Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)

Ask what people's favorite Dracula film is and among the answers you'll hear “the Lugosi” or ”one of the ones with Christopher Lee” or “that Gary Oldman movie”. No one ever says “the Schreck”. Yes, sure, plenty will name Nosferatu...but never by citing by the actor. People know Lugosi, Lee, and Oldman. They know Langella and Jourdan and Palance. Who the hell is Max Schreck besides an in-joke in a Tim Burton movie? Most people doubt that's even the actor's real name. Of course they do, it means “fright” in German. What could be more perfect for a vampire film?

In fact Schreck was his real name and he left behind a substantial body of work as an actor. I've never seen any of it, and I'll bet most of you never have either. He is indelibly and permanently inscribed in my bad dreams as Count Orlok. I know nothing else of him. Max Schreck doesn't exist in my awareness, say his name and all I can see is the vampire stretching out his talons. For all of Murnau's brilliant experimental cinematography, Schreck remains the movie's most important special effect.

Schreck's Count Orlok looks inhumanly thin like a praying mantis and moves with the slow, deliberate pace and body language of a spider. He gives one the creeps the moment he appears, beckoning his midnight guest into his unlit castle. A sane person would run away screaming. Vampires feed on blood, we know, but this may be the only vampire movie where the act is almost wholly insectile in its parasitism rather than a thin metaphor for lusts. That too makes Orlok stand out from the rest as less human and less alive. He doesn't have the urbanity of the Draculae that followed. Unlike other Draculas his masquerade of humanity isn't just a mask of civility, the way Schreck essays the role Orlok's disguise comes off more like that of an alien wearing a human suit that doesn't fit well. He is altogether other. And like I said, most of us have never seen Schreck in anything else so we have no impression of him as a human with which to strip away the monster.

Nosferatu is always named as one of the great films in German Expressionism, but that's wrong – it's great but not expressionist. Murnau employs various tricks with camera, editing, and lighting only sparingly, and crucially only does so when Orlok is on the screen to heighten the impression that the vampire is so wholly 'other' or unnatural that even the laws of nature cease to function in his presence...that to be in his presence is to abandon the protection of reality itself. Copolla tried to this with his version, unsuccessfully in my opinion because his film was overflowing with so many artistic touches that the ones surrounding Dracula failed to stand out as meaningful.

Everything else about Nosferatu is as firmly realistic as his Tabu, as tactile and earthy. The grisly visage of the dead sea captain conveys a sense of bodily decay that's mirrored in the castle where the vampire keeps his coffin. There's a startling shot of a postman defecating in the bushes* that threw me for a moment, but I think it underscores the natural earthiness the whole film evokes, that life is as vibrant as it is messy and vulnerable. It's in the insects Knock (this movie's Renfield) devours, Hutter's (Harker's) reckless glee for adventure and disregard of danger real or superstitious, Ellen's (Mina's) twee concern over picked flowers. Contrasted to the dreamy unreality of the vampire, this grounding in vibrant realism makes Orlock that much more a threat by emphasizing the richness of the life he threatens. When we first meet Ellen, she looks a bit like death already, rather pale and skeletal. Later she becomes a figure of eroticism with her “lovely neck”, feverish sleep, angsty sleepwalk in her sheer nightdress, and calling out passionately for her Hutter when Hutter is about to be molested by Orlok. One of my favorite quotes regarding Max Schreck's Count Orlok is that “he looks like a penis with teeth”**.

*This shot isn't in most public domain copies, nor in the Blachawk-issued restoration that I own on VHS. I saw it for the first time last night in the restoration put out by Kino. This version also has more accurate intertitles.

**attribution needs a confirmation.