The funny thing is, we’re not even supposed to be able to see the original “Nosferatu.” When the director F.W. Murnau and the producer Albin Grau approached the estate of Bram Stoker, hoping to adapt his seminal horror novel “Dracula” into a feature film in 1921, the author’s widow turned them down flat. Unswayed, the filmmakers went ahead, pressing the screenwriter Henrik Galeen to make a handful of cosmetic changes to obscure their act of plagiarism. When “Nosferatu” was released the following year, the Stoker estate took them to court, kicking off a lengthy international legal battle; the final ruling ordered all copies of the film to be confiscated and destroyed.
Luckily, a few prints survived, and the film was subsequently restored and reappraised as one of the most influential films of the silent era. Its moody cinematography and jolting edits influenced countless horror pictures, as well as two direct remakes, the newest of which hit theaters on Christmas Day. Each iteration of this reconstituted story tells us much about the director behind it, and the cinematic environment in which it was made.
The original “Nosferatu” was a product of the German Expressionist movement. Murnau and Grau, who was also the picture’s production designer, use stylized sets, atypical compositions and dramatic lighting to set the mood and build dread, most famously in the scenes set in the vampire’s dim Transylvania castle, where candlelight casts the count’s distinctive, creeping shadow upon the high stone walls.
His name has been changed from Dracula to Orlok; the other key characters are renamed as well. The real estate solicitor Jonathan Harker has become Thomas Hutter; his fiancée, Mina, is now his wife, Ellen; his employer Renfield, secretly in thrall to the count, is renamed Herr Knock; and the role of the vampire hunter Van Helsing has been reduced and remade into Professor Sievers.
But the broad strokes of the plot remain the same: Hutter is sent to Transylvania by Knock, over Ellen’s objections, for what he believes is the closing of a lucrative real estate deal, but is in fact a plot to lure him there as a sacrifice to the vampire. Orlok is enthralled by a photograph of Ellen, and abandons Hutter so he can travel to Germany to take Ellen as his own; she is haunted by visions of the coming evil, and ultimately sacrifices herself so that Orlok may be killed by the morning sunlight.
That conclusion was one of the major departures from the source novel, in which Dracula is killed by Harker and Quincey Morris, the fiancée of Mina’s best friend, Lucy (another of the vampire’s victims). The climax was also the most concrete deployment of one of the film’s key deviations: In the original novel, Dracula is merely weakened by sunlight, but “Nosferatu” put forth the notion that the sun can kill vampires, which became a key piece of film and literature’s ongoing vampire lore.
The other noteworthy divergence would become even more pronounced in its subsequent remakes. As Orlok merely kills his victims (rather than turning them into vampires, as in the Stoker novel), the rash of dead bodies he leaves in his wake had to be explained. So the screenwriter Galeen folded in a subplot wherein a horde of rats from the boat Orlok commandeers for his ocean voyage swarms the town, spreading plague among its inhabitants. This prompts some of the picture’s most memorable imagery, which was seized on, and greatly expanded, by the German filmmaker Werner Herzog for his 1979 interpretation, “Nosferatu, the Vampyre.”
In fact, you get the feeling that Herzog made his film less out of any interest in Dracula or horror than in plague and rats; he gives us several lingering, almost loving shots of the invading army of vermin. His film combines the over-the-top tradition of German Expressionism and the later, divergently realistic German New Wave movement, in which Herzog was a key player.
But his plotting is quite faithful, and though he restores the names from the Stoker novel (which was by then in the public domain), he follows Murnau beat for beat, and even replicates some dialogue. And though he was obviously making a sound film, Herzog deftly uses silence throughout: filling Harker’s room with hushed quiet, punctured only by the howling wind outside, when he wakes to find Dracula standing over him; removing all sound, save for that of blood being sucked, during the “feeding” sequences; and, during the vampire’s death, eschewing dramatic music and throbbing strings for the bare sound of Dracula gasping for breath as the morning birds chirp outside.
In other words, “Nosferatu, the Vampyre” is aesthetically minimalist, and thus the opposite of what Robert Eggers is up to in his grandly theatrical remake. It’s a haunted, sweaty nightmare of a movie in which he uses the cast iron pot of the original to cook up a hearty Transylvania stew, cheerfully intermingling ingredients from not only the previous adaptations but several official Draculas (especially Francis Ford Coppola’s operatically ornate and unapologetically horny “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992)), as well as the 2000 horror delight “Shadow of the Vampire,” a wildly fictionalized account of the making of Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” featuring Eggers’s “Nosferatu” player Willem Dafoe.
Eggers’s primary addition to the tale is a greater motivation for Orlok’s obsession with Ellen (Eggers’s screenplay restores the altered character names): a psychic connection, dating back to her youth, which led to “troubled nerves” which were only stymied by her relationship with Hutter. This mania manifests itself in seizures, screams and other indicators of inner turmoil, recalling not only “The Exorcist” but “Possession” (1981) — starring Isabelle Adjani, who played the Ellen/Mina role in Herzog’s 1979 “Nosferatu.” Eggers is much more explicit in both his gore and sensuality than Herzog, exploring themes of sexual shame and forbidden desire within the Ellen-Hutter-Orlok triangle, and complicating the dynamic between the vampire and his victim considerably, into a lust-hate battle of wills (“I abhor you,” she all but moans into his mouth).
“Nosferatu” ultimately feels like a container for all of Eggers’s cinematic compulsions — beyond its debt to Murnau and Stoker, it echoes the epic scope of his previous picture “The Northman,” the aural ornateness (and crusty Dafoe performance) of his drama “The Lighthouse,” and the Gothic folk horror elements (down to a midnight ritual in the woods, his own addition) of his debut effort “The Witch.” In these moments, his “Nosferatu,” like Herzog’s, reminds us that the best remakes are less slavish imitations than cover records, allowing the artist to freely and thrillingly explore their own stylistic preoccupations and obsessions.
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