"Nosferatu"...the first and best

Wikipedia...

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (translated as Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror; or simply Nosferatu) is a classic 1922 German Expressionist 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 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) lives in the fictitious German city of Wisborg. His employer, Knock (Stoker's Renfield), sends Hutter to Transylvania to visit a new client named Count Orlok (Stoker's Count Dracula). Hutter entrusts his loving wife Ellen (Stoker's Mina Harker) to his good friend Harding (Stoker's Arthur Holmwood) and Harding's sister Annie (Stoker's Lucy Westenra), before embarking on his long journey. Nearing his destination in the Carpathian mountains, Hutter stops at an inn for dinner. The locals become frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name and discourage him from traveling to his castle at night, warning of a werewolf on the prowl. The next morning, Hutter takes a coach to a high mountain pass, but the coachmen decline to take him any further than the bridge as nightfall is approaching. A black-swathed coach appears after Hutter crosses the bridge and the coachman gestures for him to climb aboard. Hutter is welcomed at a castle by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away.

Hutter wakes up to a deserted castle the morning after and notices fresh punctures on his neck, which he attributes to mosquitoes or spiders. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house across from Hutter's own home. Hutter writes a letter to his wife and gets a coachman to send it. Reading a book about vampires that he took from the local inn, Hutter starts to suspect that Orlok is Nosferatu, the "Bird of Death." He cowers in his room as midnight approaches, but there is no way to bar the door. The door opens by itself and Orlok enters, his true nature finally revealed, and Hutter falls unconscious. The next day, Hutter explores the castle. In its crypt, he finds the coffin in which Orlok is resting dormant. Hutter becomes horrified and dashes back to his room. Hours later from the window, he sees Orlok piling up coffins on a coach and climbing into the last one before the coach departs. Hutter escapes the castle through the window, but is knocked unconscious by the fall, and awakes in a hospital.

When he is sufficiently recovered, he hurries home. Meanwhile, the coffins are shipped down river on a raft. They are transferred to a schooner, but not before one is opened by the crew, revealing a multitude of rats. The sailors on the ship get sick one by one; soon all but the captain and first mate are dead. Suspecting the truth, the first mate goes below to destroy the coffins. However, Orlok awakens and the horrified sailor jumps into the sea. Unaware of his danger, the captain becomes Orlok's latest victim when he ties himself to the wheel. When the ship arrives in Wisborg, Orlok leaves unobserved, carrying one of his coffins, and moves into the house he purchased. The next morning, when the ship is inspected, the captain is found dead. After examining the logbook, the doctors assume they are dealing with the plague. The town is stricken with panic, and people are warned to stay inside.

There are many deaths in the town, which are blamed on the plague. Knock, who had been committed to a psychiatric ward, escapes after murdering the warden. The townspeople give chase, but he eludes them by climbing a roof, then using a scarecrow. Meanwhile, Orlok stares from his window at the sleeping Ellen. Against her husband's wishes, Ellen had read the book he found. The book claims that the way to defeat a vampire is for a woman who is pure in heart to distract the vampire with her beauty all through the night. She opens her window to invite him in, but faints. When Hutter revives her, she sends him to fetch Professor Bulwer (Stoker's Abraham Van Helsing). After he leaves, Orlok comes in. He becomes so engrossed drinking her blood that he forgets about the coming day. When a rooster crows, Orlok vanishes in a puff of smoke as he tries to flee. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her grief-stricken husband. The last scene shows Count Orlok's ruined castle in the Carpathian Mountains, symbolizing the end of Count Orlok.

Production...

Nosferatu was the only production of Prana Film, founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau. Grau had the idea to shoot a vampire film; the inspiration arose from Grau's war experience: in the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the Undead.

Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen the task to write a screenplay inspired from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, despite Prana Film not having obtained the film rights. Galeen was an experienced specialist in Dark romanticism; he had already worked on Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) in 1913, and the screenplay for Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World) (1920). Galeen set the story in a fictional north German harbour town named Wisborg and changed the character names. He added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship. He left out the Van Helsing vampire hunter character. Galeen's Expressionist style screenplay was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism, such as those by Carl Mayer. Lotte Eisner described Galeen's screenplay as "voll Poesie, voll Rhythmus" ("full of poetry, full of rhythm").

Filming began in July 1921, with exterior shots in Wismar. A take from Marienkirche's tower over Wismar marketplace with the Wasserkunst Wismar served as the establishing shot for the Wisborg scene. Other locations were the Wassertor, the Heiligen-Geist-Kirche yard and the harbour. In Lübeck, the abandoned Salzspeicher served as Nosferatu's new Wisborg house, the one of the churchyard from Aegidienkirche served as Hutters and down the Depenau coffin bearers bore coffins. Many walks of Lübeck took place in the hunt of Knock who ordered Hutter in the Yard of Füchting to meet the earl. Further exterior shots followed in Lauenburg, Rostock and on Sylt. The exteriors of the film set in Transylvania were actually shot on location in northern Slovakia, including the High Tatras, Vrátna Valley, Orava Castle, the Váh River, and Starhrad. The team filmed interior shots at the JOFA studio in Berlin's Johannisthal locality and further exteriors in the Tegel Forest.

For cost reasons, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner only had one camera available, and therefore there was only one original negative. The director followed Galeen's screenplay carefully, following handwritten instructions on camera positioning, lighting, and related matters. Nevertheless Murnau completely rewrote 12 pages of the script, as Galeen's text was missing from the director's working script. This concerned the last scene of the film, in which Ellen sacrifices herself and the vampire dies in the first rays of the Sun. Murnau prepared carefully; there were sketches that were to correspond exactly to each filmed scene, and he used a metronome to control the pace of the acting.

Nosferatu

A Symphony of Horror [eine Symphonie des Grauens]

1922

"Nosferatu (Eine Symphonie des Grauens)"

by

Michael Koller

senses of cinema

Based illegally on Bram Stoker's Dracula, F. W. Murnau's film is undeniably the best and probably the most faithful of the myriad of films based on the novel. Naively, the film's producers attempted to circumvent the author's estate's copyright by changing the names and central location of the film. London became Wisborg, Count Dracula is called Graf Orlock, Jonathan Harker became Hutter and his wife Mina was named Ellen, and so on. Ironically, in all prints struck over the last few decades, the names (apart from the location, for obvious reasons) have reverted to the originals of Stoker's novel. Made on a tiny budget by Praha-Film, as the first of an ambitious slate of occult films, an overzealous spending on promotion sent the film rapidly into debt, limiting its distribution potential. Add to this, a tenacious perseverance on the part of Stoker's wife Florence to protect her copyright (who almost saw to the destruction of all prints of the film when the original negative was destroyed after a court decision). Certainly, the novice producers, businessman Enrico Dieckmann and designer, painter, architect, and occultist Albin Grau, who was the film's art director (costumes and sets) and story board artist, were familiar with Stoker's novel. The title of the film comes allegedly from the Romanian word for the undead, and The Undead was the working title of Stoker's book. The Carpathian Mountains, in Romania, is where Dracula lives prior to his relocating.

Nosferatu's scriptwriter Henrik Galeen, had previously gained a reputation for his horror/fantasy and Expressionistic work through his co-direction and scripting of the 1914 version of Der Golem and Der Student von Prague (1920) and his script for the 1920 version of Der Golem. Later he was to script Waxworks (1924) and write and direct Alraune (1927), cementing his position as the major collaborator on all of the best German fantasy films. His technique for maintaining the multiple perspectives and the fragmentary nature of Stoker's novel was to frame the story as the chronicle of an unidentified narrator, inserting texts, letters, newspaper clippings, diary and log book entries and documentary footage similar in style to the arachnid footage later used by Buñuel in L'Age d'Or (1930). (1) Murnau further added to this fragmentation with an extensive and complex use of cross-cutting between scenes. Whereas Stoker's novel is contemporaneous (1897), Galeen's script is set at the time of "The Great Death in Wisborg in the year 1843 A.D." In the English language version, the intertitles have altered the location and era to Bremen, 1838, with the historian's name given as Johann Cavallius. The English language version alters several other plot details and sadly, loses the lyrical, Expressionistic character of Galeen's original intertitles. The original has, as Eisner notes, "oddly-broken lines. prolific use of exclamation marks, words in capitals, and letter-spaced lower-case matter. [a] staccato rhythm. with its incomplete sentences, clauses, phrases and idiosyncratic punctuation." (2) For simplicity's sake the remainder of the article will refer to the film's location as Bremen.

The positing of the story back in time by fifty years and the location shooting necessitated by the film's low budget had a profound effect upon the look of the film. Whereas Stoker's novel invokes Jack the Ripper, who operated in London in the late 1880s, Murnau's film conjures up the mediaeval Europe of the Plague. The film had, even at the time of its release, "the patina of antiquity", a look that Murnau created through the careful choice of locations. (3) Location filming was rare in Germany at the time of the film's production, but this allowed Murnau to suitably combine the two contradictory elements which exist in most of his work: expressionism and realism. Murnau was greatly influenced by the Swedish director Victor Sjöström in his use of the environment as a vital character in the drama of a film, and this is no better displayed than in this film. The busy, cluttered detail of Murnau's Transylvania and Bremen wreaks of old world decay and menace. These are the kind of locations where Dracula would feel at home, and his Bremen residence looks condemned. This appearance was achieved without the use of chiaroscuro lighting effects usually associated with German horror. Fritz Arno Wagner's use of shadows is very effective but surprisingly controlled considering the nature of the tale.

The film begins very conventionally. The initial exposition is uni-linear, realistic and pedestrian. It is only after the vampire appears that the tone changes and the cross-cutting begins. The precise sense of place is set dialectically against, although not always successfully, optical effects (speeded-up motion, stop-motion photography, superimpositions, and the use of negative), heavy make-up and Expressionist performances. The almost contradictory dichotomy of filmic realism partnered with Expressionist acting exists elsewhere in Murnau's work. This can produce profound results, as it does with Emil Jannings characterisations in Der Letzte Mann (1924) and Faust (1926), and with Max Schreck in the second half of Nosferatu, or it can unbalance the film as occurs with George O'Brien and Max Schreck, in the earlier stages of Sunrise (1927) and Nosferatu respectively. This may not be Schreck's fault. His performance is very restrained throughout. Schreck's make-up early in the film appears theatrical, but as the film progresses, this becomes more subtle and believable, perhaps developing with the skill of the make-up artist, culminating in the powerful images of the vampire that are commonly reproduced.

Max Schreck's role as the vampire was for many years after the completion of the film shrouded in legend, probably, in no small part due to Schreck's apt name (Schreck translates from German as fright, fear, terror, horror). Some believed, or were encouraged to believe, that Murnau had taken the role or that The Count was playing himself. Such tales are unfortunately untrue. Schreck may have been given the role because of his name, but he had been associated with Max Reinhardt's Berlin company, as had many of Murnau's collaborators. Schreck had an undistinguished film career apart from his role as the vampire, appearing in Murnau's The Grand Duke's Finances the year after Nosferatu. Murnau himself had been a student of, then actor and finally assistant to Reinhardt before the war, taking up filmmaking in 1919. Murnau was a perfectionist and a name alone would not have been sufficient reason to cast someone in a pivotal role. Schreck's emaciated, ungainly appearance, combined with his character's rodent-like features and the vampire's lengthening fingernails creates cinema's ugliest vampire, and fits with the film's aesthetic and theme of the vampire as the contagion of the epidemic that spread throughout Europe (vampire = rats); as a symbol of a diseased and corrupted aristocracy feeding off the vitality and youth of the young. This is different from the novel where the vampire is a suave and sophisticated seducer who is more akin to the sexual threat of Hammer's Christopher Lee. Here the relationship is more predatory than sexual. This is the natural order. The fatal disease is due to the parasite feeding off the living. Dr. Van Helsing shows his students a Venus fly-trap devouring a fly and a polyp with mouth and tentacles consuming its live victim. Life is the fear of death and disease.

Lotte Eisner draws a parallel between the dire influence of the vampire, and Murnau's personally traumatic struggle with his homosexuality and with Germany's repressive turn of the century legal code and moral climate which lent itself to the possibilities of blackmail. (4) Homosexuality may have been an implicit theme of vampire lore, but the repressive nature of the German state made it difficult to raise this theme.

Throughout the film, Murnau draws a fateful triangle between Dracula, Harker and Mina. At one point, as the vampire and Harker race to Bremen where Mina waits, Mina states, "He's coming. I must go out to meet him." The 'he' is made ambiguous, and this ambiguity has already been suggested earlier in the film where cross-cutting makes it appear that Mina is beckoning the vampire into her arms. He has already stated that she has a lovely neck and, at the conclusion of the film it is Mina's sacrifice that destroys the vampire. In Stoker it is Mina that must be saved, but here it is Mina that ends the tyranny. Whereas Stoker's vampire is killed by a stake, Nosferatu introduced the device of the vampire who is destroyed by the sun's rays and where Stoker's vampire casts no shadow, Murnau's does throughout to great dramatic effect. At the climax of the film, the shadow of the vampire's hand grasps at Mina's heart and she arches in pain. Murnau may have broken the laws of vampires, but he has obeyed the laws of the cinema.

Endnotes:

1. This is shown to be Galeen's contribution and not Murnau's by a reading of Galeen's script included in the English translation of Lotte H. Eisner's Murnau, Cinema 2, Secker & Warburg, London 1973, pp. 228-70. Murnau's alterations are indicated in bold in the text.

2. ibid., p. 269.

3. Carlos Clarens, An Illustrated History of the Horror Film, Capricorn Books, New York, 1968, p. 23.

4. Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, Cinema 2, Secker & Warburg, London, 1973, p. 98.

The script [transcribed by B. J. Kueh]...

     NOSFERATU

     1922

     cast

   Count Dracula, the vampire....................Max Schreck
   Renfield, an estate agent..............Alexander Grannach
   Jonathon Harker, Renfield's clerk...Gustav von Wangenheim
   Nina, his wife............................Greta Schroeder
   Westenra, Harker's friend....................G. H. Schell
   Lucy, his wife.............................Ruth Landshoff
   The Professor................................John Gottowt
   The Town doctor...............................Gustav Botz
   Captain of the 'Demeter'.......................Max Nemetz
   First Mate.................................Wolfgang Heinz

From the diary of Johann Cavallius, able historican of his
native city of Bremen:  Nosferatu! That name alone can chill the
blood! Nosferatu! Was it he who brought the plaque to Bremen in
1838? I have long sought the causes of that terrible epidemic,
and found at its origin and its climax the innocent figures of
Jonathon Harker and his young wife Nina.

                     B R E M E N   1 8 3 8

                            MORNING
            At the Home of Jonathon and Nina Harker
                     Harker leaves for work

HARKER:  (presents Nina with a bouquet of flowers)

                    In the streets of Bremen
                      Harker walks to work
                     An old man approaches

OLD MAN:  Wait, young man.  You can't escape destiny by running
away.

HARKER:  (shakes the old man's hand and continues walking)

             At the Estate Office of Agent Renfield
                    Renfield reads a letter

The agent Renfield was a strange man, and there were unpleasant
rumors about him.

                          Enter Harker

RENFIELD:  Here is an important letter from Transylvania. Count
Dracula wishes to buy a house in our city.  It's a good
opportunity for you, Harker.  The Count is rich, and free with
his money.  You will have a marvelous journey.  And, young as
you are, what matter if it costs you some pain--or even a little
blood?  The house facing yours...that should suit him.  Leave at
once, my young friend.  And don't be frightened if people speak
of Transylvania as the land of phantoms.

                   At the Home of the Harkers

HARKER:  I may be away for several months, Nina.  Renfield is
sending me to some lost corner of the Carpathians.

NINA:  (looks worried)

Harker left Nina with his good friends, Westenra and his wife
Lucy.

                  Outside the Westenras' House
               Nina runs to say goodbye to Harker

HARKER:  Don't worry, Nina, nothing can happen to me.

              Harker mounts a horse and rides away

           *****************************************

                    T R A N S Y L V A N I A

>From relay to relay, through the dust raised by the stages,
Harker hurried on.

            A coach speeds along rugged countryside

                            EVENING
                         A Village Inn
      Harker disembarks from the coach and enters the Inn.

HARKER:  Dinner, quickly!  I should already be at Count
Dracula's castle!

              The inn patrons look away in worry.

INNKEEPER:  You must not leave now!  The evil spirits become
all-powerful after dark!

HARKER:  (chuckles to himself)

                      In a room at the Inn
                    Harker undresses for bed
           He reads from a book left on the bedtable

                    THE BOOK OF THE VAMPIRES
     ...and it was in 1443 that the first Nosferatu was
     born.
     That name rings like the cry of a bird of prey.  Never
     speak it aloud...
     Men do not always recognize the dangers that beasts can
     sense at certain times.

HARKER:  (laughs and goes to bed)

               Outside the window, a hyena prowls
                 Village horses scatter in fear
                 Village women cower in terror

                            MORNING
                        Outside the Inn
                        A coach departs

                         LATE AFTERNOON
                  In the Carpathian Mountains
             The coach speeds along mountain roads

PASSENGER:  Hurry!  The sun will soon be setting.

                      AT DUSK THAT EVENING
                        At a crossroads
             The coach stops and Harker disembarks

DRIVER:  We will go no further, sir.  Not for a fortune!  We
will go no further.  Here begins the land of the phantoms.

            The driver throws down Harker's luggage

HARKER:  (Walks away, crossing over a bridge)

And when he had crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet
him.

  Harker is met by a coach which carries him to Castle Dracula

                         An the Castle
            Harker is greeted by the Nosferatu Count

NOSFERATU:  You are late, young man.  It is almost midnight.  My
servants have all retired.

            He leads Harker to sup at a dining table

HARKER:  (cuts finger on a bread knife)

NOSFERATU:  Blood!  Your precious blood!

                    Harker warily backs away

NOSFERATU:  Let us chat together a moment, my friend. There are
still several hours until dawn, and I have the whole day to
sleep.

           He leads Harker to a chair by a fireplace

As the sun rose, Harker felt himself freed from the oppressions
of the night.

                         Harker awakens
                 He notes two marks on his neck

                       LATER THAT MORNING
       Harker walks in the countryside around the Castle
      He finds a gazebo and writes there a letter to Nina

     Nina, my beloved-
          Don't be unhappy.  Though I am far away, I love
     you.  This is a strange country.  After my first night
     in the castle, I found two large bites on my neck.
     From mosquitoes?  From spiders?  I don't know.  I have
     had some frightful dreams, but they were only dreams.
     You mustn't worry about me.  I am leaving immediately
     to return to Bremen--and to you.

                    Harker stops a traveler
                and gives him the letter to post

As twilight came on, the empty castle became alive with menacing
shadows.

                In the parlour at Castle Dracula
          Harker and the Nosferatu review legal papers
            The Count sees Harker's picture of Nina

NOSFERATU:  Is this your wife?  What a lovely throat!  That old
mansion seems quite satisfactory.  We shall be neighbors.

                   Count signs the documents

                           THAT NIGHT
                      In Harker's Bedroom
                Harker packs away Nina's picture
               He finds The Book of the Vampires
                         and reads more

     Nosferatu drinks the blood of the young, the blood
     necessary to his own existence.
     One can recognize the mark of the vampire by the trace
     of his fangs on the victim's throat.

HARKER:  (peeks out his bedroom door)

COUNT:  (stands motionlessly at the end of the hall)

HARKER:  (quickly closes his bedroom door, looks out the window
at the river far below, and climbs into his bed)

                        Enter the Count

That same night in Bremen, in a somnabulistic dream...

                  At the home of the Westenras

NINA:  (awakens in a trance and walks out to the terrace)

                        Westenra follows

WESTENRA:  Nina?

               Nina collapses in Westenra's arms
                         Enter servant

WESTENRA:  The doctor, quickly!

                        LATER THAT NIGHT
             In Harker's Bedroom in Castle Dracula
         The Count advances on Harker as he lies asleep

                           MEANWHILE
                  In Nina's Bedroom in Bremen
                 The doctor, Westenra and Lucy
                 stand over Nina as she sleeps

NINA:  (suddenly sitting up)  Jonathon!  Jonathon!  Hear me!

                         MOMENTS LATER
             In Harker's Bedroom in Castle Dracula
          The Count turns from Harker's sleeping body
                         Exit the Count

                           MEANWHILE
                  In Nina's Bedroom in Bremen

NINA:  (sighs relief and returns to sleep)

DOCTOR:  A sudden fever.

The doctor laid Nina's trance to some unknown disease.  Since
then I have learned that she had sensed the menace of Nosferatu
that very night.  And Harker, far away, had heard her cries of
warning.

                        THE NEXT MORNING
             In Harker's Bedroom at Castle Dracula
                         Harker awakens
       He rushes from his bedroom out into the courtyard
                    and wanders into a crypt
              He finds the Count lying in a coffin
                     Exit Harker, horrifed

                       EARLY THAT EVENING
              Harker looks out his bedroom window
    He sees the Count loading coffins on a horse-drawn cart

COUNT:  (climbs into a coffin and closes the lid)

              Exit horses, cart, coffins and Count

HARKER:  (Makes a rope from a bedsheet and climbs out window)

  Harker falls to the ground below and is knocked unconscious

                          THE NEXT DAY
            A cargo-bearing raft floats down a river

The men little suspected what terrible cargo they were carrying
down the valley.

                       SEVERAL DAYS LATER
          In a hospital room somewhere in Transylvania
        A nurse and doctor tend to Harker at his bedside

NURSE:  Some peasants brought him here last evening.  He still
has a high fever.

HARKER:  (leaps up suddenly)  Coffins!  Coffins filled with
earth!

                         In a shipyard
                Sailors load crates onto a ship
      Tipping over one crate, they find only dirt and rats

Nosferatu was en route; and with him disaster approached Bremen.
 At the same time, Dr. Van Helsing was giving a course on the
secrets of nature and their strange correspondences to human
life.  The professor told his students about the existence of a
carnivourous plant.

                 ********************************

                          B R E M E N

               Professor Van Helsing's Laboratory
             Van Helsing and four colleagues watch
                as a Venus flytrap traps a fly.

VAN HELSING:  Astonishing, isn't it, gentlemen?  That plant is
the vampire of the vegetable kingdom.

Nosferatu held Renfield under his influence from afar.

                       At the Sanatarium
           An attendant enters the doctor's quarters

ATTENDANT:  That patient who was brought in yesterday has gone
out of his mind!

              In Renfield's cell at the Sanatarium
                   Enter Doctor and Attendant

RENFIELD:  (catches and eats flies)  Blood!  Blood!

                    Renfield leaps at Doctor
                   Attendant subdues Renfield

                  In Van Helsing's Laboratory
          Van Helsing and colleagues peer into a tank

VAN HELSING:  And now, gentlemen, here is another type of
vampire:  a polyp with claws...transparent, without substance,
almost a phantom.

Nina was often seen alone among the dunes, watching and waiting
for her husband's return.

                On the dunes overlooking the sea
            Nina sits on a bench looking out to sea.
       Lucy and Western bring Nina the letter from Harker

                           MEANWHILE
      In Harker's Hospital Room Somewhere in Transylvania
         Harker dresses for his journey back to Bremen

                        AT THE SAME TIME
         In Renfield's Cell at the Sanatarium in Bremen
       Renfield unfolds a newspaper clipping and reads it

                   NEW PLAGUE BAFFLES SCIENCE
                   A  mysterious  epidemic of
                   the plaque  has broken out
                   in eastern Europe  in  the
                   port  cities  of the Black
                   Sea, attacking principally
                   the  young  and vigourous.
                   Cause  of the  two  bloody
                   marks  on the neck of each
                   victim baffles the medical
                   profession.

RENFIELD:  (laughs)

Aboard the Demester, first one man was stricken, then all.

                   In the hold of the Demeter
                 Captain tends to a sick sailor
              The Count appears briefly then fades

One evening at sundown, the captain and his first mate buried
the last man of the crew.

                   On the deck of the Demeter
          Captain and first mate toss a body overboard

FIRST MATE:  I am going below.  I want to have a look in the
hold.

                   In the hold of the Demeter
       First mate sees the Nosferatu rise from his coffin

FIRST MATE:  (rushes topside and leaps overboard)

CAPTAIN:  (ties himself to the sterring wheel)

              The Nosferatu approaches the Captain

Despite all sorts of obstacles, Harker pushed on towards Bremen.
 Meanwhile, driven by the fatal breath of the vampire, the
vessel moved rapidly towards the Baltic.

                           ONE NIGHT
                    At the Westenras' House
                 Nina sleepwalks to the terrace
                       Lucy follows Nina

NINA:  He's coming.  I must go to meet him.

                     In the Bremen Harbour
                  The Demeter sails into port

              In Renfield's Cell at the Sanatarium
           Renfield attempts to climb out his window

RENFIELD:  The Master is coming!  The Master is here!

                        Renfield escapes

I have long tried to understand why Nosferatu travelled with the
earth-filled coffins.  Recently I discovered that to preserve
their diabolic power, vampires must sleep during the day in the
same unhallowed ground in which they had been buried.

         The Count carries his coffin from the harbour
             to his newly-purchased house in Bremen

                           MEANWHILE
                    At the Westenras' House
               Harker returns and is met by Nina

NINA:  Jonathon!  Thank God you are safe!  Now I feel that I too
have been saved!

                        THE NEXT MORNING
                     In the Bremen Harbour
                  Officials search the Demeter
             The captain is found dead at the wheel

OFFICIAL:  We couldn't find a single living soul on board!

           A second official discovers the Ship's Log

                  Ship's Log - Varna to Bremen
                                       24 April 1838
     Passed the Dardanelles - East wind - Carrying 5
     passengers, mate, crew of 7, and myself, the Captain.

                                          6 May 1838
     Rounded Cape of Inatagran - One of my men, the
     strongest, is sick - Crew is restless, uneasy.

                                          7 May 1838
     Mate reported stowaway hiding below decks - Will
     investigate.

                                         18 May 1838
     Passed Gibraltar - Panic on board - Three men dead
     already - Mate out of his mind - Rats in the hold - I
     fear the plague.

BURGOMASTER:  The plague is here!  Stay in your houses!

                          HOURS LATER
               In the deserted streets of Bremen
                    Towncrier reads a notice

                  ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ NOTICE ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
               To halt the spread of the plague,
               the Burgomaster of Bremen forbids
               the citizens of this city to bring
                  their sick to the hospitals
                     until further notice.

Nina had promised her husband never to open The Book of the
Vampires, but she found herself unable to resist the temptation.

               In the living room of the Harkers
            Nina reads from The Book of the Vampires

     One can recognize the mark of the vampire by the trace
     of his fangs on the victim's throat.
     Only a woman can break his frightful spell--a woman
     pure in heart--who will offer her blood freely to
     Nosferatu and will keep the vampire by her side until
     after the cock has crowed.

                          Enter Harker

NINA:  (pointing out the window to the mansion across the
street)  Look!  Every night, in front of me!

The townspeople lived in mortal terror. Who was sick or dying?
Who will be stricken tomorrow?

                     At the Harkers' House
                     Nina lies sick in bed

HARKER:  Don't be frightened.  I will get the professor.

                          Exit Harker
                   Nina looks out the window
     at the line of coffins being carried along the street
            She reads from The Book of the Vampires

     Only a woman can break his frightful spell--a woman
     pure in heart--who will offer her blood freely to
     Nosferatu and will keep the vampire by her side until
     after the cock has crowed.

                           MEANWHILE
                     Outside the Sanatarium
                Two old women talk to each other

OLD WOMAN:  They saw him escape.  He strangled his keeper.

        Renfield runs down an alley, pursued by a crowd
                     He climbs onto a roof
                 The crowd throws rocks at him
            He climbs down and runs outside of town
                       The crowd pursues

                           THAT NIGHT
                    In the Harkers' Bedroom
      Nina is awakened by the Nosferatu outside her window
                      She opens the window
           Harker awakens and Nina faints in his arms

HARKER:  The professor!  Call the professor!

                          Exit Harker
                      Enter the Nosferatu

                        THE NEXT MORNING
                    In the Harkers' Bedroom
                         The cock crows
      The Nosferatu looks up from drinking at Nina's neck

                           MEANWHILE
              In Renfield's Cell at the Sanatarium

RENFIELD:  Master!  Master!  Beware!

                   Outside the Harkers' House
                 Harker and Van Helsing arrive

                    In the Harkers' Bedroom
              Sunlight sweeps across the buildings
              across the street from Nina's window
  Nosferatu attempts to escape but is touched by the sunlight
                 He vanishes in a puff of smoke

              In Renfield's Cell at the Sanatarium

RENFIELD:  The Master is dead.

                    In the Harkers' Bedroom
                          Nina awakens
                          Enter Harker

NINA:  Jonathon!

           Harker takes Nina in his arms as she dies

And at that moment, as if by a miracle, the sick no longer died,
and the stifling shadow of the vampire vanished with the morning
sun.

                                          THE END

Thoughts on "Nosferatu"

Stahe ir film renakes often fail..."Nosferatu"


Previous Halloween treats...

Blood suckers of Connecticut

H. P. Lovecraft treat..."The Alchemist" 

BE AFRAID...the Vampire Squid

H. G. Wells treat..."The Star"

Animation land Halloween cartoons  

Witch Hazel 

The mirror
 
Kwaidan..four ghost stories 
 
Edgar A. Poe treat..."A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"

Giants

Mark Twain treat..."A Ghost Story"

The Devil and Maciste..."Maciste all'inferno"

"Daughter of Horror"...a remarkable cult film 
 
Two historical cinematic Halloween offerings

Yes Virginia, there is a village named "Frankenstein" in America 

Bram Stoker treat..."Dracula's Guest"

Schrödinger's cat achieves revenge 

"The Hands of Orlac"...Austrian Expressionist cinema

H. H. Munro treat..."The She-Wolf"
 
Physics taking the fun out of Halloween cinema?

Halloween lithograph postcards from the past
   
Not just for Halloween, but works good--"face painting"

A disappearing Halloween tradition..."bobbing for apples" 

Honoré de Balzac treat..."The Elixer of Life"

Guy de Maupassant treat..."On the River" 

Meet Zé do Caixão [Coffin Joe] from Brazil's first horror film..."At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul"

Mary Henry and the living dead..."Carnival of Souls"

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle treat..."When The World Screamed" 
 
Corman/Coppola horror film..."Dementia 13" 
 
Castle and Price for the classic horror film "House on Haunted Hill"

92 years later, it is still a strong [horror] film..."The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari"

Wallachia's prince...Vlad Dracula

"In search of the real Dracula"

by

Leif Pettersen

Octoberr 12th, 2011

BBC Travel

Long before Bram Stoker’s literary Dracula sparked a century-long, global obsession with vampires – both the torturing and tortured variety – a lavishly mustachioed Wallachian prince by the name of Vlad Dracula (r 1448, 1456-1462 and 1476) was making a name for himself by heroically repelling successive waves of Ottoman invaders.

Dracula’s name and accomplishments went viral across the continent, often accompanied by liberal embellishment. In particular, tales embellished his array of statement-making prisoner execution methods, which ranged from decapitation to boiling to burying alive.

However, Dracula famously earned the post-mortem moniker “T,epes,” (impaler) from his preferred form of execution: skewering. A wooden stake was carefully driven through the victim’s buttocks, emerging just below the shoulders. This diabolical method ingeniously (ie, cruelly) spared all the vital organs, meaning that the now writhing victim faced at least 48 hours of unimaginable suffering before death.

To be fair to poor Dracula, skewering defeated enemies was not unusual in medieval Europe. Vlad’s first cousin, S,tefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), is said to have “impaled by the navel, diagonally, one on top of each other” 2,300 Turkish prisoners in 1473. And they sainted him!

Dracula’s legend as wily Ottoman scourge and bloodthirsty combatant was sealed in the spring of 1462 when, after repeated failed attempts to conquer the rebellious prince, an increasingly impatient Sultan Mehmed II raised and personally led an army of 90,000 troops into Wallachia. The momentum and morale of this impressive siege took a serious hit when they stumbled upon a bit of Dracula’s handiwork: a literal forest of stakes adorned with 20,000 men from Mehmed’s previous Ottoman army. T,epes,’ forces, using disguises and guerrilla tactics, picked away at the Sultan’s demoralized forces, including a daring but unsuccessful assassination attempt on the Sultan himself, for months before they ultimately retreated.

Finding Dracula’s true home

T,epes, is still revered as a hero in Romania, though these days you are more likely to see his face on vampire-themed T-shirts and coffee mugs, cheapening the prince’s good name in the interest of tourist revenue. This enthusiastic effort has unfortunately spilled over into popular “Dracula castle tours” that disingenuously railroad tourists to the undeniably vampiresque Bran Castle in southern Transylvania. However, Vlad never lived there and – it is disputed – he may not have ever even set foot on the premises.

In fact, Dracula’s true home, Poienari Citadel, is a gorgeous but admittedly long trip southwest over the Carpathian Mountains in Wallachia, so far off the tourist beaten path and ill-serviced by public transport that only Dracula purists, historians and the occasional hopelessly lost driver ever visit.

Poienari, built on previous fortress ruins by miserable, soon-to-be-skewered Turkish prisoners in 1459, was a massive defensive fortress, strategically positioned to guard the entrance of Wallachia from Transylvania through the Arges, Valley. Though it was used for centuries after Dracula was forced to flee yet another Ottoman attack, the structure was eventually abandoned. A large section collapsed and fell down the mountain in 1888. What remains is a rather small cluster of semi-restored, head-high ruins, somewhat underwhelming on their own, but enriched by the mountaintop setting and the heart-quickening 1,480 stairs one needs to endure to access the site.

Thoughts on "Nosferatu"

A fine silent film on Bram Stoker's Dracula.

"Six Degrees Of Nosferatu"

by

Thomas Elsaesser

April 13th, 2011

Sight and Sound

The gestation of Nosferatu connected director F. W. Murnau with death and the traumas of his time in ways more intriguing than anything suggested in Shadow of the Vampire, the new film about making Nosferatu, argues Thomas Elsaesser

"Where do you think you're going?" Professor van Helsing calls after Jonathan Harker in F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu Ein Symphonie des Grauens (1922). "You cannot escape your destiny by running away." Both the film and Bram Stoker's original novel Dracula bear a family resemblance to the 'appointment in Samarra' story of the merchant who came across Death at noon in Baghdad and, panic-stricken, rode to Samarra, unaware that his real appointment with Death was not until the evening - in Samarra. Harker travels to Transylvania, thinking he's selling the mysterious Count a piece of real estate, but what the two also trade when they exchange contracts is the portrait of Harker's fiancée Mina, giving Nosferatu access to and possession of her person - the main reason, at least in Murnau's film, why the Count acquires real estate in the first place. And when Harker manages to escape the Count's castle, making his way home on horseback, little does he know that in the meantime the Count is already sailing ahead to await him in the becalmed port of Harker's native city, ready to land his deadly cargo of plague-carrying rats. Murnau too was involved in 'appointments in Samarra' - for instance, he seems to have undertaken what would prove his last journey in order to evade the very fate that was to lie in store for him. He died on 11 March 1931 in a freak automobile accident near Santa Monica on his way to arrange a steamship passage to New York after having been warned by his astrologer that he should avoid travelling on land.

The making of Murnau's last film Tabu A Story of the South Seas (1931), which opened nine days after his death, was similarly ill-fated. Not only did the production, which began auspiciously as a collaboration between Robert Flaherty and Murnau, break up in disarray, but it seems that Murnau himself was proceeding at cross-purposes. According to his correspondence, he actually undertook his South Sea journey to visit not Tahiti, where the film was shot, but Bali, where a long-time friend and former associate had made his home. Tabu has often been regarded as Murnau's intimate film diary, the ultimate home-movie: beautiful bodies diving into the deep for pearls, darting canoes, languid and yearning limbs stretched out or embracing. But in its sombre, ominous and uncanny mood, its empty landscapes and restrained framing, Tabu is actually a companion film to Nosferatu. The old Hindu priest, who impartially but implacably pursues the young couple, fulfils at plot level a function similar to that of the vampire, namely to split up the couple and reclaim the virgin bride. And as in Nosferatu, doom in Tabu comes in the form of a ship, pushing its way gently into the perfectly framed shot of a peaceful port.

Despite the detailed research of M. Bouvier and J.-L. Leutrat, the question of how Nosferatu came to be made is still something of a mystery. Virtually the only film produced by Prana-Film - a financial sinking ship whose owners were subsequently taken to court for copyright violations by Bram Stoker's widow despite having changed most of the characters' names - the project owed much to the enigmatic figure of Albin Grau, who signed for the decor and costumes but also seems to have been the driving force behind the production, both financially and artistically. Very little is known about Grau, though a recent article by Enno Patalas depicts him variously as a student of eastern philosophy, a freemason and master of the 'pansophic lodge of the light-seekers' in Berlin, a fan of Aleister Crowley, a friend of novelist-painter Alfred Kubin and the author of a pamphlet about the use of colour in decor and lighting in black-and-white films. More predictable collaborators were film-industry professionals screenwriter Henrik Galeen (who co-wrote The Golem) and director of photography Fritz Arno Wagner, one of the three top cameramen at Ufa.

Germany in 1921-22 was recovering from the bloodletting of World War I. The spectres that haunted the new republic included the Spartacist uprisings in Berlin and Munich, based on the Soviet model and bloodily suppressed, raging inflation that bled the economy like an internal haemorrhage, and an army of horribly disfigured war cripples. But it was another memorable event that left its echo in Nosferatu: in the winter of 1919-20 a Spanish flu epidemic and famine hit Germany, ravaging the country and reportedly killing more civilians than the Great War itself. So the cholera whose origins Nosferatu is supposed to record is doubled by several successive disasters befalling a defeated Germany, during which public opinion only too readily blamed the victors of Versailles for not coming to the country's aid. Instead, the French, adding insult and humiliation to injury and penury, insisted on the prompt payment of war reparations and annexed the Rhineland, setting off a chain of events that gave the nationalist right its first electoral successes among the working class.

But the war had left less visible scars and traumas, especially on the veterans. In the run-up to the opening of Nosferatu, Grau published a piece in Bühne und Film explaining how he'd come by the story and why he'd wanted to turn it into a film. It has to do with the war in Serbia and his experiences as a soldier of the infantry. Dispatched to a remote village as part of what he describes as "a vermin-extermination commando", he's billeted with an old peasant who tells him the story of his father who, killed in a blood-feud, was buried without sacraments and haunted the village as a vampire. The peasant even shows Grau an official paper about his father's disinterment in 1884, where the body is discovered perfectly preserved except for two front teeth now protruding over the lower lip. The prefect ordered a stake to be driven through the heart of this 'nosferatu' (Romanian for undead), who expires with a sigh.

What comes into view in Bram Stoker's original Dracula as much as in Grau's tale and Galeen's unauthorised adaptation for Murnau is Britain and western Europe's relationship with 'Mitteleuropa' and its eastern flank: the Slav peoples in general and those of the Balkans in particular, a world the Germanic west had for centuries studied with fascinated antipathy. And Mitteleuropa also encompassed 'the Pale' - the home territories of the eastern Jews whom the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 had forced to move westwards. Superimposed in the figure of Nosferatu are several contradictory and conflicting ethnic or racial 'others', making him at once an 'in-between worlds' creature and a babushka doll of 'worlds-within-worlds'. Put differently, the story prefigures in some sense the imperial coloniser's bad dreams of a reverse colonisation of the mother country by the colonised subjects. The earth Nosferatu brings in his coffins, as well as the name of his ship (Demeter, i.e. Mother Earth), give a clear hint of this feared return. That such an influx of the subjugated and exploited should be seen in terms of rats, contagion and contamination speaks volumes: about the unselfconscious racism of the educated classes during the last-but-one turn of the century, but also about 'us', hyper-selfconscious readers of literary texts and filmic discourses, and citizens of 'Fortress Europe', some of whom harbour their own nightmare visions of history's undead heading west from the 'land beyond the trees' and beyond.

Nosferatu is a film about networks of contagion and contamination that are also networks of secret and subversive communication. The lines of attraction and repulsion that link Nosferatu and Harker and Nosferatu and Mina weave a subtle web of interaction and dependency, of transfer and substitution. These different levels of making contact charge the film with the kind of energy that alone gives vampirism its extended metaphoric significance, reverberating, for instance, in the film-within-the-film (a spoof on Ufa's recently inaugurated Kulturfilm documentaries) about nature's own vampires and predators. A mutually sustaining symbiosis mingles passion and revulsion with petrified fascination and drifting abandonment: it takes over the ship, her unfortunate crew and then the burgers of Wisborg, but it's also the subject of Professor van Helsing's natural-history lesson, when he traces a malevolent genealogy from plant life to animal existence, from carnivorous orchids, polyps, spiders and flies, and rats, all the way to the beginning and Mina's playfulness with the cat and her kitten. But a similarly fatal chain of eating or being eaten goes from Mina's anxious possessiveness as Harker sets off, to the servility of the Transylvanian peasants, the dangerous hospitality of Nosferatu, the craven submission of Renfield, the sadistic exploitation of the ship's crew by its master, until it returns full circle with Mina's sacrifice, offering herself to Nosferatu's terrible visitation.

The idea of unpredictable patterns of propagation is perhaps not so dissimilar from what in more recent times has been studied by mathematicians and statisticians under the name of small-worlds syndrome. Small-worlds scientists are trying to understand the dynamics of groups and open systems and the patterns of their interaction, which tend to oscillate between total randomness and total organisation. It's a key issue for biologists (how do thousands of crickets manage to chirp in unison within seconds of starting up?). It's used by economists when predicting global stock-exchange movements or the effects of a particular market's collapse. It's of interest to preventive medicine when looking at the spread of viruses and devising methods of disease control, and it helps designers of mobile communications networks trying to determine the shortest route between two long-distance parties, connecting them by piggy-backing on local data traffic.

To the rest of us, small-worlds syndrome is better known as 'six degrees of separation', according to which everyone knows someone famous across the overlap between one's own circle of friends, acquaintances and associates and the circles of friends of these friends. If we use Nosferatu as a template, then the six degrees of Murnau open up intriguing connections.

Born in Bielefeld in 1888 as the son of a textile manufacturer, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe adopted the name Murnau as a young adult. The fact that he did so in order to disguise an unflattering surname and in homage to an artists' colony south of Munich already leads to Kandinsky, Franz Marc and other members of the Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter who used to spend time in Murnau. And Murnau the place is just one of the connections between Murnau the man and Expressionist poet Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele and his circle of avant-garde artist friends.

Albin Grau may link Murnau with Alfred Kubin and such Prague Gothic writers as Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka, but he was an outsider to the film industry, while Galeen and Wagner belonged to one or other of the production units that existed at Ufa under Erich Pommer. What's called Expressionist film mainly reflected common tastes and preferences among this remarkably tightly knit community of professionals - no more than two dozen names - who operated as teams and skills networks. With the exception of Fritz Lang, Murnau and a few others, the directors were no more than first among equals, with the set designers probably leaving the most lasting impression on the look of the films.

Murnau's reputation is as German cinema's most exquisite Romantic poet, in contrast with the technophile Lang who had astounded the film world with the trick effects for which Ufa was famous since The Spiders (1919) and Destiny (1921). In 1915 Murnau was called up and served in the infantry in East Prussia; he hated it and was bored to distraction. The following year he managed to get transferred to the Luftwaffe, where he flew combat missions over France until after an emergency landing during fog he came to spend the remainder of the war as an internee in neutral Switzerland. Murnau's time as a pilot suggests that this tender soul had nonetheless shown a remarkable appetite for 'storms of steel', blending his high-Romantic sensibility with a taste for 'top-gun' technology typical of the aristocratic German dandy in the von Richthofen mould. Indeed, Murnau's obsession with gliding camera movements and intricate spatial set-ups suggests analogies with the perception of pliable space and horizonless vistas experienced by a fighter pilot.

Most cultural-studies approaches to Nosferatu (or indeed to Stoker's Dracula) have little trouble relating the myth of the vampire to a historically new and politically troubling awareness of female sexuality. The somnambulist Mina and her friend Lucy have been compared to the hysterical females treated by Charcot in Paris at the Salpêtrière, where they were photographed by Albert Londe, thanks to his newly developed chronophotographic camera, while two young doctors from Germany and Austria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, looked on. (Stoker has van Helsing support his diagnosis of Lucy's symptoms with a pointed reference to having studied in Paris under Charcot.)

But Murnau's Nosferatu is open to another reading of its sexual pathology. Vampires in the movies are usually bisexual, often letting ambiguity hover over the question of whether, say, Dracula's brides are for the Count ends in themselves, or merely means to an end (as Venus-traps, to attract young men to their rescue who then become the juicier victims). But Murnau's Nosferatu would seem to be the prototype of another gender, not least because of the vampire's many animal features, from his pointed ears and bird-like claws to his rodent teeth, rather than the more usual fangs suddenly bared on an otherwise impeccably gentleman-dandy face and physique (as with Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee).

The French surrealists admired Nosferatu mainly for its eroticism, contrasting the anodyne puppy-love of Mina and Harker with Nosferatu's necrophiliac lust, musty and potent at once, exuding the aroma of dank crypts and leathery flesh. According to Robin Wood, on the other hand, sexuality is branded in Murnau's films as the source of evil: Nosferatu stands for raw carnal desire which must be kept in check in the interest of higher spiritual values, and so Mina, expressing that mixture of desire, curiosity and horror typical of patriarchal culture's depiction of female sexuality, must die along with the vampire. But the love triangles in the film also lend themselves to an interpretation that brings out a more layered structure of sexual attraction and ambivalence. For instance, underlying the secret heterosexual bond between Nosferatu and Mina is the Renfield-Harker-Nosferatu relation. The initial situation suggests that the film superimposes two plotlines, one heterosexual, the other developed around the homosexual relationship between Nosferatu and Renfield doubled by the homosocial story of Harker being befriended by Renfield, whereupon the older man introduces his younger friend to a very 'experienced' queen. Likewise the protagonists of Murnau's Faust (1926) - Mephisto and the rejuvenated Faust - could be called a queer couple, especially on their travel adventures to that celebrated destination of homoerotic desire, the Mediterranean, thinly disguised by the excessively heterosexual story of Faust and Gretchen.

Siegfried Kracauer had argued that Weimar cinema obsessively staged anxieties about male self-images and male sexuality: his 1966 From Caligari to Hitler even ties the theme of damaged masculinity to the vanishing of paternal authority after a lost war. Certainly the preferred stories of Expressionist cinema focus on male identity crises - often signalled by the appearance of a double - and toy with bisexuality by featuring love triangles in which the two males are usually 'best friends' or business associates who show an obvious but rarely openly acknowledged attraction to each other. In this respect Murnau's films are neither an exception nor unusually explicit. Doubles abound in Murnau as they do in other directors, whether by way of disguise (Tartuffe, 1926) or across a split male character (Faust old and young). Likewise, there are several crucial films where a pure, almost asexual love is threatened or destroyed by the intrusion of another male's predatory attentions - to the man (Nosferatu/Harker, Mephisto/Faust, Tartuffe/Orgon, Tabu's Hitu/Matahi).

For a novelist like Jim Shepard, Murnau's homosexuality is crucial to both his films and his life; sorrow and secrecy become the wellsprings of his creative drive, the motives behind a tale of love, longing, guilt and self-abjection. In his fictionalised 1998 biography of Murnau, Nosferatu in Love, Shepard makes the twin poles of self-deprecating humour and self-lacerating grief the protective armour behind which the director feeds on lascivious thoughts furtively indulged. For Shepard, the deepest wound the war inflicted on Murnau was the death on the Eastern Front of his intimate friend Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, on whom he once recklessly cheated. Baffled and hurt, Hans voluntarily enlists and soon gets himself killed, to the undying shame and mortification of Murnau, at least according to Shepard.

It's true that Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele was an Expressionist poet and co-editor of the magazine Das neue Pathos. He was the son of a Jewish banker and art-collector, whose mother Mary, a concert singer, virtually adopted Murnau after his return from Zurich at the end of the war. It's also true that the Ehrenbaum-Degele villa in Berlin-Grunewald remained Murnau's home from 1919 until he left for America in June 1926. But Shepard's fictional diary spins its tale around a number of characters and incidents for which there is no evidence in historical records.

There are two other 'degrees of separation' - one that might underpin and the other undermine Shepard's speculations. The first is the suggestion, already made obliquely in the press reports after the opening night, that Nosferatu is something of a spoof, the camp interpretation and insider's tale of characters and antics in another castle from that of the film - the private retreat (a castle in Austria) and very public court (the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Berlin) presided over by the reigning monarch of Berlin's artistic and theatre worlds, Max Reinhardt. (From 1911 to 1914 Murnau was a pupil of Reinhardt's in Berlin, working as an actor and assistant director.) In his brief study of Murnau published in 1977, Stan Brakhage first reads Nosferatu as a primal-scene fantasy of Murnau himself, linking it to a homosexual childhood fantasy and the wish to do away with his parents and at the same time play father to his mother. But he, too, links the film to Reinhardt ('Max Schreck') and his circle, where homosexual eccentricity and extravagance were encouraged, and homosexuals with talent and panache found a safe haven and congenial company amid the strict anti-homosexual legislation of the otherwise broadminded Weimar Republic.

Shepard describes these excesses with some gusto by introducing a character called Spiess, who plays the role of seducer, Mephisto and evil genius to the hesitant Murnau-Faust, and in the end his novelised biography stands and falls by the credibility one is prepared to give this figure. As it happens, a Walter Spies did in fact exist, and was present - the other degree of separation - during the shooting of Nosferatu, though he never appeared on any list of credits. But he wasn't the figure depicted by Shepard, and his subsequent life is too important, both to Murnau and to many other histories of dance, music and film, to leave Shepard's account unchallenged.

Although definitely an intimate of Murnau's in the early 20s - Murnau invited Spies to live with him and asked him to decorate his villa - Spies left Germany soon after the making of Nosferatu, disenchanted by the empty frivolity of the film world and its hangers-on. Spies was a painter and musician, born in Moscow in 1895 - another Slav - whose family fled west to Berlin in 1909 and sent their son to study in Dresden with Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix. In the ethnological museums of Berlin and Amsterdam he discovered the visual and musical culture of what was then the Dutch East Indies. In 1923 he boarded a ship for Java and settled in Jogyakarta, where he stayed for four years before moving to Bali. His letters to his mother, as well as the few to Murnau, make it clear that Murnau remained his sponsor (he bought several of Spies' paintings) and close friend. A visit to Spies in Bali was on Murnau's mind when, disappointed with his work in Hollywood, he bought a yacht and set off on a voyage on the high seas in the direction of the South Sea Islands and the East Indies. If the prematurely ruptured relationship with Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele made Murnau into something of an undead, a nosferatu in love, then it was certainly not due to Walter Spies. On the contrary, Spies' invisible presence during the shooting of Nosferatu makes him a more likely candidate for the haunter, giving another twist to the mystery surrounding the real identity of the central figure.

E. Elias Merhige's recent Shadow of the Vampire turns on the idea that Nosferatu isn't played by an actor at all but by a real vampire in disguise, a suggestion first made by Adou Kyrou in Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953): "In the role of the vampire the credits name the music-hall actor Max Schreck, but it is well known that this attribution is a deliberate cover-up... Who hides behind the character of Nosferatu? Maybe Nosferatu himself?" The actor-as-star-as-vampire, needing fresh blood and being paid in unsuspecting victims, is in the film business not such a far-fetched metaphor. Many a great star has been known to terrorise the cast with his caprice or turn the set into a bloody battlefield of violated egos and raped reputations. But an even more archetypal movie situation is that of the scientist harnessing the dangerous powers of nature or the unconscious in order to realise his vision at whatever cost to himself and others: every Dr Jekyll trying the serum on himself is a stand-in for the artist-director as sorcerer, no longer in control of the apprentices he has summoned. It's Faust calling on Mephisto, selling his shadow or his soul, an image elaborated in Shadow of the Vampire where the director's ruthlessness in sacrificing his leading lady to his vampire-actor for heightened artistic effect is depicted as equal to the vampire's thirst for blood. But with its conflation of actor and vampire, the film only appropriates what lies ready-made in the filmographies not only of Murnau but of German Expressionist cinema in general, with its ubiquitous ventriloquists' dummies, waxworks coming to life, warning shadows, Golems - all caught in the confusion between art and life, or rather of art as more truthful, more youthful and more authentic than life.

Why has this standard trope of movie lore made a comeback in recent years? Shadow of the Vampire comes right after Neil LaBute's Nurse Betty, billed not as camp vampire gore but as a romantic comedy, despite the bloodletting. It too focuses on a character whose scary dedication to disavowing the difference between artifice and life is mistaken for method acting. Perhaps it's no wonder that the old problem of realism and art is revived in the digital age, where the fake looks more real than the real thing, but where we're so suspicious of authenticity and the image worlds we inhabit are of such universal duplicity that it's axiomatic that the real thing must be fake.

As with The Matrix, The Truman Show, The Cell or Being John Malkovich, the most intriguing questions at the heart of Nurse Betty and Shadow of the Vampire are philosophical: the (epistemological) problem of 'other minds' and the (ontological) problem of 'other worlds' - in the first case, what would it mean to 'know' what goes on in someone else's mind, and what proof do I have that others actually exist, and in the second, if the world I live in is merely someone else's fiction, where would the 'outside' be, from which I could ever see that I'm trapped 'inside', if not inside someone else's inside? These are problems to which the answers are versions of Pascal's wager: the leap into faith (which may be the void) remains the sole cure for such radical scepticism. The vampire movies, as suggested, are more in the line of a Faustian pact than a Pascalian wager, whether entered into out of world-weary longing for youth, love and eternal life, or out of a quest for truth, beauty and the perfection of artifice by ambitious artists or mad scientists. Chances are that either way they get more than they bargained for, dying in horrible agony like Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray or suffering the apparently inverse but in truth complementary fate, namely becoming one of the undead and wishing for mortality: in both cases, ending up as monsters, excluded from the community of ordinary humans and carrying with them an unredeemed or irredeemable surplus.

What is this surplus energy or meaning that brings forth these figures of excessive but also inextinguishable desire? Excess there is, yet is it actually a matter of desire? "We bring them the plague, and they don't even know it," Freud is supposed to have said to Jung the day the two of them disembarked in New York harbour in 1908.

The theories of female sexuality woven around Dracula/Nosferatu all suggest that these attractive/ repulsive monsters embody the vagaries of desire. But psychoanalysts, especially the Lacanians, might well argue that vampires are drive creatures, not desire creatures, meaning that it's the death drive, the repetition compulsion, the entropic principle of life that animates them, not desire, based on and sustained by lack, renewing itself around the perception and disavowal of difference.

Yet there may be another way of describing both the elements of excess, surplus and residue in these figures and the sense that they're creatures driven not by (human) desire but by some other force and energy - that of our technical revolution, as it has impacted on the domains of information and communication. Dracula may be the only original myth the age of mechanical reproduction has produced. This, at any rate, is the notion of Friedrich Kittler, for whom Dracula stands for the eternal repetition of mechanical inscription which entered the western world with the typewriter, the gramophone/phonograph and the cinema. But what the myth tells us about these new media is still a moot point.

Kittler, for instance, argues that Dracula is the story of how women themselves become media, how their susceptibility and sensitivity are discovered in the middle of the 19th century as a resource and raw material. Charcot, Breuer, Freud - for Kittler they all line up as men who "harvest" the mediatic powers of women, and it's Bram Stoker who calls their bluff, who both exposes the patriarchal mechanisms and offers - as in all good myths - the imaginary solution that allows Victorian society to live with this shocking realisation and its contradictions. In the contrasting and complementary figures of Mina and Lucy, and in the descriptions of their symptoms, Stoker makes hysteria and somnambulism appear as the human equivalents of wireless transmission (invented by Marconi in 1895). On their journey in pursuit of Dracula back to Transylvania, Mina serves the men as both medium and messenger - thanks to her contact with Dracula, she's able to track his global position through the transmissions emanating from him, but also, being familiar with the technically advanced transcription device of the typewriter, she records and fixes the messages he unwittingly sends across the ether, while the posse of pursuers travel towards their appointment in Samarra/Carpathia. As Kittler dryly remarks, women around 1890 had only two choices: to become hysterics or typists. Mina, after the demise of Lucy, is both.

Freud, by contrast, was a notorious technophobe. The only piece of technology he ever pronounced on is the "mystic writing pad", basically a child's toy and more akin to the wax tablets of the Romans or the palimpsests of the medieval monks than to Edison's, the Lumières' or Marconi's inventions. Freud's refusal to have anything to do with cinema, notably his utter lack of co-operation in the making of G. W. Pabst's Secrets of a Soul (1912), is also well documented.

Psychoanalysis and the cinema - born together, but on a collision course ever since. Freud was right: they are antagonists, but they came together against a common enemy it now seems it was their historical mission to kill - literature and the literary author. For the first 100 years, the technological media and psychoanalysis competed over literature's prime task and near-monopoly: representing, that is recording, storing and repeating, individual human experience. Cinema and psychoanalysis translated experience into images and sounds, texts and traces, manifest as physical symptoms or as phantom sensations. Where the cinema does it mechanically, using a synthetic support, psychoanalysis retained the (female) body and the (human) voice as material support. It, too, however, tried to automate the recording process as much as possible through free association as 'automatic writing' and through the analyst as passive recording device. In the process both media produced that famous excess which in various generic formulas (from musical and melodrama to special effects and body-horror) feminism and film studies in the last 30 years have been trying to come to grips with.

In the new century, it's psychoanalysis that's in full retreat, a mere ghost haunting the hermeneutic mills of the humanities. And yet Nosferatu is still with us: the excess energy of the undead is now readable as belonging to the cinema and its eccentric patterns of propagation and proliferation across culture at large. Not only in the way films have deposited their coffins in galleries, museums, schools and libraries, but also thanks to the Renfields - cinephiles turned necrophiles - lovingly restoring perished prints and reviving the 'originals' at Sunday matinees or special retrospectives. Less fancifully perhaps, remakes of cinema's classics and restorations of the cinematic patrimony are also efforts to banish and `contain the mysterious forces or lifeforms the sound-image media have brought into human existence. Perhaps the mistake of Shadow of the Vampire is not that it fantasises a vampire hiding inside 'Max Schreck', but that the potency of the myth of Nosferatu today speaks less about the making of a movie than about restoration and preservation, so it's perhaps fitting that besides a camp remake we can also enjoy a re-issue (on video and DVD) of a 'brand-new' Nosferatu.

Character names follow those of Bram Stoker's novel, not Murnau's film.

Nosferatu

Directed by

F. W. Murnau

1922