New Nosferatu a Monstrously Goth Delight
Like many of us, my introduction to the vampire was through film. As a kid, I stayed up late on Friday nights to watch Creature Feature on TV and soaked up the old black-and-white vampire movies starring the likes of Bela Lugosi.
Christopher Lee as a vampire
But my primary source of vampire joy was from the blood-and-cleavage-filled masterpieces from England’s Hammer Studios. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, Hammer produced a string of Dracula movies that starred the incomparable Christopher Lee. I saw all of them, and my adolescent eyes drank in the technicolor lushness of the vampiric embrace: the open bedroom window, the billowing curtains, the hypnotic stare, and, ultimately, the slowly opening fang-filled mouth. As a matter of fact, I was never without a pair of my own plastic fangs stashed in a drawer—to this day, I still have a set of custom-made fangs ready to go at a moment's notice. To put it simply, I have always had a major crush on vampires.
It was not until my twenties that I actually read Bram Stoker’s Dracula—it was a shock! Where were all the trappings that I was used to: the cape, the widow’s peak, the lady-killing aristocrat? Stoker’s Dracula is severe, cold, animalistic, calculating, and evil to his core. He loves no one. He is a revenant from a primordial past that is hellbent on destroying modern society from within its tightly repressed structures. It was then that I realized the influence of horror films had filled my idea of the vampire with a pastiche of clichés—fangs, capes, wooden stakes, crucifixes, garlic…and so on.
Since its publication in 1897, the story of Dracula has not only suffered under the weight of these cinematic clichés, but the vampire itself has mutated into variations ranging from the comedic (Love At First Bite, for example) to the down-right insipid (the Twilight series). I don’t want camp. I don’t want teenage romance. I want the MONSTER, feral and pure.
What I look for in a ripping vampire story can be summed up with the adage “everything old is new again.” I look for films that challenge, re-invent, or subvert the established rules and tropes of the vampire to create a story that feels fresh and unpredictable. I look for the vampire as a creature driven by a primal blood-lust, a supernatural being that has no sympathy towards its victims…and at its core, a harbinger of doom for the entire human race if it remains unchecked.
I also look for the crucial counterpoint to the vampire—the poor, baffled humans that must fight for their lives in order to defeat the overpowering force of the monster. The struggle against the vampire is as equally important to the story as are the machinations of the vampire itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the “everything old is new again” offering from the brilliant Robert Eggers: Nosferatu.
Nosferatu 1922 / public domain
Nosferatu, as a cinematic legend, has a long and colorful history. The current release is the third version since the movie first appeared as a silent film in 1922. Originally created by the German filmmaker F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu—A Symphony of Horror), was almost lost forever due to a lawsuit filed by Bram Stoker’s widow for copyright infringement of Dracula. The judge presiding over the case ruled in favor of Stoker’s estate and ordered that all copies of Nosferatu (including any negatives) must be destroyed. Fortunately for the film world, a few copies and negatives of this ground-breaking movie were hidden away and survived the purge.
Though the pedigree of Stoker’s Dracula is evident in the story of Nosferatu, Murnau’s film makes critical changes to the story itself; primarily among them is changing the setting from 1890s England to 1838 Germany, and changing the names of the characters—for example, Dracula becomes Count Orlock. This film is considered one of the prime examples of German Expressionism in film. Of the original 1922 version, film critic Roger Ebert wrote:
“Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films…It doesn't scare us, but it haunts us.”
