AKA:
Nosferatu
Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens >> German
Synopsis:
Though diminished by decades of pop-horror incarnations, the vampire
remains uniquely evocative of both dread and fascination, horror and
seductiveness. Monsters from werewolves to Freddy Krueger may frighten,
but neither victims nor audience are drawn to them. By contrast, the
vampire suggests the horror of evil working on our disordered passions.
A
pioneering film in the silent German expressionist movement, F. W.
Murnau's Nosferatu (not to be confused with Werner Herzog's 1979 remake)
is almost unique in imagining a vampire who is not darkly attractive,
but corpselike and ghastly. Even so, his dread fascination remains
troubling; the hero's wife seems repelled but also mesmerized even as
she seeks to destroy him.
An unauthorized adaptation of Bram
Stoker's Dracula, Nosferatu made few concessions to copyright beyond
name and place changes: Count Dracula became Count Orlock (Max Schreck),
Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), Mina
Harker became Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder), and scenes set in England
were moved to Bremen, Germany (yet the vampire's arrival by sea is
retained, illustrating just how superficial the changes are).
Perhaps
unfortunately, Murnau's film all but eschews the traditional role of
Christian iconography, of crucifixes and holy water, in vampire
mythology, retaining only a few vestigial references (e.g., an allusion
to the seven deadly sins). (Herzog's remake, which restores Stoker's
original character names, also reincorporates Stoker's religious
imagery.) However, it more than makes up for this with a major new
contribution to vampire mythology: It was in this film that the vampire
was first imagined to have a deathly vulnerability to sunlight.
Nosferatu,
like Dracula, has been the subject of numerous Freudian and
sociological interpretations: The vampire is sex; the vampire is the id
or animal desire; the vampire is wantonness; the vampire is veneral
disease.
As applied to Stoker's novel, at least some of these
theories may be worth exploring; but Murnau's film fundamentally alters
the equasion in ways that upends such interpretations.
First, it
leaves Dracula's wives out of the story, eliminating the seductive scene
in the book that leaves the protagonist Harker in a debilitated
condition. Second and more importantly, it changes the rules about
destroying vampires: Whereas Stoker's Dracula could be opening attacked
with stakes and holy artifacts, Murnau's Orlock must be distracted till
dawn by a pure virgin surrendering herself to his thirst, even at the
cost of her life.
This is no simple metaphor for sex or animal
appetite, for Orlock is too obviously evil, destructive, and moribund;
yet in making surrender rather than resistance the means of destroying
the monster, the film hardly evokes wantonness or veneral disease. The
imagery resists allegorization, remaining simply, unsettlingly, itself.
Einladung zu unserem kultur Programm in Wien
6 years ago
