NOSFERATU
SUNDAY OCTOBER, 1 2017 AT 12:30 AM
One of the most foreboding and influential horror films in the history of cinema, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) was almost kept from the screen when the widow of Bram Stoker, Florence, sued the German producers for unauthorized use of her husband's novel, Dracula. The lawsuit over Nosferatu has haunted the film's history. Wanting to distance themselves from the film, the producers of Nosferatu sold it to Deutsche Film Produktion who edited the film without Murnau's consent. The film was then altered further for its 1929 American release, making the search for the "original," "uncut" Nosferatu a film historian's obsession.
Stoker's 1897 novel formed the foundation for an astounding body of film and literature concerned with the vampire. A tale of an undead "Count Dracula" with a taste for blood, Dracula mixed Eastern European folktales with the real-life exploits of the 15th-century Prince Vlad the Impaler, who reportedly speared 100,000 of his citizens to death. For Nosferatu, screenwriter Henrik Galeen relocated Stoker's story from London to 1838 Bremen and changed his characters' names in order to evade copyright law.
At the center of F.W. Murnau's unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's seminal vampire story (the first film adaptation) is the horrifying figure of Count Orlok (Max Schreck), a nobleman who wants to buy a deserted house in the Carpathian Mountains adjacent to that of Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim). Hutter travels to Transylvania to meet with the mysterious Count where he is attacked by Orlok's nightcrawling, vampire alter ego. After seeing a picture of Hutter's wife, Orlok travels via ship to Hutter's village of Wisborg to taste the lovely, white neck of Nina (Greta Schroeder). Like Stoker's Count Dracula, whose implicit physical lust expressed the repressed sexual desires of the Victorian era, Murnau's Nosferatu also had a sexual component, in suggesting the only cure for Orlok's evil is the untainted sexuality of a good woman. Nina reads in a book of vampire lore that the only way to stop the beast is for a virtuous woman to spend the night with him, thus sacrificing herself for the good of her society.