23. Nosferatu (1922), dir. F. W. Murnau
I rewatched Nosferatu in May ahead of the World Dracula Day lecture I gave ( LJ / DW), because this year marks the centenary of its release and I’d themed my talk around a series of such vampire-related anniversaries. I’d wanted to watch it at some point this year anyway, as I will be going to Slovakia with DracSoc at the end of August on a primarily Nosferatu-themed trip which will encompass Orava Castle (the location used for Orlok’s castle), so that killed two birds with one stone. Many of the thoughts and responses I had on watching it went into my lecture, but it’s a very rich film, so the process of watching it and reading up on it to prepare the lecture left me a bunch of surplus thoughts which didn’t have a place in the lecture. This post is mainly about capturing those.
One point is about the experience of watching the film itself. Its chequered survival history means that there is no longer any such thing as a pure encounter with the original version of Nosferatu. No matter how good the restoration we’re watching is, some aspects of it are now lost forever: like the soundtrack originally scored for it and played at the premiere, which only survives in a condensed version. So we can’t now watch it as it was originally intended and experienced, but only ever through the filter of modern restorations. That's something I'm very much familiar with from Classical texts, of course, so not at all a problem. My choice of restoration was the BFI version with a soundtrack by James Bernard because of my love for everything he did for Hammer.
I was also struck this time how much the epistolary character of Stoker’s novel is preserved in the many documents shown on screen - the Chronicle of the Great Plague, the book about vampires which Hutter finds in the Transylvanian inn, Hutter’s letter to Ellen, the ship’s log, the news story about the plague which Knock pulls out of his jailer’s pocket. One interesting and deliberately unanswered question is: who is the authorial ‘I’ writing the Chronicle of the Great Plague which the story presents itself as? In the German intertitles, their name is replaced with three crosses: ‘von +++’. This unknown author also says that Hutter told them about his experiences: e.g. ‘no sooner had Hutter crossed the bridge than he was seized by the sinister sights which he later described to me’. This follows nicely in the tradition of the omniscient editor, and of the distancing / persuasive device of telling a story which has some connection to that editor but didn’t happen to them directly which is found not only in Stoker but in Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James and many others, and which I’ve previously written about here: LJ / DW. Indeed, we never really know who edits together the documents which make up Stoker’s Dracula either, though Mina seems a very likely candidate.
The ship’s log is the only document in Nosferatu which retains actual calendar dates from Stoker’s narrative, though. The length of the ship’s journey is a bit compressed. In Stoker, the ship sets off on 6 July, the last entry written by captain before he dies at the wheel is 4 August and the ship actually beaches in Whitby on the night of 8-9 August. In Nosferatu, the log starts on 12 July and last entry is dated 22 July. It reads, ‘Rats in the hold of the ship. Danger of plague’. I mention this because Sam George has argued for a strong connection between Nosferatu and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, because of the rats which follow Orlok around and the fact that in some versions of the story, the Piper takes the town’s children away to Transylvania. In Robert Browning’s poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 22 July is also the date on which the Pied Piper disappears with all the town’s children. But in the Grimm brothers’ version, it’s 26 June, and I suspect that’s the one the producers of Nosferatu would have known. So the fact that the ship’s log ends on 22 July is probably just a coincidence.
I attended a couple of online conferences about Nosferatu in the spring, and quite a lot was said across both of them about the character of Ellen and how central she is to the plot and its denouement. She certainly is, in ways which build on Stoker’s Mina but go a lot further. Simply put, she’s the only human character in the film who actually understands what’s going on and does anything to stop it.
Hutter should be able to work it out. He has a book about vampires with him in the castle, and half-suspects that Orlok is a vampire as it describes. But despite being bitten by Orlok in the castle and seeing Orlok lying in his coffin, he doesn’t really put two and two together. In fact, later, back in Wisborg, he concludes that his bad experiences in the castle were just his imagination, spurred by the book. It’s only when Ellen reads the book after his return that she fully realises what must be plaguing the town, based on the sickness and her experience of seeing Orlok at the warehouse window every night, and realises what she must do. At this point she sends Hutter to fetch Bulwer (the closest the film has to a Van Helsing figure), but it’s not because she really thinks Bulwer can help. Rather, it’s a ruse to get them out of the way so that she can do what she needs to do with Orlok. Hutter and Bulwer then return only after Orlok has been destroyed, in time to witness Ellen’s death, and Bulwer’s only role at this point is to look ponderously into the middle distance.
The 1979 version makes the relationship between Orlok and Ellen into an outright romance, but the seeds of something like that are here too. When Hutter is in Orlok’s castle, Ellen senses Orlok’s threat to Hutter from afar and cries out for him. This obviously reflects her close connection to Hutter, but Orlok must sense her emotional presence too, as he pauses at that moment and retreats away from Hutter. (As a side-note, while beset by visions of what’s happening in Transylvania, Ellen also sleepwalks on the balustrade in Wisborg, which in Stoker’s terms means she is in some sense Lucy as well as the more obvious Mina.) From that point onwards, there are some nice ambiguities about which of Orlok and Hutter she is really connected to. E.g. she stretches her arms out and cries ‘I want to go to him! He is coming!’ while both Orlok and Hutter travel to Wisborg, so that it’s ambiguous which one she means, and similarly we don’t know who she is thinking of when she sits at home embroidering the words ‘Ich liebe Dich’. And this of course all builds towards and helps to make plausible the climactic scenes in which she invites Orlok into her bedroom - to kill him, yes, but in a way which is shot through with a distinct sense of forbidden / repressed / self-destructive desire on her part as well as his.
Cuts between Ellen in Wisborg and both Orlok and Hutter on their journeys there from Transylvania are part of what make the ambiguities in Ellen’s attachments work, and they aren’t the only examples of clever editorial juxtapositions in the film. Another very striking one is the way we see Bulwer explaining to his students that a Venus fly-trap is like a vampire just before we see Knock also catching and eating flies in his cell, like an exemplar of the same point. Similarly, we see Knock pointing to spiders in the corner of his cell, followed by a close-up of one of the spiders in its web eating its prey which looks very much like another example from Bulwer’s biology class, so that the two sequences overlap and inform one another.
What else? Ah, antisemitism. It needs noting that Henrik Galleen, the screenwriter, was Jewish. But people can express internalised prejudice. Certainly, the screenplay for Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920; LJ / DW), which he also did, doesn’t exactly challenge stereotypes about Jews. And of course he wasn’t the only person who fed into Nosferatu. It’s widely recognised that Count Orlok’s visual appearance, association with rats, and arrival as an immigrant bringing contagion into Wisborg all reflect longstanding antisemitic stereotypes. But this viewing really brought home to me how much the same applies to Knock, an amalgamation of the characters of Peter Hawkins and Renfield from the novel. His goblin-like appearance, greed for money, and apparent eagerness to serve Count Orlok from the moment he receives a letter with occult writing on it all look like antisemitic stereotypes to me. Knock also becomes the scapegoat (a Jewish concept) for what happens to the town - everyone gossips about him, attributes the terrible murders to him, and then chases after him in a big witch-hunt. Indeed, since that witch-hunt catches up with him precisely while Orlok is feeding on Ellen, and therefore when the deaths are about to stop, they will presumably believe ever afterwards that he was the source of their problems. Only Ellen and presumably Hutter, who later explains it to the unknown narrator, understand the real culprit. Charitably, it’s possible to argue that the depiction of the witch-hunt after Knock, whom the audience knows is innocent, could be a critique of this kind of behaviour, but the film still codes the real source of the problem (i.e. Orlok) as Jewish and Knock as his eager accomplice, so that doesn’t count for much.
Finally, I inevitably watched this film with my Hammer lenses on. Prints of Nosferatu were circulating pretty readily by the 1950s, and it’s clear that some of those involved in the production of Hammer’s Dracula had seen it. For one thing, I think Nosferatu’s portrayal of Hutter going over a bridge into the land of phantoms on the approach to Orlok’s castle explains why there is a bridge across a stream in front of Dracula’s castle in Hammer’s Dracula (and indeed Prince). Certainly, it isn’t in Stoker’s novel. Other apparent connections between Nosferatu and Dracula include the vampire seeing and commenting on a picture of his visitor’s beloved (Hutter drops a picture of Ellen out of his bag, which Orlok sees and says she has a beautiful neck; Dracula picks up and comments favourably on the picture of Lucy on Harker’s dressing-table), and scenes of both Harker and Hutter looking in their travel mirrors to see whether they’ve been bitten. Meanwhile, the motif of doors opening at the vampire’s will without him needing to touch them which occurs in Nosferatu (e.g. as Orlok leaves the warehouses to go to Ellen) also occurs of all places in Scars, when the door of the bedroom to which Dracula takes Sarah simply opens in front of him.
Right then, I think I might finally have written down everything I wanted to say about Nosferatu - for the time being, anyway! Next stop Orava Castle! 😍😍😍
One point is about the experience of watching the film itself. Its chequered survival history means that there is no longer any such thing as a pure encounter with the original version of Nosferatu. No matter how good the restoration we’re watching is, some aspects of it are now lost forever: like the soundtrack originally scored for it and played at the premiere, which only survives in a condensed version. So we can’t now watch it as it was originally intended and experienced, but only ever through the filter of modern restorations. That's something I'm very much familiar with from Classical texts, of course, so not at all a problem. My choice of restoration was the BFI version with a soundtrack by James Bernard because of my love for everything he did for Hammer.
I was also struck this time how much the epistolary character of Stoker’s novel is preserved in the many documents shown on screen - the Chronicle of the Great Plague, the book about vampires which Hutter finds in the Transylvanian inn, Hutter’s letter to Ellen, the ship’s log, the news story about the plague which Knock pulls out of his jailer’s pocket. One interesting and deliberately unanswered question is: who is the authorial ‘I’ writing the Chronicle of the Great Plague which the story presents itself as? In the German intertitles, their name is replaced with three crosses: ‘von +++’. This unknown author also says that Hutter told them about his experiences: e.g. ‘no sooner had Hutter crossed the bridge than he was seized by the sinister sights which he later described to me’. This follows nicely in the tradition of the omniscient editor, and of the distancing / persuasive device of telling a story which has some connection to that editor but didn’t happen to them directly which is found not only in Stoker but in Sheridan Le Fanu, M.R. James and many others, and which I’ve previously written about here: LJ / DW. Indeed, we never really know who edits together the documents which make up Stoker’s Dracula either, though Mina seems a very likely candidate.
The ship’s log is the only document in Nosferatu which retains actual calendar dates from Stoker’s narrative, though. The length of the ship’s journey is a bit compressed. In Stoker, the ship sets off on 6 July, the last entry written by captain before he dies at the wheel is 4 August and the ship actually beaches in Whitby on the night of 8-9 August. In Nosferatu, the log starts on 12 July and last entry is dated 22 July. It reads, ‘Rats in the hold of the ship. Danger of plague’. I mention this because Sam George has argued for a strong connection between Nosferatu and The Pied Piper of Hamelin, because of the rats which follow Orlok around and the fact that in some versions of the story, the Piper takes the town’s children away to Transylvania. In Robert Browning’s poem, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 22 July is also the date on which the Pied Piper disappears with all the town’s children. But in the Grimm brothers’ version, it’s 26 June, and I suspect that’s the one the producers of Nosferatu would have known. So the fact that the ship’s log ends on 22 July is probably just a coincidence.
I attended a couple of online conferences about Nosferatu in the spring, and quite a lot was said across both of them about the character of Ellen and how central she is to the plot and its denouement. She certainly is, in ways which build on Stoker’s Mina but go a lot further. Simply put, she’s the only human character in the film who actually understands what’s going on and does anything to stop it.
Hutter should be able to work it out. He has a book about vampires with him in the castle, and half-suspects that Orlok is a vampire as it describes. But despite being bitten by Orlok in the castle and seeing Orlok lying in his coffin, he doesn’t really put two and two together. In fact, later, back in Wisborg, he concludes that his bad experiences in the castle were just his imagination, spurred by the book. It’s only when Ellen reads the book after his return that she fully realises what must be plaguing the town, based on the sickness and her experience of seeing Orlok at the warehouse window every night, and realises what she must do. At this point she sends Hutter to fetch Bulwer (the closest the film has to a Van Helsing figure), but it’s not because she really thinks Bulwer can help. Rather, it’s a ruse to get them out of the way so that she can do what she needs to do with Orlok. Hutter and Bulwer then return only after Orlok has been destroyed, in time to witness Ellen’s death, and Bulwer’s only role at this point is to look ponderously into the middle distance.
The 1979 version makes the relationship between Orlok and Ellen into an outright romance, but the seeds of something like that are here too. When Hutter is in Orlok’s castle, Ellen senses Orlok’s threat to Hutter from afar and cries out for him. This obviously reflects her close connection to Hutter, but Orlok must sense her emotional presence too, as he pauses at that moment and retreats away from Hutter. (As a side-note, while beset by visions of what’s happening in Transylvania, Ellen also sleepwalks on the balustrade in Wisborg, which in Stoker’s terms means she is in some sense Lucy as well as the more obvious Mina.) From that point onwards, there are some nice ambiguities about which of Orlok and Hutter she is really connected to. E.g. she stretches her arms out and cries ‘I want to go to him! He is coming!’ while both Orlok and Hutter travel to Wisborg, so that it’s ambiguous which one she means, and similarly we don’t know who she is thinking of when she sits at home embroidering the words ‘Ich liebe Dich’. And this of course all builds towards and helps to make plausible the climactic scenes in which she invites Orlok into her bedroom - to kill him, yes, but in a way which is shot through with a distinct sense of forbidden / repressed / self-destructive desire on her part as well as his.
Cuts between Ellen in Wisborg and both Orlok and Hutter on their journeys there from Transylvania are part of what make the ambiguities in Ellen’s attachments work, and they aren’t the only examples of clever editorial juxtapositions in the film. Another very striking one is the way we see Bulwer explaining to his students that a Venus fly-trap is like a vampire just before we see Knock also catching and eating flies in his cell, like an exemplar of the same point. Similarly, we see Knock pointing to spiders in the corner of his cell, followed by a close-up of one of the spiders in its web eating its prey which looks very much like another example from Bulwer’s biology class, so that the two sequences overlap and inform one another.
What else? Ah, antisemitism. It needs noting that Henrik Galleen, the screenwriter, was Jewish. But people can express internalised prejudice. Certainly, the screenplay for Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920; LJ / DW), which he also did, doesn’t exactly challenge stereotypes about Jews. And of course he wasn’t the only person who fed into Nosferatu. It’s widely recognised that Count Orlok’s visual appearance, association with rats, and arrival as an immigrant bringing contagion into Wisborg all reflect longstanding antisemitic stereotypes. But this viewing really brought home to me how much the same applies to Knock, an amalgamation of the characters of Peter Hawkins and Renfield from the novel. His goblin-like appearance, greed for money, and apparent eagerness to serve Count Orlok from the moment he receives a letter with occult writing on it all look like antisemitic stereotypes to me. Knock also becomes the scapegoat (a Jewish concept) for what happens to the town - everyone gossips about him, attributes the terrible murders to him, and then chases after him in a big witch-hunt. Indeed, since that witch-hunt catches up with him precisely while Orlok is feeding on Ellen, and therefore when the deaths are about to stop, they will presumably believe ever afterwards that he was the source of their problems. Only Ellen and presumably Hutter, who later explains it to the unknown narrator, understand the real culprit. Charitably, it’s possible to argue that the depiction of the witch-hunt after Knock, whom the audience knows is innocent, could be a critique of this kind of behaviour, but the film still codes the real source of the problem (i.e. Orlok) as Jewish and Knock as his eager accomplice, so that doesn’t count for much.
Finally, I inevitably watched this film with my Hammer lenses on. Prints of Nosferatu were circulating pretty readily by the 1950s, and it’s clear that some of those involved in the production of Hammer’s Dracula had seen it. For one thing, I think Nosferatu’s portrayal of Hutter going over a bridge into the land of phantoms on the approach to Orlok’s castle explains why there is a bridge across a stream in front of Dracula’s castle in Hammer’s Dracula (and indeed Prince). Certainly, it isn’t in Stoker’s novel. Other apparent connections between Nosferatu and Dracula include the vampire seeing and commenting on a picture of his visitor’s beloved (Hutter drops a picture of Ellen out of his bag, which Orlok sees and says she has a beautiful neck; Dracula picks up and comments favourably on the picture of Lucy on Harker’s dressing-table), and scenes of both Harker and Hutter looking in their travel mirrors to see whether they’ve been bitten. Meanwhile, the motif of doors opening at the vampire’s will without him needing to touch them which occurs in Nosferatu (e.g. as Orlok leaves the warehouses to go to Ellen) also occurs of all places in Scars, when the door of the bedroom to which Dracula takes Sarah simply opens in front of him.
Right then, I think I might finally have written down everything I wanted to say about Nosferatu - for the time being, anyway! Next stop Orava Castle! 😍😍😍