home releases

The television program titled Silents Please introduced highlights of various films syndicated across America on ABC during Prime time. This included a short version of Nosferatu under the title Dracula in 1961. Shortly after the Silents Please screenings, Entertainment Films Company made the film available on 8mm for home screenings as Terror of Dracula in a shorter format than the television screening. In 1972, Blackhawk Films released the film as Nosferatu, the Vampire.

Despite Nosferatu was not in the public domain until the early 21st century, several bootlegs and unauthorised reprints have been released based on the the 1947 MoMA print. A 1991 LaserDisc edition, David Shepard's 1998 DVD and the 2001 Image Entertainment DVD are based on the (MoMA) print. The 1991 release version still included the "Harker" and "Dracula" names while the 1998 version had new English intertitles which followed the translations from Eisner's book which Patalas described as "faulty". Eureka Entertainment's 2001 DVD offered the film in black and white and sepia tone were based on 1981 restorations. Following a theatrical re-release in the United Kingdom, Eureka Entertainment released the first Blu-ray disc release of the film in 2013. This release was based on the 2000s restoration.

In popular culture

A memorial plaque for Nosferatu in Wismar, Germany featuring actor Max Schreck as Count Orlok.

Further information: Count Dracula in popular culture

Music

• such as the Blue Öyster Cult song "Nosferatu" whose lyrics make direct references to the plot in the film.
• In the 1980s, the gothic rock band Nosferatu formed in 1988.
• In the 1990s, German television screenings had the film featured a score by the band Art Zoyd. Patalas described the score as "particularly inappropriate" for the film.

Film In his essay on early vampire films in Continuum, academic David Baker described Nosferatu's immediate influence as not clear due to the destruction of film prints. Baker said that while it is chronologically the first significant of the Dracula inspired vampire film, it only developed considerable prestige, influence and impact over time. The character of Count Orlok only became better known during the 1950s and 1960s than it had been previously, with the character appearing in photographs in film studies books and monster fanzines.

• The television miniseries Salem's Lot (1979) featured vampire resembling Orlock.
• Nicolas Cage's character in Vampire's Kiss (1989) would watch the count on television.
• A fictionalized feature film of the production of Nosferatu was made by E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000) starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe.
• Orlok like vampire in The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023).

• Remakes
  • The film was remade by German director Werner Herzog with Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979).
  • David Lee Fisher was announced as a director of a "remix" of Nosferatu in 2016 with Doug Jones to star as Orlok.

Other

• During the 1990s, Nosferatu was adapted into both a musical and a comic book.
• The film was still referenced with action figures, t-shirts, model kits, and as a reoccurring character in SpongeBob SquarePants.

References

Sources

• "Nosferatu". 8 Uhr-Abendblatt (in German). Berlin. March 6, 1922. p. 5.
• "Phantoms of the Night: 100 Years of Nosferatu". Apollo. December 9, 2022. Archived from the original on December 13, 2022. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
• "Das Fest des Noferatu". Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (in German). No. 111 (Morning ed.). March 7, 1922. p. 8. Retrieved September 19, 2024 – via Berlin State Library.
• "Film-Echo". Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger (in German). March 6, 1922. p. 1.
• "Upcoming Eureka Entertainment Releases". Blu-ray.com. August 22, 2013. Archived from the original on September 13, 2013. Retrieved September 24, 2024.
• "Notes on the Restoration". Nosferatu (booklet). Eureka Entertainment. 2013. p. 38. EKA70116.
• "Filmschau". Vorwärts (in German). Berlin. March 21, 1922. p. 6.
• "N.V. Nederlandsche Bioscoop-Trust". Haagsche Courant (in Dutch). No. 11964. February 16, 1922. Retrieved September 19, 2024 – via Delpher.
• "Phantoms of the Night 100 Years of Nosferatu". Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg. Archived from the original on March 5, 2024. Retrieved September 25, 2024.
• Baker, David (2021). "Browning's Dracula and the Development of the Classical Screen Vampire: Genre, Form, and Figure". Continuum. 35 (2).
• Banks, Matthew E. (2024). "Nosferatu at 100: The Fight for Life". In Bacon, Simon (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-36252-1.
• Berriatúa, Luciano (1991). Los proverbios chinos de F.W. Murnau (in Spanish). Filmoteca Española. ISBN 84-86877-05-9.
• Bock, Hans-Michael, ed. (2009). The Concise Cinegraph: Encyclopaedia of German Cinema. Berghahn Books. ISBN 978-1-57181-655-9.
• Comiskey, Andrea; Horwitz, Jonah (2023). "Fractured Flickers (1963-1964), Camp, and Cinema's Ab/usable Past". In Pinedo, Isabel C.; Phillips, W.D. (eds.). Camp TV of the 1960s: Reassessing the Vast Wasteland. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-765074-0.
• Clarens, Carlos (1968) [1st pub. 1967]. An Illustrated History of the Horror Film. Capricorn Books. ISBN 978-0-399-50111-1.
• Eisner, Lotte H. (1973) [1st pub. 1965]. Murnau. Secker & Warburg. SBN 436 09700 1.
• Everson, William K. (1974). Classics of the Horror Film. The Citadel Press. ISBN 0-8065-0437-4.
• Gide, André (February 27, 1928). "Nosferatu". Translated by O'Brien, Justin (published 1949). Retrieved September 20, 2024 – via Project Muse.
• Glut, Donald F. (1975). The Dracula Book. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0-8108-0804-8.
• Graham, David (May 9, 2008). "Book Lifts Lid on Star of Eerie First Dracula film". Reuters. Berlin. Archived from the original on October 2, 2024. Retrieved September 24, 2024.
• Hall, Mordaunt (June 4, 1929). "The Screen; A Tell-Tale Phonograph. Vampires and Coffins". The New York Times. Archived from the original on September 14, 2019. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
• Heiss, Lokke (2024). "Nosferatu and Its Relationship to German Expressionist Film". In Bacon, Simon (ed.). The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-36252-1.
• Huff, Theodore (August 1948). "An Index to the Films of F. W. Murnau". Sight and Sound Index Series. No. 15. Retrieved September 20, 2024 – via University of California.
• Jones, David Annwn (2023). Vampires on the Silent Screen: Cinema's First Age of Vampires 1897-1922. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-031-38642-8.
• Kurtz, Rudolf (2011) [1926]. Expressionismus und film [Expressionism and film]. Translated by Kiening, Christian. Indiana University Press. ISBN 978-0-86196-922-7.
• Leow, Katharina (2021). Special Effects and German Silent Film. Amsterdam University Press. ISBN 978 94 6372 523 1.
• Marriott, James; Newman, Kim (2018) [1st pub. 2006]. The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies. London: Carlton Books. ISBN 978-1-78739-139-0.
• Massaccesi, Cristina (2016). Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 0993238467.
• Patalas, Enno (2002). "On the Way to "Nosferatu"". Film History. 14 (1). ISSN 0892-2160. Retrieved September 24, 2024 – via JSTOR.
• Richards, Leah (2022). "Settling the Score(s): Nosfeartu Symphonies, Concept Albums, and Improvisations of Horror". In Bacon, Simon (ed.). Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study. Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-1-80085-640-0.
• Robertson, James C. (1989). The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913-1972. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-03291-1.
• Rhodes, Gary D. (2014). Tod Browning's Dracula. Tomahawk Press. ISBN 978-0-9566834-5-8.
• Rhodes, Gary D. (February 17, 2022). ""Nosferatu" at 100". Los Angeles Review of Books. Archived from the original on February 17, 2022. Retrieved September 20, 2024.
• Rhodes, Gary D. (2024). Vampires in Silent Cinema. Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 978-1-3995 2574-9.
• Skal, David J. (1991). Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-30805-7.
• Trask, C. Hooper (April 21, 1922). "Berlin Film News". Variety. Vol. LXVI, no. 9. Variety Inc.
• S. M. S. (June 15, 1929). "New Films Reviewed in New York". The Billboard. Vol. XLL, no. 24.
• V.S. (June 4, 1929). "Vampires and Water Power on the Cinema Guild Bill" (PDF). Daily Worker. Vol. VI, no. 75 (Final ed.). New York. p. 4. Retrieved September 19, 2024 – via Marxists Internet Archive.

External links

• Nosferatu at IMDb
• Nosferatu at Rotten Tomatoes
• Andrzejbanas/Nosferatu at the TCM Movie Database

Video

• Video footage of the "Phantoms of the Night 100 Years of Nosferatu" exhibit in Berlin on YouTube
• Nosferatu on SpongeBob Squarepants on the official SpongeBob SquarePants YouTube page