The trouble with brilliant, all-time classics like this one is that we have become so familiar with its images that we have stopped really looking at it.
Halloween is as good an excuse to have another viewing of what is without question a cornerstone of cinema. The film is extraordinary, its making is even more so, especially with the knowledge that it was destroyed as no-one bothered to check with Bram Stoker that it was ok to borrow wholesale his Dracula story.
Murnau changed the characters’ names not good enough but also inserted a filmic idea that was not in Stoker’s book light will kill the Count. Still not good enough the Stoker family won the court case and the film was destroyed, but luckily reels have been found all over Europe and the 100 minutes have been lovingly pieced together again.
Another bit of good fortune was that in 2006 the original score, long assumed lost, was found in Berlin and handed to the Berlin Philharmonic. And what a score it is, highly filmic and very sophisticated for 1922. It must sound awesome live.
Director F.W. Murnau seems to have had a lot of luck, the biggest slice coming with the casting of Schreck as Count Orlock. He is so convincing, and utterly weird looking, that rumours started that he was indeed an actual vampire. Watch the film Shadow of the Vampire to see a version of this story, with John Malkovich as Schreck nothing like as weird on-screen as the real thing, but worth seeing for its sense of fun.
With his bald head, bat-like ears, extraordinary hands and nails and massive eyes that never blink, Schreck is the epitome of ruined vampiric doom, a lonely, blood-thirsty maniac intent on bringing the plague to a small town and drinking a virgin’s blood. He is helped by some amazing visual effects for 1922. He appears to open a door without touching it, his coffin’s lid closes as if by magic and his carriage moves at twice the speed it should.
It’s an amazing, eerie, weird performance but it was never bettered. The most famous sequence, with his shadow creeping up a staircase as he stalks his prey, still sends a chill down the spine.
The film still stands as a simple tale of good against evil, and what someone is prepared to do for love. Harker sorry, Hutter is clearly a good man, sent to Orlock’s castle to sell some real estate. His wife Ellen is even whiter than white, almost crying when her husband brings her some flowers because he has killed them’. Hutter is pitched against pure evil in Orlock, everything about him screams bad, from his castle jutting out from a rock to his rotting teeth and knarled, ruined, aristocratic face.
It’s a cracking story, one which is so familiar yet still holds the attention and has a real feeling of something important at stake. Lots of films claim to be important but this one genuinely is, a classic horror film, and a metaphor for whatever you want it to be the rise of Nazism, the creeping sense of evil in the world, the death of religion. Interestingly this is a BFI release as part of their Gothic season, a further release will the Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu The Vampyre with Klaus Kinski. Mad, extraordinary looking and brilliant though Kinski is, and great as Herzog is, it’s nowhere near as good as the original version. The obvious thing to do is to see both.
Overall verdict: Brilliant, seminal horror classic, on which just about every vampire film since has been based, and come up second best.
Reviewer: Mike Martin