Nosferatu

In movies, if not in life, what genuinely frightens us tends to change over time. Reports of terror-induced panic at showings of 1931’s Dracula leave its viewers incredulous nearly a century later. We become inured and desensitized, our imaginations—a vital fear factor—lessened by the infrequency of their use owing to the internet, phones, and AI. A deadening of our insides that involves staking our imagination through its heart. How fitting it is then that we have F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu—about a certain leader of the undead—to horrify us indefinitely.

It is Dracula without the name, though Murnau wasn’t trying to hide the fact. He was simply going a quasi-bootleg/pirate route, bypassing copyright law and aiming to tailor the film to Germans. Max Schreck is Dracula, now renamed Count Orlok. It’d only been 25 years since Dracula’s publication. Many of the novel’s original readers were still around and would have had no confusion as to what was being adapted. This was a low-budget undertaking, tantamount to an early horror-film form of fan service. Not that Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, was amenable to the approach, demanding all prints be destroyed, much as Van Helsing and his friends had once tried to snuff out a vampire. But wouldn’t you know: some survived the purge, which was also very undead on their part.

Nosferatu will never fail to be scary. It looks like no horror film, thanks largely to Schreck, who resembles a shaved rat that someone took a paring knife to; his skin is whittled while also being thorny. But it isn’t just his appearance—it’s how he moves. There’s nothing natural or human about any of it. Murnau, like Jean Vigo, was one of cinema’s great poets who married the romantic and the realistic. He knew which effects to deploy and how to use the camera to maximize fluidity. The film’s subtitle “A Symphony of Horror” is a play on the transcendent nature of Murnau’s abilities; his visuals are themselves symphonic. They enmesh, surrounding us as sound does. These are images and they move, but it doesn’t feel enough to call them moving images. Were it possible to film a nightmare and play it back for someone in the morning, it could well resemble Nosferatu. It’s a movie that doesn’t seem of this earth, or at least the waking plane of consciousness. Watch it late at night and you won’t sleep afterward. A decompression period must be provided for the post hoc viewer to settle down again in the land of the living. As we watch, we’re apt to say to ourselves, “I don’t want to do this anymore,” while also loving the experience, because this is what it means to fall for horror, whether for the first time or the latest.