“Nosferatu. Doesn’t the word sound like the call of the Death Bird at midnight? Don’t whisper it, for then the images of life will fade until they transform into pale shadows, and ghostly dreams will be born in your heart to feed on your blood.”
More than a century later, this intertitle of Nosferatu (FW Murnau, 1922) remains one of the best character presentations that horror cinema has ever given us. What his screenwriter Henrik Galeen wanted to achieve with him was beyond the strictly cinematicsince the first and last film from Prana Film, founded a year earlier by the mysterious producer Albin Grau (who months later went bankrupt), is full of occult symbols, references to alchemy and other signs only for the initiated. Nosferatu It can be understood, therefore, as an occult treatise that used the Dracula by Bram Stoker as a simple narrative base from which to explore the esoteric possibilities of the then still young medium of cinema. It’s a pity that Florence Stoker, the author’s widow, was not very understanding of the operation.: After defeating Prana in court, this real-life vampire slayer dedicated her final years to tracking down and destroying every copy of the film distributed around the world, so it’s a true (dark) miracle that Nosferatu has survived to this day.
One of the main differences between the book and its first unofficial adaptation lies in the appearance of its protagonist: although Stoker describes the Count as a decrepit and abject being in his first passages (that is, those that take place in his castle in Transylvania) , Dracula begins to transform into a nineteenth-century dandy as soon as he sets foot in London, while the unforgettably iconic Count Orlok of Murnau aligns his outward appearance with his remote origins. Thus, the first versions of the script delved into a lineage that begins with none other than the fearsome Belial, one of those primordial archdemons that appear cited in the Dead Sea Scrolls, prince of plagues and “Lord of Arrogance” (we believe that that’s its official title). Beyond this biblical reference, the makeup that the actor Max Schreck, whom Murnau met during his time as a theater director, wore to play Orlok explicitly refers us to that army of rats that his mere presence unleashes on the streets of Wisborg, the fictional German city from the mid-19th century where the bulk of the action takes place. Which is, of course, very problematic: its long teeth, pointed ears and vermin-like claws They bring him dangerously close to all those caricatures of the supposed International Jewry that swept through (like a true plague) the Weimar Republic in the years prior to the rise of the Nazi Party, a time when the wave of anti-Semitism went from cultural to institutional.
Since it was published From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Cinema (1947), influential essay where Siegfried Kracauer studied the communicating vessels between the theoretically apolitical Weimar cinema and the subsequent emergence of fascismall analysis of Nosferatu is forced to confront that elephant in the room, which does not mean that the character of Count Orlok has lost one iota of his power as a founding myth of cinematic horror. Werner Herzog returned to that characterization in his remake Nosferatu, vampire of the night (1979), although the makeup applied here to Klaus Kinski, the work of the Japanese artist Reiko Kruk, is a little less aggressive. The actor was so pleased with Kruk’s work that he tried to hire her again for the very trospid Nosferatu, prince of darkness (1988), also known as Nosferatu in Venicea kind of exploitation eurotrash of the character who finally dispensed with the mousey look and shaved head to, well, present Kinski with his usual appearance + removable fangs. There wasn’t money for much else in one of the most chaotic and controversial productions of eighties horror.
