The bountifully rich Count Orlok wishes to purchase property
in Bremen and young Hutter is sent to the Count’s castle in Transylvania to
finalise everything. But upon his arrival he discovers that Count Orlok is a
strange man excited by the sight of blood and soon feverish nightmare begins to
grip him. After realising that Orlok is a nosferatu, a vampire, he escapes the
castle and heads back to Bremen. But it may be too late as a strange plague has
already begun to sweep across Europe and it soon becomes clear that Orlok has
eyes for Hutter’s young and innocent wife.
Based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, this is the original Dracula
movie that spawned a lot of popular vampire myths as well as delivered some of
cinema’s most incredibly creepy images, not to mention the inspiration behind
Bela Lugosi’s eerie double-jointed finger movements in the 1931 classic.
The
bountifully rich Count Orlok wishes to purchase property in Bremen and young
Hutter is sent to the Count’s castle in Transylvania to finalise everything. But
upon his arrival he discovers that Count Orlok is a strange man excited by the
sight of blood a
nd soon feverish nightmare begins to grip him. After realising
that Orlok is Nosferatu, a vampire, he escapes the castle and heads back to
Bremen. But it may be too late as a strange plague has already begun to sweep
across Europe and it soon becomes clear that Orlok has eyes for Hutter’s young
and innocent wife.
It may be in grainy black and white, it may be a silent
movie, but Nosferatu stands as a
beautiful piece of German Expressionist cinema that still sends shivers down
the spine even to this day! Aside from the characters’ names, little of the
Stoker’s vampiric horror story is changed and, as I mentioned earlier, this
movie gave birth to some of the most iconic scenes in cinema, hell clips from
this flick were even featured in Queen’s music video for ‘Under Pressure’ with
David Bowie!
Count Orlok (i.e. Count Dracula) is just as creepy a character as
he was back in 1922! Between his sharpened fangs, heightened eyebrows, deathly
slow prowl, elongated shadows, and spindly fingers, there are just so many
things about this guy that are frightening. Amongst cinema’s most iconic
moments are Orlok slowly and vertically rising from a coffin, his slow walks
around his castle casting eerie elongated shadows, and the slow creeping of his
shadow over the bodies of his sleeping and unsuspecting victims. Seriously
eerie stuff!
What I really liked about this movie is how alike it was to the
book. Just like Stoker’s original classic, the major plot points and exposition
are conveyed through letters, book chapters, and newspaper articles rather than
captions, and the black and white medium was never put to better use than
depicting a story about the struggle between light and dark. The German
Expressionist love of using greater light to cast greater shadows was used here
to wondrous effect, really heightening the horror of the entire thing.
Starring
Max Schreck, Alexander Granach, Gustav van Wangenheim, Greta Schroder, Georg H.
Schnell, Ruth Landschoff, John Gottowt, Gustav Botz, Max Nemetz, Albert Venohr,
and Hardy von Francois, Nosferatu, Eine
Symphonie des Grauens is an important piece in cinematic history that many
Dracula remakes and vampire flicks owe part of themselves to. Filled with
suspense, romance, drama, and mystery, it’s a movie that always going to hold
relevance, even if its silence is seen as outdated. It’s jagged editing,
intriguing special effects, and captivating performances elevate into a realm
that is beyond the reach of time’s deathly decay and for this I admire it.
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