St. Lawrence Arts: Munjoy Hill, Portland, Maine

Nosferatu - A silent film with musical accompaniment by Carolyn Swartz

St. Lawrence Arts
Portland, ME

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Nosferatu - A silent film with musical accompaniment by Carolyn Swartz

One of the most foreboding and influential horror films in the history of cinema, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922)

At the center of F.W. Murnau's unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's seminal vampire story (the first film adaptation) is the horrifying figure of Count Orlok (Max Schreck), a nobleman who wants to buy a deserted house in the Carpathian Mountains adjacent to that of Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim). Hutter travels to Transylvania to meet with the mysterious Count where he is attacked by Orlok's nightcrawling, vampire alter ego. After seeing a picture of Hutter's wife, Orlok travels via ship to Hutter's village of Wisborg to taste the lovely, white neck of Nina (Greta Schroeder). Like Stoker's Count Dracula, whose implicit physical lust expressed the repressed sexual desires of the Victorian era, Murnau's Nosferatu also had a sexual component, in suggesting the only cure for Orlok's evil is the untainted sexuality of a good woman. Nina reads in a book of vampire lore that the only way to stop the beast is for a virtuous woman to spend the night with him, thus sacrificing herself for the good of her society.

Probably the most memorable and chilling aspect of Nosferatu is Schreck as the monster. An actor whose own name is German for "terror," Schreck is certainly a nightmarish apparition with his bulbous head, pointed batlike ears and long, talonlike fingers and fangs. His ratlike facial features also associate him with the rodents who spread the plague across Europe. And Schreck's eerie, stammering, zombielike walk has since become a feature of numerous screen monsters, from the stammering gait of Frankenstein to the deliberate, determined pace of the killer Michael in Halloween (1978). This inspired interpretation of Stoker's monster suggests, in an almost subconscious way, the world of death and parasitism and decay created in Stoker's novel. Schreck's vampire was a thoroughly original creation, a monster far from the bloodsucking playboys of later Draculas.