31 Days of Fright, Day 28: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

Welcome to day 28 of 31 Days of Fright here at Road To The Movies! In today's episode, Gabe unearths...

NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR
1922
Not Rated

I'm not sure if I've already told you this, but vampires were my first horror love. I watched Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys when I was eight, and fell immediately head-over-heels. In the intervening years, I have watched vampire movie after vampire movie, struggling through days and even weeks worth of some of the worst stories ever captured on film, always hopeful that just around the next bend in the aisle at the video store, the greatest vampire film of all time could be waiting for me.

Then came adulthood and the slow crumbling of all my vampiric hopes and dreams. Blade. Underworld. Twilight. Vampires may live forever, and maybe I'm just getting too old, but this new generation sucks.

But fear not, fellow vampire hunters. It turns out there is yet hope in the halls of the dead, but it's not a hope for the future. As any vampire worth his grave dust knows, hope is a thing of the past.

I've always been an unabashed lover of vampire nostalgia. The Lost Boys will forever be my own, personal blood and gold standard, but I also take great joy in finding and sharing other classics from my childhood, like Fright Night, Vampire Hunter D, The Omega Man, and Near Dark. If the recent past holds such a treasure trove of vampire goodness - and there are quite a few that I haven't even discovered yet - what if I went back further? What if I went all the way back to the foundations of vampire cinema, to the godfather of them all?

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror wasn't the first vampire movie ever made, but it is certainly the most immortal. When it was discovered that F.W. Murnau had basically adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula to the big screen without first securing the rights, he was ordered by the courts to destroy all known copies of the film, and - I'm sure, to the horror of film lovers everywhere - he complied. Still, rogue prints of the film survived, hiding in dark corners of the globe until the sun of copyrights set and they could emerge to claim their rightful place at the head of the bloody feast table known as Vampire Cinema.

But, I can hear you ask, is it merely the cold corpse of a movie, silently convalescing in the aged crypts of Castle Vampire, unable to contend with its leaner, lither, more terrifying offspring? Well, yes and no.

Nosferatu is definitely showing its age. At ninety, one can hardly expect the polish and sparkle (ugh) of a modern vampire movie. But is that an entirely bad thing? Yes, the cinematography is archaic to the point of being stilted and most of the movie is so over-acted that it would make Adam Sandler blush, but the real question is, Does it detract from or add to the experience? For my money, the archaic acting and cinematography only serve to draw me more deeply into the time period in which the story is set. I always find it not just slightly disconcerting when I'm watching a movie set in the nineteenth century, only to find that the characters speak like modern teenagers. Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes films may have been entertaining, but I can assure you they will never get a second viewing out of me.

And there is Nosferatu's contribution to the mythology of the vampire in general to consider. Most sources seem to agree that Nosferatu is the first story in which sunlight killed a vampire. No small matter, that, as the idea now permeates vampire mythology so fully that writers and filmmakers have to set aside extra time in their stories to refute it before they can move forward with a tale in which sunlight won't kill a vampire. It's a significant addition to vampire lore, and this movie brought it to the table first.

Of course, I would be remiss in my duties as your personal film taster if I did not mention the one thing that makes Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror truly one of the greatest moments in the history of the genre, which is the immortal performance of Max Schreck. His turn as the grotesque Count Orlock is so good - especially by the standards of that era - that there has actually been speculation - upon which 2000's Shadow of the Vampire was based - that he wasn't really an actor at all, but an actual vampire hired by director F.W. Murnau to play in the movie. It sounds absurd, but when you watch the movie and see not only the sinister quality of Schreck's performance, but the very genuine looking fear in the eyes of actor Gustav von Wangenheim - an actor who, for most of the movie, overacts with such gusto as to make Jerry Lewis look subtle - I would be surprised if you didn't find yourself at least questioning whether such a thing might not be possible.

Sadly, it's not all blood roses and funerary incense. Most of the film's original score was lost decades ago, and with the exception of the scenes during the time and immediately after Count Orlock is on the ship, the soundtrack Kino Video either found or commissioned for the movie was easily the most headache-inducing thing I've had to endure cinematically since Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter's stampede scene. It completely ruined the sinister atmosphere Murnau had worked so hard to create. I felt like I was watching a great silent horror movie while someone watched Beyond The Mind's Eye on a TV right next to me. What a way to drive a stake through the heart of one of cinema's greatest moments.

No, this isn't a horror movie that will pack teenagers into a theater and sell millions of dollars worth of tie-in merchandising. Yes, the soundtrack belongs on a tech demo video from 1993. Yes, this film is archaic and slow and overacted, but for my money, it's also more immersive than five Twilight movies, more atmospheric than four Underworld movies, and more terrifying than three Blade movies. It's old and stiff and of another time, but it's not dead. It still stalks the darkened corridors of our collective cinematic mind, it still seeks new victims to feed its dark existence, and it is still very, very dangerous.

9/10

-GABE


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