Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror (1922) - Prelude to the 21st Century

David Eggers' Nosferatu opens here on Christmas Day. I’ve been, for the most part, avoiding reviews, but I am betting that it will be a fine film regardless of whatever nits others and/or myself pick at. As much as comparisons are said to be odious, any work that takes on such material is inviting them and at the same time, inviting us to return to the original work.

Before diving in, I’ve typically confronted films like Nosferatu (1922) through a kind of two-dimensional approach. The first is an historical dimension; this is comprised of  prevailing contemporary events/social-societal movements, personnel on the film under discussion, thematic antecedents (found in films and other artworks and movements that were of the moment). The other dimension is almost purely aesthetic; film technique, visual use of metaphor/analogy, incorporation of social/psychological elements current at the time of the film’s creation, and so on.

With any work of Nosferatu’s stature, it also requires locating it in the larger stream of modernism of which it was a part and upon which it had a decisive effect. In this film’s case, it’s worth considering how German Expressionism opened the way to exploring the unconscious as a predecessor to Surrealism, and how the film is also a commentary on the demons that plagued humanity then and throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. One thinks of Durant’s “Age of Anxiety”. To that end, it also sheds light on why Herzog’s version is also important, in that Herzog positions his film as part of a cinematic tradition such that the New German Cinema can be seen as an extension of the Expressionism of half a century earlier. We might also ask, with the arrival of David Eggers’ version, are we living in an echo of the era that birthed Murnau’s Nosferatu?

The historical dimension

I want to go into this genuinely, but I also want to address a question that comes with a lot of this kind of analysis. Do you need to know the historical context of a work of art before you engage with it? As a general rule, no. However, knowing more about the work enhances and enlarges the appreciation if not the enjoyment of, that work. 

There’s much about silent cinema that sometimes baffles or amuses people unfamiliar with it. Typically, it’s the acting; the broadness of gesture, the overreaction to events. There’s the very often stagey quality to narratives. Sets seem so constructed, matte paintings too obvious. Sometimes, the intertitles’ wording seems archaic. And then, the magic kicks in.

Before long, audiences recognize that they’re seeing and reacting to performances from a century ago; and once the stories take hold, the archness or the broadness of the performances ceases to matter. The sets enhance the narrative as we’re drawn into the same magic audiences were a hundred years earlier. 

Or not. I’ve met people who say they won’t watch a black and white film because it’s too old, let alone something from before sound. Their loss.

With Nosferatu, specifically, and Murnau generally, there’s less a sense of staginess or the artificial than one might think. We’ll go into this in greater detail later, but I want to let that percolate in the background for a bit.

In 1922, the Weimar Republic was dealing with post-World War I reconstruction, high inflation, barely repressed social tensions, high unemployment and in general, a battered national psyche. That said, Germany saw leaps forward in the arts, across the board. To be sure, these were sometimes not so veiled critiques of the failures and corruption of government, poverty, and very often, films that did their best to make sense out of the rubble of a world around them.

Dada and following on its tail, Surrealism, was a major influence on artists and their approaches to their respective disciplines. Earlier in the century, German Expressionism helped express a different kind of freedom of the unconscious, one more specifically located in the societal milieux in which Germans found themselves. We think of Schiele, Grosz, Nolde, and Kirchner. 

One aspect of the film that seems unavoidable is the reading of Count Orlok himself as an antisemitic caricature, reflecting the broader antisemitism found in interwar Germany and of course, that blossomed like a malignant poppy during Hitler’s reign. It’s been contested whether Orlok as a Shylock of sorts, is intentional. 

I’m of the mind that Murnau wasn’t himself antisemitic or any less more so than his countrymen; which means he could very well have been so culturally since antisemitism was, by then, baked into the social bread of Christian Europe. To say that Nosferatu the film is antisemitic does say more than we might be comfortable admitting. 

Seen in this context, Count Orlok is an ancient evil that brings plague and rot wherever he goes. He isn’t merely Death as Boogeyman, but seems to be realized as Death to the German State. Given what would be happening in Germany in another ten years or so, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that Murnau’s film may have been seen as a precursor to the kind of vile propaganda that would begin appearing like Die ewig Jude/The Eternal Jew, a documentary of Jews in the ghettos of Lodz, Crakow, Lublin, and Warsaw. Goebbels found it “too pushy” and passed on releasing it. The salient point is that it runs with the idea of equating Jews with vermin and includes a passage denouncing actors from the Weimar Republic.

Also, as a final note for now, it’s telling that at least one member of the cast was Jewish (Alexander Granach). That doesn’t mitigate the charge leveled at the film, just a further contextual element that might indicate how unaware Germans were at the time on the one hand, and how the script was interpreted by the players themselves.

Tied into this is that the Spanish Flu epidemic was still recent in memory. Millions died and it’s difficult to imagine this, too, didn’t add to the visceral response to the film. Henrik Galeen, the scriptwriter for the film, certainly saw Orlok as a metaphor for the plague. 

I doubt I need to go on. If these elements are kept in mind, it might yield a fuller view of the world into which Nosferatu was brought. It may give some idea of how it was received and why it held such power as a major - perhaps the major - film in German history. Yes, even more than Das Kabinet Der Doktor Caligari/The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari of three years earlier. Murnau’s vision calls forth a malignant invasion from the Transvaal that would eat away at the soul of the Heimat. 

Of course, there are other elements at work. The film itself is replete with unsettling imagery, suspense that grows increasingly unbearable over the course of the film to its conclusion, and the operatic self-sacrifice to destroy evil itself in the dawn’s rays. Innocence dies so that we all may live. It might be one of the first, if not the first so-called “elevated horror” films.

Additionally, the team that brought the film into the world is one of the most accomplished of all time. It’s not just Murnau, easily the first “greatest” German director. His competition at the time was mostly Fritz Lang and Ernest Lubitsch. And yes, there’s Pabst, Wiene and some others, but these three are in a class of their own. Murnau would die before Lang and Lubitsch, but his place in cinema history was established prior to Nosferatu.

It’s worth noting that just about everyone on the film was accomplished in their field. Max Schreck, who played Count Orlok, was a well-known and highly regarded stage actor, with a biography and CV that belies the conceit that sprung up around the film that the lead actor was actually a vampire and vanished after filming. He had his own theater company, which performed anti-fascist material until it was shut down by the Nazis. Schreck continued to work until his death in 1936. 

His nemesis and our hero, Thomas Hutter was played by Gustav von Wangenheim, who - like others in the film, had done his time in the army during World War I, and whose parents were also thespians. Sentenced to death in absentia by the Nazis, he and his wife  emigrated to the Soviet Union where became a citizen and continued acting and directing on stage and in films. He returned to Berlin and continued working in film until the mid-fifties. 

Greta Shröder plays Ellen, Hutter’s wife; married briefly to Paul Wegener, she also wrote the screenplay for the first filmed version of The Phantom of the Opera. She stayed in Germany through the year and acted in two propaganda films and appeared on stage until the late 1950s. 

Alexander Granach takes the role of Knock, Nosferatu’s version of Renfield. He had quite a career post-Weimar. He managed to get the USSR and acted in Die Kämpfer/The Struggle for von Wangenheim; he left Soviet Russia for Hollywood and acted against Greta Garbo in Ninotchka, acted for Fritz Lang in Lang and Brecht’s anti-fascist Hangmen Also Die! and more.

Behind the camera, beside Murnau, was Galeen, the scriptwriter, Arbin Grau as producer, Günther Oskar Krampf who went uncredited and Fritz Arno Wagner are the two cinematographers, and in addition to being the producer, Grau was also the art director and costume designer.

And - what of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau? He was trained as an art historian and was gay at a time when it was about as dangerous as in England. That said, anything one could say about the director based on these two elements might be sufficient keys to his cinema. In Lotte Eisner’s The Haunted Screen, she sees where Murnau put his training and his life as an Other to effective use. 

"Whereas Lang attempts to give a faithful reproduction of the fanlous paintings he sometimes uses, Murnau elaborates the memory he has kept of them and transfonns thenl into personal visions.” Later, she notes that "In his attempt to escape from himself, he did not express himself with the artistic continuity which makes it so easy to analyse the style of, say, Lang. But all his films bear the impress of his inner complexity, of the struggle he waged within himself against a world in which he remained despairingly alien.” It is this latter observation that helps us take another approach to Nosferatu.

His Westphalian roots are reflected in his location shooting preference in his other films but here, serves a kind of anchoring in landscapes, both external and interior. Again, we’ll visit all this soon enough.

The foregoing is just a sketch of the period and the people; more will come into play over the course of this post. I owe so  much to just about everyone who’s every written about this film or Weimar Era cinema; hopefully, this will inspire the reader to do further research on their own.

The Aesthetic Dimension

Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror has been called the most important German film by Werner Herzog and that might cause some questioning, if not immediate push-back, but it’s arguable that it is, in fact the summit of German filmmaking. Not only is it a principle text for the horror genre, but in terms of what Murnau brought to screen, it is, in fact, a symphony. 

There is hardly a technique that goes unused that had come into being during the silent era. Montage, fast-motion, negative printing, colorization, a variety of angles and compositions, all of which are not there to draw attention to themselves, but to serve the story, effectively lending greater depth to the characters, absent the medium of sound by which they could speak and express their thoughts and feelings.

Murnau’s vision is as thoroughly ensconced in German Romanticism or just plain Romanticism as it is in German cinematic expressionism. Perhaps even more so; in the Carpathians, Hutter encounters forces far greater than he could imagine, reflected in the mountains and the tracking shots Murnau set up. Indeed, humans and animals are dwarfed by the vastness. The sweep is a filmic equivalent of Casper David Friedrich in its reach and loneliness. The solitude of the mountains grows oppressive, particularly when Hutter arrives at Orlok’s castle. 

Here, Orlok himself is framed by buttresses and arches, himself a kind of High Gothic architectural motif and consequently, one whose origins predate the European Christian world. I don’t believe for a minute that Murnau equates pre-Christian Europe with evil or the natural world is to be abhorred or renounced. What does seem operative here is Orlok an other that can only live by feeding on the living, absorbing their essence into a dark, withered immortality. He is “basilisk which can only see by killing” to use a phrase from C.S. Lewis.

Murnau teases and plays with us with interior and external spaces; interior shots feel claustrophobic when matched against the openness of the outside world. Even in revelry in the tavern, there is a sense of the townsfolk doing their best to keep at bay the horrors that run through the world around them, especially at night. When a woman tells Hutter he shouldn’t leave because the werewolf is out, there’s a cut to a coyote in the woods. Writing this almost sounds inane; in the context of the film, it works. Either the animal is actually a werewolf or this is an example of how the folk imagination interprets reality. But then, how explain Orlok?

In any case, Murnau’s camera continues to draw us in and show us around. As Hitchcock noted repeatedly from his time studying the masters at work - especially Murnau - the camera was always moving. The beauty of it is that in scene does the camera work draw attention to itself. It provides a near-documentary feel to a nightmare. Also, if Murnau was borrowing from Friedrich in exteriors, it’s almost as if he was checking with Fuseli for interiors. Each room, whether his cell at the castle, Ellen’s bedroom, or the clinic where Hutter recovers, has this sense of indefiniteness, as though at any given moment, the space would dissolve and the sleeper awake. Or plunge deeper into another nightmare.

The shots on the ocean journey are where montage might be the most skillfully employed. For every scene of the ship’s exterior, there are only a couple of beats before we’re back inside where a sailor is taken ill and dying feverishly in a hammock, to the sailor’s vision of Orlok in the shadows, to - later on - an empty hammock swaying as others walk past. 

There are also visual through lines; repeated shots of the rats in the soil scurrying when a coffin is broken open and later, the procession of coffins once the plague has hit Bremen. All of it presaged by Orlok loading up a wagon with soil-filled coffins (by himself and filmed sped-up; it sounds absurd, but it’s remarkably effective) and then, once having arrived in Bremen, Orlok transporting coffins to the abandoned building he now owns, near his neighbors Hutter and Ellen.

It’s not just that it’s a good-looking film; it’s that each shot fits like a note in a score. I’m sure Murnau wouldn’t want to go overboard with musical analogy, but it seems to be the case that each Act is like a Movement and within each, are legatos, adagios, and refrains. It might well be that Murnau saw film as a visual analog for music. 

More than many films, Nosferatu is a study in editing and sequences that themselves seem to tell stories and hint at something more outside the frame.

A pastiche interpretations

From a textual-critical perspective, Nosferatu is about as open to interpretation as it gets. The dreamlike aspect of such a work ensures the potential for multiple interpretations and multivalent meanings. I find myself sympathetic to a number of readings. If there is one overarching one, it’s one that’s close to Jo Leslie Collier’s psychoanalytical/existentialist interpretation. She sees in the film Murnau’s combination of “the quest for love and the death wish” and folded into this are dichotomies, particularly, Ellen and Hutter. 

She sees, and rightly I think, Hutter as a kind of stunted man; he’s not a juvenile, but he is possessed of only the barest self-awareness and his gaze is limited to mirrors and small, cramped windows that allow look at only himself or onto harrowing landscapes and dizzying heights. In contrast, Ellen is framed by large windows through which she can across space and time; though, once Orlok moves into the abandoned building across from the Hutters, that view is now occupied by death and sex. 

Hutter also embodies that very often masculine notion of the empirical trumping any metaphysical extrapolation or possibility. As Collier has it; “he ignores the warnings of the metaphysical”. That is, he tosses aside The Book of the Vampire, ignores Ellen’s forebodings, and dismisses the warnings of the peasants. Given that Orlok is his destiny, he cannot run from it; he must face his fear and come to face to face with death. 

Hutter, as Collier points out, is a study in overcompensation. He laughs too much, his gestures are far too broad, and he is overly expressive in his dismissal of what others try to tell him. It might well be that his journey is part fall from grace; that he leaves his Garden of Eden with Ellen ignorantly, heedless of her apprehensions and driven by profit (though who can blame a young husband for wanting to be a good or a better provider?), and descends into fear and torment, is a consideration. And possibly, he is redeemed somewhat at the end by loss, but let’s consider other interpretations.

Early in the film, Professor Bulwer admonishes Hutter that he cannot escape his destiny. Collier has it that Hutter’s destiny is being himself; I agree only insofar that our destiny lies in how we meet the inevitable. In this case, death and the end of all things that matter to us. Hutter’s lack of awareness dooms Ellen in the end. She sacrifices herself so that Hutter and Bremen - and perhaps the world - may live. How she dies is as pertinent as the fact that she dies; Hutter is unconscious in the chair by the window from which Orlok and Ellen look out at/into each other. As Collier and others have pointed out, Orlok’s feeding on her is sexual in nature. He is able to possess what Hutter seems incapable of having (despite Ellen being his wife; Collier points out that Ellen is rendered as one of Murnau’s “asexual madonnas”. Though that might be the case, Ellen is the only character in the film who seems to have any agency. She is the only person who faces Orlok directly and knows what has to be done to end his terror. 

It might well be that the town, like Hutter, tries to shut out the plague, and by extension, Orlok, but it is Ellen who recognizes that his power grows in proportion to that denial. She also is aware of something that he is not: time and its passage. She is aware of the moments of her passage into oblivion whereas Orlok has existed for so long outside time’s boundaries (at lest, in a nocturnal context). After he has fed, and the dawn’s sun vaporizes him, Hutter comes to, rushes to Ellen on the bed and they embrace, after which she quickly dies. We can assume that the dawn is Hutter’s enlightenment; he can no longer flee from his destiny; but will he ever be whole, given how much he’s lost in learning al this? 

Collier mentions that the sunrise represents redemption, but I don’t see it, unless redemption does infer the embrace and understanding of the tragedy of being. 

Thus, we certainly have the possibility of Nosferatu as an existentialist journey, but there is also a kind of historical allegory that we’ve encountered already to some degree. We know that many who worked on the film fought in World War I, which had ended only three years before the film’s release. There had also been the ravaging of the Spanish Flu and between the two, no one was untouched by the horrors of those years. One can see in the vampire archetype, how the aristocrats fed off the blood of the young people who were caught up in the “meat-grinder of death” (Giesen). Hutter’s flight to return to Bremen to save Ellen is emblematic of the desire to ensure some kind of protection from the onslaught of the most recent forms of chemical warfare and weapons that could wipe out dozens, if not hundreds at a time. 

Hutter is clearly suffering from PTSD in the clinic and leaves before he should, but he moves out like a soldier returning to the front. Ellen’s sacrifice is that of the masses at home giving up whatever luxuries to ensure support of the war effort, even though it means the end of the all that they knew, the old order that will never return because nothing will ever be the same. Society suffers as the soldier, exhausted sleeps and that old order dies at the dawn of a new, uncertain day.

Another reading is Orlok as the shattered soldier himself, trying only to connect with that larger community, but is doomed to fade, unloved and ignored as his brothers-in-arms drift into their own dreams, incapable of helping the less fortunate victims of conflagration.

Any or all of these may fit. We don’t have full knowledge of authorial intent, but it would be disingenuous to assume that the atrocities of the so-called War to End All Wars aren’t reflected in the film or that the tragedies of then-recent history didn’t inform the tale.

Yes, Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror is a faithful adaptation of Stoker’s book, but the use to which it has been put might well be quite different from what he had in mind.

Afterthoughts on Herzog and Forethought on Eggers

As mentioned above, Herzog held that Murnau’s film was the most important German film. He took on the task of creating his own version as a way of bridging the gap between the freedom of German cinema in the twenties and early thirties with that of the New German Cinema in the 70s. In the interim, the German industry had been restricted to Nazi propaganda films, of course, but in the post-war era, movies were mostly escapist, Heimat fare. As has been said, anyone who held up a mirror was ignored or pilloried, as happened with Lorre and his sole directorial effort Der Verlorene/The Lost One. By the late sixties/early seventies, directors like Herzog, Fassbinder, Wenders, and Schlondorff were reinventing German cinema in ways that Lang, Pabst, and Murnau would certainly approve of. 

But Herzog’s version isn’t just an homage. It may skew closer to an emphasis on desire, sex, and death, but it would be foolish to not admit of social criticism, as well. Kinski’s Orlok is less feral that Shreck’s but also more human; he’s imbued with a tragic air and a neediness beneath the weight of ages, rather like the divided Germany of the time. 

As for Eggers’ forthcoming version, I can only guess. I suspect it will be a well-executed film, as all of his have been; but I have my doubts that he’ll be equal to the task of creating an Orlok for this new century. Will he be using the tale as a lens through which our current traumas will be refracted? Is it likely that he’ll be dealing with plague in a similar way to the film of a hundred years ago, when another pandemic was still fresh in memory? We’ll see. In a strange way, it’s a fitting Christmas release; something to remind us of the terror of the situation, and that maybe the only thing we have to save us will be looking directly into the abyss. Perhaps the Redeemer we seek will be found on the precipice.

Sources/Further Reading

Balázs, Béla. Béla Balázs: Early Film Theory: Visible Man and The Spirit of Film. Berghahn Books. 2011.

Giesen, Rolf. The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors and Its Enduring Legacy. McFarland and Company, Inc., Publishers. Jefferson, North Carolina. 2019.

Coller, Jo Leslie. From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen. UMI Research Press. Ann Arbor, MI 1988.

 

Eisner, Lotte H. The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt. Thames and Hudson. London. 1969.

Eisner, Lotte H. Murnau. Martin Secker and Warburg Limited. London. 1973.

Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler - A Psychological History of the German Film. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey. 2019.

Manvell, Dr. Roger (Introduction). Masterworks of the German Cinema . Icon Editions, Harper and Row. New York. 1973.

Prawer, S.S. Between Two Worlds: The Jewish Presence in German and Austrian Films, 1910 - 1933. Berghahn Books. 2005.

Appendix: Gallery

It’s difficult to convey Murnau’s mastery of montage. Eisner noted that he was the first to come up with a kind of parallel or doubling montage. She singled out the doublings in Orlok traveling by sea against Hutter by land and the escape and mob chase of Knock with incidents at Ellen’s house. A more contained sequence is between Professor Bulwer’s lesson, Orlok drawing near, and Knock getting excited.