“Nosferatu” began life as an undead in 1922 as an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula.” However, F.W. Murnau’s film, subtitled “Symphony of Terror,” quickly came to be considered a masterpiece in its own right, a high water mark for German Expressionism, and a template for future vampire films. It became. The films differed from the novels in important ways, such as the locations (from London to Germany) and the names of the vampires (from Dracula to Orlok). This did not stop the Stoker Foundation from filing a lawsuit and demanding that all prints be destroyed. Fortunately, some survived.
That was over 100 years ago. Since then, “Nosferatu” has come out of the coffin twice. In 1979, Werner Herzog created Nosferatu. Now, Robert Eggers, who has been chipping away at the occult since his pared-back 2015 debut The Witch, has released a gothic aesthetic that crystallizes vampire themes of sex and death. He has unleashed his own unique “Nosferatu”. As a classic of the genre in its own right.
Max Schreck played a vampire in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu.
(Photofest)
The elements of the story remain the same even after decades. A lawyer is sent deep into the mountains by his eccentric employer to seal a deal with a reclusive count. surprise! The client is a vampire and his eccentric employer falls under his spell. To make matters worse, the vampire wants the lawyer’s wife, and the lawyer is moving into an old mansion across the street from the couple. He will bring with him so many rats and a nasty plague of things. I also go to the neighborhood.
Despite working from the same scenario, each film has its own personality and approach to the material. It all started with Murnau’s original work, with the towering, grim Max Schreck playing Count Orlok some nine years before Bela Lugosi played the gentle Count Lothario in Tod Browning’s Dracula. The song, performed with live ensemble accompaniment, remains popular in the repertoire scene, and now thanks to the Silents Sinked series and Radiohead’s album Kid A, the original “Nosferatu” is his work. It’s matched by an unforgettable performance by a director who will reach. Five years later, she reached her peak as an avant-garde sensualist with the dark romance “Sunrise.”
Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani starred in Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu.
(Shout Factory/Bleeding Light Film Group)
The early films showcased Murnau’s already fluid camerawork, especially his command of shadow puppets and low angles, making the 6-foot-3 Shrek look like an otherworldly force of evil. (In another life, I wrote a rambling college paper analyzing the arrival of a ghost ship carrying Nosferatu and his army of rats to the fictional German town of Wisborg. Ask me about that someday. Please. I’m sure you’ll regret it.)
Director Herzog was already a giant of New German Cinema, having directed films such as “Aguirre” and “Stroszek,” and admired Murnau’s films. Like many of his films, his own rendition is a lush, contemplative, vampire movie that’s engrossing, or at least immersive as you ponder the story’s metaphysical layers. When a vampire (actually Dracula) played by Klaus Kinski brings a plague to young Wismar, the inhabitants hold a spooky “Seventh Seal”-like dance and the Last Supper. Kinski is the most melancholy of the Nosferatu trio, almost emotional in his despair. “Time is an abyss, deep as a thousand nights,” he laments. “It’s a scary thing not to grow old.” You can imagine him sneaking off to a goth club, swaying to the music of Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead Man” and staring into the night.
Bela Lugosi plays the evil Count Dracula as a kind-hearted lothario in Tod Browning’s 1931 classic Dracula.
(AP)
This is where the new Nosferatu comes into play. It works wonderfully in conjunction with the other two films and as a frenetic entity in its own right. The film follows three principals, Ellen Hatter (Lily-Rose Depp), her lawyer husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and the gruesome Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, who sounds like a Kaiser with emphysema). , it’s like a love triangle where they invade each other’s dreams. . Orlok is represented here as a manifestation of Eren’s forbidden desire. She doesn’t just sleepwalk when under the Count’s spell, like her two predecessors. She experiences frenzied seizures and severe seizures that seem close to orgasm. At one point, she compares Orlok to a snake inside her body. The Earl brings plagues to everyone, but he is also Eren’s personal demon. Others are just along for the ride.
This “Nosferatu” is sometimes referred to as “The Exorcist,” a more esoteric horror film starring Isabelle Adjani, who played Lucy Harker in Herzog’s “Nosferatu,” and Andrzej Szuławski’s “Possession” (1981). Sometimes they are influenced. Another fun game of connecting the dots in Nosferatu: Willem Dafoe, who played the Van Helsing-like Albin Eberhard von Franz in Eggers’ film, plays the very Method Max Schreck (John He was chosen to play Markovich (opposite Murnau). Skylark “Shadow of the Vampire” (2000), inspired by “Nosferatu.” The history of horror, especially this line of horror, can sometimes feel like a hall of mirrors.
Robert Eggers’ latest film Nosferatu stars Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhard von Franz.
(Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features)
There’s an intensity to the romantic fate of the new Nosferatu, painfully vulnerable and ferocious, feminine yet masculine, muscular fatalism that is neither. It’s a resonant ode to darkness and death, both modern and keen to build on the world created by our forebears.
