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F.W. Murnau changed the name and ghastly appearance of his villain, but this unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's
Dracula couldn't fool the Stoker estate, and it became the center of a lawsuit that almost resulted in its complete destruction. Thankfully this masterpiece survives (though in a somewhat altered form), for despite its liberties with the novel, this 1921 horror classic remains the most beautiful and resonant interpretation of Stoker. Though the plot remains essentially the same--naive real-estate clerk Thomas (Gustav von Wangenheim) is sent abroad to finalize a sale with the nocturnal Count Orlock (the hideous-looking Max Schreck), who imprisons Thomas and travels to England to claim Thomas's beautiful young wife, Ellen (Greta Schroder), as his own--the visual realization creates a very different story. Schreck plays the vampire as a grotesque demon, with his claw-like hands, bald head and sharp, bat-like ears, and he rises from his coffin with an supernatural stiffness, like a tent pole pulled upright. When the eerily empty ghost ship carrying his coffin arrives in Thomas's home port, a river of rats pours out and spreads through the town like a plague. Perhaps the most noticeable changes from the novel are the absence of Van Helsing and the richer realization of Ellen, the would-be victim, whose innate sensibility and solemn spirituality give her a spooky connection with the vampire. With his stark, symbol-laden visual scheme and sacrificial conclusion, Murnau creates a more mythic tale than any subsequent adaptation of Stoker's novel.
--Sean Axmaker
Review
The film that brought one of German cinema's masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of Dracula, even if the Bram Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar. ~ Lucia Bozzola, All Movie Guide
DVD ~ Robert Wiene
DVD ~ Tod Browning
DVD ~ Sergei Eisenstein
DVD ~ James Whale
DVD ~ Fritz Lang
