Nosferatu

For other uses, see Nosferatu (disambiguation).

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
File:Nosferatuposter.jpg A promotional film poster for Nosferatu
Directed by	F. W. Murnau
Written by	Bram Stoker Henrik Galeen
Produced by	Enrico Dieckmann Albin Grau
Starring	Max Schreck Gustav von Wangenheim Greta Schröder Alexander Granach Georg H. Schnell Ruth Landshoff John Gottowt Max Nemetz Wolfgang Heinz Albert Vehnor Heinrich Witte Guido Herzfeld Karl Etlinger Fanny Schreck Hardy von Francois Gustav Botz
Cinematography	Fritz Arno Wagner Günther Krampf
Distributed by	Film Arts Guild
Release dates	Germany 4 March 1922 USA 3 June 1929
Running time	94 min.
Country	Germany
Languages	Silent film German intertitles

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror or simply Nosferatu) is a German Expressionist vampire horror film, directed by F. W. Murnau, starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok. The film, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was in essence an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, "vampire" became "Nosferatu," and Count Dracula became Count Orlok).

Plot

Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker in Stoker's novel) is an employee at a real estate firm in a fictitious German city called Wisborg (the name of the town being a reference to the actual town Wismar), living with Ellen, his wife. His employer, Knock, receives a mysterious letter. Knock decides to send him to visit Count Orlok in the Carpathian Mountains to finalize the sale of a house. Hutter leaves his wife with his good friend Harding, and Harding's sister Lucy, before embarking on his multiple-month journey.

Close to his final destination, Hutter boards at an inn, where the locals become frightened at the mere mention of Orlok's name, and discourage him from traveling to his castle during the night. In his room at the inn, Hutter finds a book entitled The Book of the Vampires, which he disregards before falling asleep.

Hutter is left to finish his journey on foot after his hired driver refuses to pass the bridge to the castle. However, he is soon picked up by Count Orlok's coach, which is driven by a strange specter that hides its face, and moves at an unnatural speed. At his arrival at the castle, whose doors open by themselves, he is welcomed by Count Orlok. His grotesque facial features hidden at this stage by his hat, Orlok initially appears to be a mere eccentric gentleman. Hutter has dinner at the castle; Orlok refuses to eat and silently reads a letter. A bell rings at midnight and a startled Hutter cuts his thumb. Count Orlok tries to suck the blood out of the wound, before being repelled by a cross hanging around Hutter's neck. Hutter falls asleep in the parlor after a conversation with Orlok.

Hutter wakes up to an empty castle with fresh wounds on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes. That night he is joined by Orlok and they sign the documents for the sale of the house facing Hutter's. Hutter finds The Book of the Vampires in his luggage and starts to suspect that Orlok is nosferatu. He tries to hide in his bedroom as midnight approaches. However, the closed door opens by itself and Orlok comes in, his true nature revealed. At the same time, Ellen sleepwalks and is found by Harding in a comatose state, screaming for Hutter. Her screams stop Orlok, who leaves Hutter untouched.

Waking up, Hutter explores the castle and its crypt. He finds a coffin, where Orlok is resting in a dormant state. Paralyzed with fear and the sheer sight of the nosferatu, he dashes back to his room, where he witnesses Orlok piling up coffins on a coach and climbing into the last one before the coach leaves. Hutter escapes the castle through the window, but is knocked unconscious when he falls and hits the ground. Meanwhile, the coffins are shipped down a river on a raft.

Next, Hutter is at a hospital after his flight from the castle. The coffins are put into a large boat, after the crew sees that they are full of soil and rats.

In a psychiatric ward, Knock is in a confinement cell where he eats flies and tries to bite the neck of his doctor. Hutter decides to leave the hospital to warn his town against Orlok. In his cell, Knock steals a newspaper with news of a new plague, which causes him to rejoice. The sailors on the boat carrying the coffins get sick, and soon all but two are dead. One of them decides to destroy the coffins, which are now crawling with rats. However, Orlok wakes up and confronted with this vision, the sailor jumps into the sea. The captain ties himself to his ship's wheel. Orlok is the new master of the boat.

The ship arrives in Wisborg. Orlok leaves it unseen in one of his coffins, quickly followed by the rats. He moves into the house he purchased across the street from Hutter's house. Knock escapes from his cell. Hutter also arrives in Germany. The next morning, the ship is inspected and it appears empty, except for the dead captain with wound marks on his neck. The logbook of the ship is found, the doctors realize they are dealing with plague. The town is stricken with panic. Ellen reads the book of vampires, despite Hutter's forbidding. She learns how to kill a vampire: a woman pure in heart must make him forget the rooster's first crowing. The town is flooded with corpses and its people chase Knock, mistaking him for a vampire.

Orlok stares from his window at the sleeping Ellen. She opens her window to invite him in but faints. As Hutter leaves to get help, Orlok comes in. He drinks her blood and forgets about the dawning day. A rooster crows and Orlok goes up in smoke as he tries to escape. The last image of the movie is Orlok's castle in the Carpathian Mountains.

Cast

• Max Schreck as Count Orlok (Count Dracula)
• Alexander Granach as Knock (Renfield)
• Gustav von Wangenheim as Thomas Hutter (Jonathan Harker)
• Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter (Nina Harker)
• Georg H. Schnell as Mr. Harding (Mr. Westenra)
• Ruth Landshoff as Ruth Harding (Lucy Westenra)
• John Gottowt as Prof. Bulwer (Prof. Van Helsing)
• Gustav Botz as Dr. Sievers (Dr. Seward)
• Max Nemetz as The Captain of The Demeter
• Wolfgang Heinz as First Mate of The Demeter

Production

Deviations from the novel

The story of Nosferatu is similar to that of Dracula and retains the core characters—Jonathan and Mina Harker, the Count, etc.—but omits many of the secondary players, such as Arthur and Quincey, and changes all of the character's names (although in some recent releases of this film, which is now in the public domain, the written dialog screens have been changed to use the Dracula versions of the names). The setting has been transferred from England in the 1890s to Germany in 1838.

In contrast to Dracula, Orlok does not make any other vampires but kills his victims, causing the town folk to blame the plague, which ravages the city. Also, Orlok must sleep by day, as sunlight would kill him. The ending is also substantially different from that of Dracula. The Count is ultimately destroyed at sunrise when the "Mina" character sacrifices herself to him.

The town called "Wisborg" in the film is in fact a mix of Wismar and Lübeck. Parts of the film depicting Transylvania were also filmed in Slovakia. Nosferatu's castle, for instance, is Orava Castle in northern Slovakia, and other locations are in the High Tatras and on the Váh River around Strečno Castle.

There is a controversy around Nosferatu, in that the character Orlok character was seen by many in Germany as Jewish. Apart from issues of the plague invading Germany, in those troubled times Germans were far more concerned about foreign immigrants. Orlok was seen by many as symbolic of foreigners—in this instance, Jewish people—“polluting” Germany following World War One. There is nothing in the film itself which identifies Orlok as Jewish, however—instead, it is his appearance.

Influences

File:Nosferatu01.png

The classic shadow on the wall

Max Schreck as Count Orlok

This was the first and last Prana Film; the company declared bankruptcy after Bram Stoker's estate, acting for his widow, Florence Stoker, sued for copyright infringement and won. The court ordered all existing prints of Nosferatu destroyed, but copies of the film had already been distributed around the world. These prints were then copied over the years, helping Nosferatu gain its current reputation as one of the greatest movie adaptations of the vampire legend.

With the influence of producer and production designer Albin Grau, the film established one of two main depictions of film vampires. The "Nosferatu-type" is a living corpse with rodent features (especially elongated fingernails and incisors), associated with rats and plague, and neither charming nor erotic but rather totally repugnant. The victims usually die and are not turned into vampires themselves. The more common archetype is the "Dracula-type" (established by Bela Lugosi's version of Dracula and perpetuated by Christopher Lee), a charming aristocrat adept at seduction and whose bite turns his victims into new vampires.

A more universal effect of the film is less obvious: the ending of Nosferatu single-handedly created the concept that vampires can be physically harmed by sunlight. While this was a common element of many other mythical creatures, pre-Nosferatu vampires disliked but could endure daylight (for instance, a part in the original Dracula novel shows its Count in a London street by day). Since Nosferatu's release, the vampire legends have quickly incorporated the idea of fearing, or being destroyed by, the sun.

Murnau's Nosferatu is in the public domain, and copies of the movie are widely available on video (usually as poorly transferred, faded, scratched video copies that are often scorned by enthusiasts). However, pristine restored editions of the film have also been made available, and are also readily accessible to the public. The only complete, original copy is said to be owned by the German Max Schreck collector Jens Geutebrück.

Derivative works

• 1922 – Aaron Copland's ballet Grohg (un-published and un-premiered until 1992) used Nosferatu as the physical model for the lead character, and roughly follows the storyline.
• 1979 – Werner Herzog's 1979 homage to Nosferatu, starring Klaus Kinski which in this film the vampire is known as Count Dracula and not Count Orlok. The film is called Nosferatu: The Vampyre.
• 1988 – A sequel to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu called Nosferatu in Venice. Starring Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu and Christopher Plummer as Paris Catalano.
• 2000 – A Hollywood movie called Shadow of the Vampire told a secret history of the making of Nosferatu, imagining that actor Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe) was actually a genuine vampire, and that director F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) was complicit in hiring the creature for the purposes of realism.

Kino DVD Edition

In 2007, Kino International released Nosferatu: The Ultimate Edition, derived from a new high-definition transfer of the film. This double-disc collection presents the film with the original German intertitles as well as with newly-translated English intertitles. Accompanying the film is a 52-minute documentary by Luciano Berriatúa which provides a detailed account of the production and explores the filmmakers' involvement in the occult.

See also

• List of German films 1919-1933
• Prana Film

External links

• Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens at IMDb
• Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht at IMDb
• Nosferatu a Venezia at IMDb
• Template:Movie-Tome
• A comparison of Nosferatu DVD releases
• The operatic adaptation by Bernard J. Taylor