Nosferatu (1922) *

 Murnau's vampire film, quite documented by many a horror and silent film scholar, closely resembling Bram Stoker's "Dracula", to the point that legal efforts from the author's widow led to many of the prints' destruction (thank goodness, this didn't lead to the film's extinction!), remains quite potent almost a century later. 2022 will be 100 years since this film hit theaters! Wow. I love that at any time, Nosferatu (1922), can be located and watched anytime a horror fan wants to get those Max Schreck (as the title character) creeps. While I decided to watch the film in primetime tonight, and it has been viewing for me at all kinds of hours, including the first time I saw it sometime noon during a horror silent film marathon (perhaps on Sci-Fi Channel, I can't quite recall), there is no better time than Midnight with the lights out. For whatever reason, tonight I watched it with Carpenter's Lost Themes soundtracks as background music, providing for quite a unique experience. Perhaps the film doesn't give us the iconic Dracula opposing Van Helsing (in this film's case a professor named Sievers (Gustav Botz)), but Murnau treads as close as he can to the Stoker novel...he seems to have crossed the line as his film was considered a rip from the novel. Orders for destruction of this film could have been disastrous for us fans of not only Murnau but horror, too. And the influence Murnau's film provided to the genre is obvious. Although I think Reggie Nalder's vampire in "Salem's Lot" (1979) is wonderfully hideous, and Kinski's own Nosferatu (Herzog; "Nosferatur: Phantom der nacht (1979)) is perfectly grotesque, too, no vampire to me is as memorably unsettlingly ugly as Shreck's own depiction of the vampire. The bald head, piercing eyes, pointed ears and nose, rodent teeth, long lanky fingers, arms and legs; Shreck's Nosferatu is a thing of nightmares. The prints available to us are mostly as hideous as Nosferatu, but we are fortunate just to have the film at all. I can't possibly entertain the thought of this being lost as "London After Midnight" still is. I still hold out hope, although it's highly doubtful, that in some crumbling hospital somewhere, a print of "London After Midnight" might be found. Maybe some vault yields this long sought after film. But we have to be realistic. So many films are lost to fires, mismanagement, voluntary destruction, and time. It's an atrocity that such history has been deprived of proper viewing and evaluation. But we do have "Nosferatu" and that can't be discounted considering it was the desire of Stoker's estate that nary a print should ever be experienced by an audience 100 years later. 

My favorite scenes are pretty much the same as documented by horror fans of the past: Nosferatu on the carriage that picks up Hutter (Gustav v. Wangenheim), the stand-in for Jonathan Harker, sent to do business with the vampire in Transylvania (this looks as if Murnau shot it in some abandoned castle in the middle of some wilderness in the mountains, giving the setting extra atmosphere) by his suspicious-acting boss, Knock (Alexander Granach). So this film has Knock going mad, very similar to Renfield, but he's nowhere near Transylvania, so Nosferatu's reach is quite extensive it would seem. The shadow up the wall as Nosferatu pursues his Mina in the form of Ellen (Greta Schröder), wife of Hutter, Nosferatu discovered in his coffin at his castle by Hutter, Nosferatu rising from his coffin in the scooner and creeping about on the deck of said scooner, the rats fleeing another of Nosferatu's coffins inside the scooner, and Nosferatu approaching Ellen, sacrificing herself to stop the vampire. The look on Nosferatu's face as he slowly moves away after puncturing Ellen's neck with his teeth, soon realizing dawn is emerging. Even when Nosferatu is reading over the deed for his new digs in Wisborg and noticing Hutter's cut finger, drawing towards him eerily...Schreck is never *not* intensely sinister and very much the essential Midnight Boogeyman. And that is what gives this film its true power...Murnau knew what he had in Schreck and found creative ways to shoot him to capitalize on how chilling his mere presence was within his camera lens. There is no romanticism, the vampire is not suave or debonair; this isn't a vampire count that wets panties or encourages arousal. He is repulsive. The plague described because of Nosferatu's neck biting and blood drinking very much is apt...he is a plague. I like how Herzog took that idea and even expanded and expounded it further in his Nosferatu film in 1979. 5/5