Nosferatu at 100: A vampire masterpiece that scares even more today

Sunlight wasn’t always fatal to vampires. This idea was first introduced to the public’s consciousness in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des GrauensOr Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror, the illegally made, now widely beloved 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This trope has continued to be used in the Dracula movies ever since. It isn’t part of Stoker’s novel, but to most modern viewers, a Dracula movie would feel incomplete without it.

F.W. Murnau, written by Henrik Galeen and directed by F.W. On March 15, Stoker will turn 100 years old. Due to a legal battle with Stoker’s estate — after producers failed to purchase the rights to the novel, even though they credited it in the opening titles — NosferatuThe company spent most of its life at the edge of destruction. However, its visual and narrative language has remained constant throughout the centuries. These marks are the result of an historical theme which has gained renewed importance in recent years. NosferatuThis story is all about plague and illness. The silent-era classic opens with title cards describing a fictitious scourge, but its story was crafted in the shadow of the 1918 Spanish Flu, a pandemic that affected roughly a third of the world’s population. As with so many modern horror stories, Nosferatu is a film where darkness consumes, light liberates, and color — yes, color — foreshadows both hope and doom.

For those who are familiar, it may surprise you. Nosferatu by reputation alone — and even to some who may have only seen the black and white version of the film — that while it was captured in monochrome at the time, Murnau’s silent classic isn’t a black and white movie as we understand it today. Color is actually one of the film’s most crucial narrative elements. Some surviving versions, like the one available on Tubi, continue to be presented sans color, but a tinted French film print also outlived a legal order to have all known copies destroyed, at the behest of Stoker’s widow. This print was eventually found again in the 1980s.

It is amazing to see the restorations. The daylight glows in bright yellow with candlelight glowing almost as a brown. The film’s most important tint is the dawn color, which has a distinctive hue of pink. The color is briefly used, but returns when the rooster calls for the returning sun. This instantly kills the evil Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck. This weakness has been shared by almost all vampires ever created. Even Columbia’s 1943 film Vampires Return, an official sequel to Universal’s DraculaThis ended in Bela Lugosi, a bloodthirstyCount playing the role of the sun undoing his work. Before long, Murnau and Galeen’s invention had been folded into the very lore they’d robbed.

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Traditionally, light has been viewed as salvation in Christian belief, so like crucifixes, it’s remained among the religious symbols that kill or weaken vampires, further positioning them as deviant and unholy. However, this sunlit use is not recommended. NosferatuIt had an immediate and contemporary meaning. The 1918 Spanish Flu saw an increase in “open-air treatments” for the afflicted, a holdover method from Germany in the late 19th century. The perceived healing effects of sunlight on influenza was one of the main reasons this treatment took place (the subject of ongoing research). Whatever Murnau and Galeen’s original intent, this eradication of the vampire ­— now a common image in horror — is historically inseparable from the eradication of disease.

The fear of illness was an existing undercurrent in Stoker’s 1897 novel, in which characters bitten by Count Dracula succumb to malady before rising as vampires. You can read the full article here NosferatuHowever, the transformative power of Orlok is eliminated. Orlok’s victims just become ill and die. When the sickness spreads throughout Wisborg, local authorities consider it inexplicable.

The film makes a key historical association during Orlok’s voyage from Transylvania: The crew of the vessel he’s traveling on die off one by one, each with mysterious bite marks on their neck. While the audience isn’t made privy to their suffering, the specter of death looms over them beforehand — or rather, under them, in the rat-infested hull of their ship, where Orlok has stored several coffins filled with the cursed earth he needs to survive. It’s especially notable that rodents, the animals which once spread The Black Death on trade ships, can be seen burrowing through the very dirt that gives Orlok his power. Orlok has an almost ratlike appearance. Many people have speculated that the film’s design was an antisemitic cartoon, or perhaps an accidental one. Galeen, himself a Jew, was certainly a prophet in the film. more overt propaganda comparing Jewish people to plague ratsIn later years.

Another coffin is used by The Count to sleep in. We see him rising slowly out of one, as if lifted to attention by a pulley — a charming technique that, while recognizable and perhaps even amusing to modern audiences, presents us with a monster whose most enormous movements still let him feel as still as a corpse. Orlok is also a subtle, chilling presence to sailors as a half-seen phantom seated on top of a casket. He tilts his head in a threatening direction toward the seaman but his arms cross casually above his knee as though to invite him toward his inevitable demise. He is present on the vessel as a warning sign of the unsettling inevitability death.

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Orlok’s bite is heavily implied to be at the root of the plague, but Murnau doesn’t actually depict him biting anyone during most of the story. For instance, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), the film’s version of Jonathan Harker, implies he was bitten during a sudden cut from night to day, but he remains inexplicably immune to Orlok’s disease. In a letter to his wife Helen (Greta Schröder), the film’s Mina Harker, he attributes the bite marks to a mosquito, another creature widely known for carrying disease (a discovery made a mere 25 years before the film was made). The vampire’s bite — perhaps the most common thread across all of vampire media — is withheld, making it all the more horrifying when Orlok finally sinks his fangs into Helen’s neck on screen. This is accompanied, shortly thereafter, by a stunning bit of silent-era acting: a ravenous look in Max Schreck’s eyes, which turns fearful as dawn approaches.

Schreck is a mystery. Even his biographer, Stefan Eickhoff, admits the man was “shrouded in mystery.” So his eerie performance as Orlok became the subject of rumor and innuendo, which eventually took shape in the tongue-in-cheek 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, in which the actor’s identity is implied to be a cover, masking his actual supernatural origins. In spite of Orlok’s vacant, statuesque stares and the stiff movements of his animal-like talons, though, the parts of Schreck’s performance that most linger in the mind are brief moments when he feels human and familiar.

His subdued mania in the presence of Hutter’s bloodied finger recalls someone jolted to attention or aroused from a stupor. It is funny to see him carrying one of his huge coffins around the city streets. Then, the morbidity sets in. Retrospect shows that the image is not as funny. We see a procession full of coffins later in the film. This is a dark and macabre display after several people have been killed by the unknown plague. It’s as if Orlok lugging a symbol of death through the town was foreshadowing, or a warning, all along.

Orlok doesn’t just bring death, he brings an unnatural, unexpected number of deaths, leading to quarantine and lockdown measures in Wisborg. He is also discussed as a contagion of sorts by Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt), who compares him to “a polyp with tentacles” (or “a polyp with claws,” depending on the translation), which Murnau accompanies with microscopic images of a polyp’s tendrils devouring another cell. “Transparent, nearly weightless,” Bulwer describes the polyp, though he’s referring to Orlok as well. “No more than a phantom.”

It is obvious that this translates into the following: nosferatuVampire, also known as a vampire, refers to an anomaly of nature, hidden in the shadows. Bulwer might have been talking about the 2009 flu epidemic that infected more than 500,000,000 people worldwide. Murnau’s microscopic imagery, used to contextualize nature’s ferocity up close, has since become a visual staple of modern thriller and horror films about disease, like OutbreakAnd ContagionThis was used to pinpoint the danger ahead and their devastating consequences on human cells. Even during montages in non-pandemic films like Requiem for a DreamThe sudden surge of cell imagery can be unnerving and puts the fragility of the human body in perspective.

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Murnau finds an image that conveys the frightening speed with which contagion moves. Orlok’s first appearance in Transylvania is when he creates a horse-carriage. This undercranked shot makes Orlok appear unnaturally fast. Time hasn’t been kind to this introduction — perhaps, in part, because of the association between fast-forwarded movement and silent slapstick comedy — but it’s a fun bit of innovation that speaks to the Count’s otherworldly powers.

It’s also backed up by plenty of other unsettling imagery, from Orlok’s stiff movements when he first turns to look at Hutter to the way the enormous keys he holds close to his chest resemble withered skeletal fingers, before we ever get a good look at his hands. Just as unsettling, in spite of the carriage’s janky, sped-up motion, is the brief color-negative shot of Orlok riding through the forest. The tint of this shot matches that of the rest, however, the other visual details of Orlok’s ride through the forest have been made difficult to see, as light and dark alternate briefly.

It is instinctive to code a scene in blues, which helps establish nighttime scenes. The dusk is usually a blue hue in real life. Although the day-for night filming process evolved, visual coding has not changed. This can be seen in films such as Mad Max Fury Road. However, given the film’s other associations, this filmmaking language can’t help but call to mind one of the other nicknames of the 1918 influenza pandemic: The Blue Death, owed to the effects of cyanosis, where fluid buildup in the lungs turned many infected patients blue. Whatever the impetus behind the shading, it turns most of Orlok’s scenes into subtle reminders of how the then-recent Spanish Flu had ravaged the human body.

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These nods become even more overt in the film’s climactic scene, when Orlok approaches Helen and the long shadow of his slender fingers creeps over her chest, clutching her heart. The darkness washes over her, possessing her like a demonic fever from within as she writhes — a ecstatic delirium that, though it calls to mind the common association between vampires and taboo sexual impulse, is also akin to the final, frenzied symptoms before death during the second wave of the 1918 pandemic.

The daylight vanquishes Orlok moments later, illuminating the flats and miniatures of nearby homes as it makes its way to Helen’s bedroom. Helen is already infected with Orlok and can only be embraced by Hutter once more. While Harker and Mina both survive Stoker’s novel, Galeen and Murnau’s ending is a fittingly macabre deviation for a film born into a world just two years removed from a global plague which claimed millions of lives, as millions more watched helplessly.

Unlike today’s advancements fighting pestilence, the 1918 Spanish Flu ravaged populations until it could go no further. And while Harker vanquished Count Dracula in Stoker’s novel, human interference has little effect on Orlok. They are the characters Nosferatu are left completely powerless in his wake — like untold loved ones left to suffer at the hands of disease — until nature simply runs its course. Until “The Great Pestilence,” as Orlok is referred to in the concluding title card, is “over-come by the victorious rays of the living sun.” The horror runs deep in this timeless milestone in the vampire canon.