Films: 1920s
(1922) Nosferatu
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Nosferatu
Director: F.W. Murnau
Release: 1922
F.W. Murnau's vampire is a seven foot tall gargoyle, a gothic-headed giant with eyes the size of human palms. His name is Graf Orlok.
German actor Max Schreck apprenticed under Max Reinhardt, as did Murnau, in the early 20th century. Orlok, a role in the center of his career, remained his most famous performance. It is unearthly. Orlok is the pin around which the entirety of Murnau's strange, painterly movie turns.
The plot is transferred from author Bram Stoker's Dracula by screenwriter Henrik Galeen (who penned and directed the notable Jewish mythological horror film "Der Golem" in 1915). Characters' names have been changed for legal reasons but Galeen also makes other alterations. He tweaks Stoker's story in order to realign it with his own thematic landscape.
In "Nosferatu" Galeen and Murnau focus almost exclusively on real estate agent Hutter (Gustaf von Wagenheim) and his wife Ellen (Greta Schroder).
The story happens in three major chapters.
Twisted real estate broker Knock (Alexander Granach) sends Hutter to Count Orlok's mountain castle to close a transaction. While there, Hutter discovers that Orlok is a vampire. Orlok preys on Hutter who, in a moment of terror, psychically communicates with Ellen back at home in Bremen. Alerted to her presence, Orlok abandons Hutter in the desolate castle and embarks for Bremen to find Ellen (and presumably other victims).
In the second part of "Nosferatu," Orlok is aboard the Demeter, bound for Bremen. The crew go mad, rats infest the hold and a mysterious ailment they take for plague dispatches them one by one. In Bremen, Ellen is lost, wandering the dunes by the ocean. She is nominally cared for by Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt). Additionally, Knock loses his mind as Orlok approaches and is incarcerated in Harding's sanitarium. Hutter struggles to escape from the mountains, heading for home.
"Nosferatu" reaches its climax as the Demeter reaches Bremen. The authorities discover the dead crew, believe the rat-infested ship has brought plague ashore and Knock escapes the madhouse. Orlok moves into the piece of property Hutter has sold him, which is directly opposite Ellen's bedroom. With the fear of plague rampant, Orlok's feast on the people of Bremen is perfectly disguised.
Hutter's return brings the solution. He has retained a volume from the mountains, "The Book of the Vampire" and in it Ellen reads that the sacrifice of a pure heart will break the vampire's spell over the city. If she can keep Orlok at her side until the "cock crows," he will be defeated by the sunlight.
Murnau, like Stoker, eschews mysticism for unknown biological frontiers. In one scene, a lesson from Bulwer to his students, the doctor emphasizes the already existent phenomenon of vampirism in the plant, aquatic and insect world (a venus flytrap consumes a housefly, a polyp sucks its prey of life and a spider captures its evening meals). Orlok, in a sense, simply moves among these creatures, a two-legged version of nature's insistence that life must feed on life.
On the other hand, Ellen's potential sacrifice must be willing and complete if it is to work. It is a spiritual act. Murnau and Galeen amplify her martyrdom while simultaneously distilling Stoker's sexual themes into a single act of submission and domination. In "Nosferatu," the woman has the power to retain the vampire in her bed and the creature's undoing follows.
Visually, Murnau makes a dark and awful ballet out of Schreck's bizarre figure and countenance. It's clear that Murnau loves to position Schreck against his backgrounds, sometimes a geographic division of light and dark within a doorway and sometimes a baroque texture of shattered abbey facade.
Murnau metamorphosizes Schreck into pure shadow, adding inches to his already preternatural size and filming him as he slips along walls and doors and even the fabric that clings to the actors. Orlok oozes out of the blackness that Murnau creates, lurches toward his victims and leaves them broken and unconscious.
Wagenheim and Schroder communicate terror with passion and believability. Their bodies cringe like real bodies cringe and they do things that frightened people do (particularly effective is a moment when Hutter covers himself with a sheet as Orlok approaches him in bed - infantilization and helplessness incarnate). Shadowplay over Schroder's breast when Orlok finally comes to her chamber, paralyzing her (like a spider) before feeding by squeezing his shadow fist over her white breast, is palpably acted by Schroder.
What does not work so well is pacing and narrative in the second section. Like Stoker, Murnau does little with the Demeter, never staying aboard long enough to generate the claustrophobia and terror of being at sea with Orlok in the hold. Compounding the sense of brevity, his cuts to Bremen are perfunctory and the interesting moments with Knock and Bulwer are too few.
What is glorious and worth burning into memory is the final feeding, with Orlok's skull-like head gleaming in the lower-left corner of the mise-en-scene as he drains Ellen, the window to the bedroom open front and center. The camera waits, practically out of the room. The removal of the viewer from the detail makes it more horrifying, the audience now the voyeur and in danger of intruding on a very forbidden moment.
James O'Brien
Cinescare Staff
