Nosferatu ... the name alone can chill the blood!". F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, released in 1922, was the first (albeit unofficial) screen adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Nearly 80 years on, it remains among the most potent and disturbing horror films ever made. The sight of Max Schreck's hollow-eyed, cadaverous vampire rising creakily from his coffin still has the ability to chill the blood. Nor has the film dated. Murnau's elision of sex and disease lends it a surprisingly contemporary resonance. The director and his screenwriter Henrik Gaalen are true to the source... material, but where most subsequent screen Draculas (whether Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella or Gary Oldman) were portrayed as cultured and aristocratic, Nosferatu is verminous and evil. (Whenever he appears, rats follow in his wake.)The film's full title--Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror)--reveals something of Murnau's intentions. Supremely stylised, it differs from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) or Ernst Lubitsch's films of the period in that it was not shot entirely in the studio. Murnau went out on location in his native Westphalia. As a counterpoint to the nightmarish world inhabited by Nosferatu, he used imagery of hills, clouds, trees and mountains (it is, after all, sunlight that destroys the vampire). It's not hard to spot the similarity between the gangsters in film noir hugging doorways or creeping up staircases with the image of Schreck's diabolic Nosferatu, bathed in shadow, sidling his way toward a new victim. Heavy chiaroscuro, oblique camera angles and jarring close-ups--the devices that crank up the tension in Val Lewton horror movies and edgy, urban thrillers such as Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice--were all to be found first in Murnau's chilling masterpiece. --Geoffrey Macnab [show more]
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