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For many horror fans, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is the most anticipated movie of 2024, perhaps even of the decade so far. It has had a troubled history with many fits and starts along the way before finally reaching screens after nearly a decade in the making (Bloody Disgusting first reported on an Eggers helmed Nosferatu in July of 2015) this Christmas Day. There is much at stake and there are big shoes to fill for this movie but if the pre-release buzz is any indication, the film may well exceed its monumental expectations.
The history of Nosferatu reaches back over one hundred years and is one of the greatest and most consistent of all horror legacies. Ostensibly retellings of Dracula, the major Nosferatu films become something unique from the world’s most famous vampire with far more sinister underpinnings than the majority of “official” Dracula stories. Nosferatu in all its forms leans into the ideas of plague, despair, and the occult with imagery that is among the most unsettling in all of horror history.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
Though the original film has long been most attributed to director F.W. Murnau, the true driving force behind Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Gauens was its producer/art director Albin Grau. The great historian of German Expressionist film Lotte H. Eisner described Grau as an “ardent spiritualist,” but today we may well call him an occultist. He immediately saw the cinematic potential of Bram Stoker’s Dracula but did not have, nor could he or his small production company Prana-Film afford, the rights to the novel. So he, along with scenarist Henrik Galeen, crafted a script that they thought would escape unnoticed from the watchful eye of Stoker’s widow Florance. They changed the names and locations from the novel while maintaining its basic structure. Jonathan Harker became Hutter, Mina became Ellen, Van Helsing became Professor Bulwer, Renfield became Knock, and Dracula became Count Orlok. The primary action was translated from England to the town of Wisborg, Germany. In fact, the entirety of the complicated novel is simplified to three major settings: Orlok’s Transylvanian castle, the ship sailing to Wisborg, and the tiny German town itself.
What gives Nosferatu its singular character is its many deviations from the source material. The look of Count Orlok is wholly unique and may well have been designed by Grau, as implied by his pre-production drawings. He chose to build up actor Max Schreck’s (yes, that was his real name) features with putty, gave him a bald pate, and large pointed teeth located centrally in his mouth, giving the vampire a unique rat-like appearance that underscored the film’s themes of plague. As with Egger’s remake, Murnau’s Nosferatu was only four years removed from the height of a global pandemic that claimed millions worldwide. Fairly or unfairly, the rat has served as the symbol of pestilence for centuries thanks to their role in the spread of the bubonic plague throughout medieval Europe. In hindsight, the plague of rats can also be interpreted as indicting the political and social climate of Germany under the Weimar Republic, which governed the nation from the end of World War I to 1933, as being fertile soil for pestilential ideas to take hold. This of course came to fruition in the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi party a mere eleven years after the release of Nosferatu.
Today, the film is rightly regarded as a masterpiece and F.W. Murnau, in large part because of Nosferatu, was declared by Lotte Eisner to be “the greatest film-director the Germans have ever known.” Murnau’s direction along with the brilliant cinematography of Fritz Arno Wagner infused Nosferatu with some of the most unforgettable imagery in all of film history. The emergence of Orlok from his coffin aboard the ship, his shadow climbing the staircase to Ellen’s (Greta Schröder) room before extending through the chamber door, Orlok clinging at the window frames of his derelict home. It is no wonder that the film has captured the imagination of filmgoers and filmmakers for over a century, and it is something of a miracle that it even still exists. After Florence Stoker learned about the film, she immediately sued Grau and Prana-Film. The judge in the case ordered all prints of the film destroyed but underground groups of cinephiles protected copies which were eventually smuggled out of the country, spreading to London and eventually throughout the world.
Nosferatu: Phantom Der Nacht (1979)
In the late 1970s, Werner Herzog made two films back-to-back that were attempts to connect with the best of his German heritage. The first of these was Nosferatu (the second, Woyzeck, would begin filming only five days after Nosferatu wrapped) which he described as his connection with his cinematic grandfathers. He has often described his generation of German filmmakers, which most notably includes Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Wim Wenders, and himself, as a generation without fathers because they had either bought into the Nazi culture or fled the country because of it. “As the first real post-war generation, we were orphans with no fathers to learn from”; Herzog told author Paul Cronin for the book Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, “we had no active teachers or mentors, people in whose footsteps to follow. This meant it was the grandfathers—Lang, Murnau, Pabst and others—who became our points of reference.” Herzog was drawn to Nosferatu for several reasons, not least among them is his feeling that Murnau’s film was “the very best German film ever,” and sought connection with his forebearers by creating his own version of it, which he has never thought of as a remake. “It goes its own way with its own spirit and stands on its own feet as a new version,” he later said.
And the film is genuinely unique from its predecessor while still embodying some of its greatest aspects. By the time Herzog set out to make his version of Nosferatu, Dracula had long since fallen into the public domain. He dispensed with the trappings from the original film that were meant to veil, however thinly, Nosferatu’s origins in Bram Stoker’s novel and chose to call his Count Dracula rather than Orlok, Hutter once again became Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz), now married to Lucy (Isabella Adjani), and Roland Topor played Renfield (and one of the most bizarre and hilarious Renfields at that) rather than Knock. Locations, however, maintained similarity to Murnau’s film as did the look of the vampire, the emphasis on plague symbolized by droves of rats, and the centrality of Lucy as the one who holds the power to destroy the evil that has invaded her hometown.
The touches that make the film a true “Herzogian” film rather than a mere rehashing of the original are multitude but the most notable have to do with the vampire, the leading lady, and the way the locations are captured on film. The film marked Herzog’s second of five collaborations with the legendarily volatile and unpredictable Klaus Kinski, and Herzog has described it as their most pleasant working experience. “For almost the entire shoot he was happy and at ease with himself and the world, though he would throw a tantrum maybe every other day.” This was a marked improvement over their relationship on Aguirre: The Wrath of God (1972) which turned out to be a mere foreshadowing of the hurricane that was in store for him on Fitzcarraldo (1982). For Nosferatu, Herzog and Kinski sought to “humanize” the vampire, giving him “a real existential anguish” that Schreck’s soulless, rodent-like bloodsucker lacked. “I wanted to endow him with human suffering, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality,” Herzog said, “He is deeply pained by his solitude and inability to join with the rest of humanity.”
Adjani’s Lucy is also given more to do than Schröder’s Ellen and has a great deal of agency in the film. One of the film’s most striking scenes finds her in the middle of the town square as dozens of coffins move past her on the shoulders of men carrying them out of the town. Nearby, dazed men and women dance around bonfires stoked by the furniture from homes that no longer need any of these mere possessions as the occupants are all dead and rats invade the streets. It is a startling image that evokes sequences from Herzog films that came before like Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and many more to come. Another striking sequence happens early in the film as Harker travels to Castle Dracula on foot through places that strike the viewer as places that no one else has ever seen. This is one of Herzog’s greatest gifts as a filmmaker—to go places that no one else would go to show us sights that have never been seen and to place his camera so that these sights seem to be otherworldly. The film is a piece of poetic beauty infused with a constant and unrelenting sense of dread.
Shadow of the Vampire (2001)
As much as I love all the “official” versions of Nosferatu, and though this stands just outside that realm, Shadow of the Vampire is my personal favorite of all of them to date (though I should note that as of this writing I have not seen Eggers’ interpretation). The premise of the film is rather simple—what if the mysterious Max Schreck was actually a vampire—but offers great insight into the filmmaking process, the “war of art,” and even the nature of reality itself all packed into a brisk ninety-five minutes. It is all very “meta” but not in a pretentious way by any means. In fact, the film captures much of the eeriness of Murnau’s film, while also being a compelling drama and a very, very funny movie. Produced by noted vampire enthusiast Nicolas Cage and directed by E. Elias Merhige, who caught the eye of the producer with his dark, surreal film Begotten (1989), Shadow is a perfect marriage of filmmakers and material. Like Albin Grau, Merhige is fascinated by the occult and had a close relationship with Werner Herzog at the time he made the film. (I have often wondered what this film would have been like with Herzog in the role of Murnau as it would have taken on a further layer of metanarrative quality, but then we would have missed out on one of John Malkovich’s great performances.)
Shadow of the Vampire features one of the most brilliant casts ever assembled for a film of this type including John Malkovich as Murnau, Udo Kier as Grau, Cary Elwes as Wagner, Catherine McCormack as Greta Schröder, and Suzy Izzard (credited as her stage name Eddie Izzard) as Gustav von Wangenhein who played Hutter in Nosferatu. All give excellent performances but Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck is nothing short of astounding and received a much-deserved Oscar nomination for the role. The core of the film comes down to the lengths that an artist will go to in order to see their vision to fruition, no matter the costs to themselves or anyone else. The filmmakers are depicted as mad scientists wearing lab coats and goggles, a necessity in the era due to the residue created by the lights of the time, but the image is striking. Murnau is regularly referred to as “Herr Doktor” and this Dr. Frankenstein of sorts repeatedly declares filmmaking to be an act of war. “Our battle, our struggle is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture,” he says as the company boards a train for their first location, and throughout the film the camera is compared to a machine gun. In the end, this fictional version of Murnau’s vision becomes so all-consuming that the real world becomes the artifice and what is within the frame, the only thing that is real. Shadow of the Vampire is an unparalleled interrogation of the madness of creativity.
It is also the most difficult of any of these films to see. Despite its all-star cast, being produced by a Hollywood icon, and ownership by Lionsgate and Universal, it has not been available to stream for some time and is trapped on an out-of-print DVD. The online rip (that as of this writing is up on YouTube) is not of great quality as it is standard definition and highly pixilated. In light of the buzz around Nosferatu at the moment, no film is more deserving of a High-Definition streaming and physical release. I will use every bit of my bully pulpit (as small as it may be) to bang the drum for a Blu-ray/4K release of this brilliant film. I have a feeling it would serve some boutique label, or perhaps even the major studio that owns the rights and uses clips of it for attractions at their theme parks, very well.
Shadows and Influence
‘Salem’s Lot’ (1979)
Several other films have taken the name of Nosferatu and used it for various purposes. Klaus Kinski took it upon himself to return to his vampiric character, with very different results from Herzog’s film, in 1988’s Nosferatu in Venice, directed by Augusto Caminito. Mimesis: Nosferatu (2018) sees a high school teacher, Professor Kinski (Joseph Scott Anthony), mounting a stage production of Dracula heavily influenced by Murnau’s film and starring a vampire obsessed student named Michael Morbius (Connor Alexander) in the lead role. The film contains a number of vampire-related easter eggs including several names inspired by Fright Night, Salem’s Lot, and even Twilight. It also features several brief appearances by Lance Henriksen as an enigmatic mentor creating a cult of vampires in the mold of Max Shreck’s Count Orlok. Also released this year, after a long gestation period, was Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror starring Doug Jones in the role of the vampire. The film, funded by a Kickstarter campaign, is more-or-less a shot for shot remake of the Murnau film with its modern actors inserted into computer generated recreations of the locations and sets used in the original.
Perhaps even more prevalent have been the many films that either pay homage or reflect the influence of Nosferatu to create various effects—from the frightening to the comic. In 1979, the same year as Herzog’s film, Tobe Hooper’s television movie of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot featured Reggie Nalder as Kurt Barlow, a creature clearly modeled off Max Schreck’s Orlok, that has very little resemblance to the character as described in King’s book. Other homages include Ben Fransham as Petyr in the 2014 film and Doug Jones as Baron Afanas (at least in the early seasons) in the television version of What We Do in the Shadows (2019-present). Just last year Javier Botet played the grey, bald, and bat-eared vampire to great effect in The Last Voyage of the Demeter for which the character is credited as Dracula/Nosferatu. The reach of Nosferatu can be found throughout film history in characters as diverse as the animalistic forms of the vampires in Fright Night (1985) and The Lost Boys (1987) to various incarnations of Gary Oldman’s Count in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) to Danny Huston’s Marlow in 30 Days of Night (2007) and beyond.
It seems likely that Eggers’ new version of the film will stand shoulder to shoulder with the long and towering legacy of Nosferatu. It seems to me that horror fans are hungry for a retelling of the classic version of the vampire myth that is genuinely unsettling even, dare I say, scary. With the innumerable variations of vampires over the years there is something refreshing about returning to the basics of why these creatures invade our dreams and our fears in the first place. There is a primal quality to Nosferatu that is found only in that version of Dracula, one that lacks romance or remorse and simply preys upon our deepest, darkest, and most potent fears.
