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NOSFERATU
by F.W Murnau
Another classic from the mind of F.W Murnau; ‘Nosferatu‘ was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and remains to this day one of the best retellings. All known prints and negatives were destroyed under the terms of settlement of a lawsuit by Bram Stoker’s widow, however the film would subsequently surface in other countries (something we can all be grateful for).
REASONS TO WATCH
– Werner Herzog considers this the greatest German film ever made (he directed the remake ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’ in 1979).
– The idea that vampires burn up when exposed to direct sunlight is traceable to this movie. In Dracula, the villain casually walks around outside in broad daylight. According to the novel, solar rays can slightly weaken a vampire, but Stoker never implies that they could kill one. Yet for the sake of a more visually compelling climax, Grau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen decided to make the sun’s light utterly fatal to poor Count Orlok, who disappears in a puff of smoke when he’s lured into a well-lit room. Thus, a resilient horror cliché was born.
– Rotten Tomatoes’ second best-reviewed horror film of all time, included in ‘1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die’, and on Roger Ebert’s ‘Great Movies’ list.
– Little is known about Max Schreck’s life and film career, a fact to which his biographer, Stefan Eickhoff, can attest. According to Eickhoff, the actor’s colleagues regarded him as a “loyal, conscientious loner with an offbeat sense of humour and a talent for playing the grotesque.” Fittingly enough, the man’s last name is the German word for “terror.” Schreck’s performance was so effective that some viewers wondered if the mysterious actor was an actual vampire.
NOTES
Forsaking the highly stylised sets typical of German expressionist films such as ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920), Murnau imparted a sense of dread to a real world of forests, mountains and open sea. Nosferatu was mostly filmed on location within the German cities of Lubeck and Wismar. However, the Transylvania scenes were shot in northern Slovakia—a place that was significantly closer to home for Murnau and company than Romania would’ve been. With one exception, all the exterior shots of Orlok’s palace really depict the 700 year-old Orava Castle that sits above a fishing village called Oravsky Poozamonva. The very last scene in Nosferatu is a shot of our vampire’s Transylvanian home, which has collapsed after his death. To shoot this footage, Murnau traveled to Starhrad, a long-abandoned Slovakian castle that’s been decaying since the 1500s
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