Nosferatu - Original and Remake

NOSFERATU - original and remake

"The weird pleasure the Germans take in evoking horror can perhaps be ascribed to the excessive and very Germanic desire to submit to discipline, together with a certain proneness to Sadism. In 'Dichtung und Wahrheit' Goethe deplores the 'unfortunate pedagogical principle which tends to free children early in life from their fear of mystery and the invisible by accustoming them to terrifying spectacles'." This insight into the 'sublimity' of the German soul is put forward by Lotte Eisner, the famous film historian, in her epochal work on the German film of the 20’s, "The Haunted Screen".

As well, it has been proven that audiences in times of economic and political turmoil are all too eager to watch horror movies. Combined, both aspects may well explain why this genre was so en-vogue after the devastating German defeat in WWI followed by a complete breakdown of traditional, rather authoritarian values, when horror films from The Golem to The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, often in rapid remakes, flooded the first years of the fragile democratic Weimar Republic. But by far the most important of these was NOSFERATU (1922) by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.

Murnau was born 1888 in Bielefeld as Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe. He broke off his studies in art history and literature when he became fascinated by the theatre. He used the pseudonym Murnau ever since his first stage appearance in 1909. Shortly after WWI he began to write for film, collaborating with both Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz. When he began directing his own films (starting with THE HUNCHBACK AND THE DANCER in 1920), Murnau worked almost exclusively in the Expressionist vain. NOSFERATU, however, represents the high point of his Expressionist period.

Like with so many other films later on, the plot was adopted from Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, through Henrik Galeen. But as Murnau’s production company Prana Film did not want to pay any license fees, no credits are given, and names and places had to be changed. To put it positively, the literary vampire legend was revised and transformed into a film. It is probably due to these changes, that “the film is more than a bit creaky in terms of narrative structure,” as Cook quite rightly points out. This applies to the sometimes confusing geography as well.

As for the relations between novel and film, Judith Mayne points out: “Like Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula, Murnau treats the vampire legend as a study in contrasts - the west versus the east, bourgeois domesticity versus the wild and threatening nature associated with the vampire, reason versus passion. In Stoker’s novel, the forces of reason prevail in the end. It is the vampire’s function, in the novel, to upset the prevailing patterns of dualistic oppositions, but it is the function of the scientist, Van Helsing, and the group of men assisting him, to meet the challenge of the vampire and to conquer him. In Stoker’s novel, the central conflict is between Van Helsing and the vampire. If Murnau restages the conflict to pit the woman against the vampire, it is in part to accentuate the sexual conflict in Stoker’s novel, and in part to suggest that the Van Helsings of the world are as incapable of conquering the thread of the vampire as they are of providing a satisfactory narrative resolution. Whereas Stoker’s novel leads toward conflict and resolution, Murnau’s film is intent upon exploring the ambivalent space between opposing terms.”

One of the most remarkable things about NOSFERATU is the apparent naturalness of its stylization, achieved with a minimum of resources since the film was independently produced - today we would probably call it a low-budget production. Like the Scandinavian directors whose films flooded Germany during the WWI, Murnau had an affinity to landscape. Unlike the usual practice in Germany at that time, when Expressionist precepts turned directors away from reality and lead them to build vast forests and entire towns in the studio, Murnau or rather his great DOP Fritz Arno Wagner filmed the landscape and views of the little town on location in Central Europe. This is even true of the castle, often believed to be a model but in fact the Bohemian castle of Oravsky. To quote Lotte Eisner once more: "Murnau saw all that nature had to offer in the way of fine images. He films the fragile form of a white cloud scudding over the dunes, while the wind from the Baltic plays among the scarce blades of grass. His camera lingers over a filigree of branches standing out against a spring sky at twilight. He makes us feel the freshness of a meadow in which horses gallop around with a marvellous light-ness... Over all these landscapes - dark hills, thick forests, skies of jagged storm-clouds - there hovers what Balazs calls the great shadow of the supernatural."

The cinematographic style was in many ways positively revolutionary:
* the camera circles round the actors, photographing each movement from the most advantageous angle. Nosferatu is frequently photographed from an extremely low angle which renders him gigantic and monstrously sinister. Every facial expression is analysed in close-ups and used to enhance the drama. Major emotional outbreaks are usually reflected in minute changes in facial expression rather than in highly expressive gesture;
* lighting adds to the prevailing horror, even in innocent Gothic brick facades with stubby gables - there was no need to increase the mystery of the alleyways and squares. A number of shots are lit so that the vampire’s vast and angular shadow is cast across every object in the frame. Many images are strikingly composed in depth, with action sharply in focus in the foreground, middleground and background simultaneously;
* composition in depth produces some memorable expressive effects. Near the film’s conclusion, its heroine, who is situated in the foreground of the frame, gazes through her window at a mass funeral procession for the vam-pire’s victims, which is shot so that it seems to stretch away endlessly from the middleground to infinity, suggesting the enormity of Nosferatu’s crime.

In short: Unlike modern horror films, the horror atmosphere underlying every set is not based on shock effects, but on the nature of presentation. Scenery, buildings and people acquire an unholy physiognomy. The film virtually is set in a twilight zone.

In contrast, the cinematic tricks used to create a supernatural atmosphere today seem much less impressive. Examples are the negative footage used for depicting the forests round the castle or the jerky acceleration of the Vampire through stop-motion photography.

But as a whole, Murnau’s "symphony of horror" (thus the subtitle of the film) remains one of the most ominous and expressive films ever made arousing that metaphysical horror; or as Hungarian film critic Bela Balazs wrote “a chilly draft from doomsday”. (In other translations, this quotation reads “a frosty breath of air from beyond” or “the glacial draughts of air from the beyond” - so pick your choice). Again according to Eisner, “F.W. Murnau was the greatest film director the Germans have ever known... He created the most overwhelming and poignant images in the whole German cinema.”

It may be worth mentioning that in 1930 a revised sound-version of the film was released under the title of The Twelfth Hour - A Night of Horror.

* * *

“It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique merely lends visible form to Romantic fancies.” Accepting this conclusion by Eisner - once again so vital in analyzing the German cinema of the 20ies - it seems only natural that Werner Herzog was destined to tackle the subject of NOSFERATU in a re-make. There can be no doubt that Herzog is the Romantic soul of the New German Cinema, forever in search of the Blue Flower of Romanticism which is as elusive as the Holy Grail. He has talked of his films as showing things that no one has seen or known of before, of seeking planets that do not exist and landscapes that have only be dreamed.

There do exist some striking similarities between Murnau and Herzog, who was born as Werner Stipeti} in Munich in 1942. Like Murnau, Herzog grew up in the country, in this case on a farm in the Alps. And like the former, he broke off his studies in literature and drama. No wonder Herzog feels attracted by Murnau and his NOSFERATU which he concedes to be the most important film ever made in Germany. But low self-esteem is undoubtedly not a characteristic of Herzog. When asked about his reason for a re-make of this master-piece he reportedly answered: “Who would dare to re-do Hamlet after Shakespeare? I would!”.

Herzog’s version by more than one critic has been labelled “essential Murnau plus sound and colour”. The striking similarities - often even cinematographic quotations - are very easy to note if both films are screened following each other - like here and today. However, NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE (1978) unfolds a more convincing narrative of Count Dracula, who journeys from his native Transylvania to wreak havoc on a quiet North German port. Partly, this may be because of a revision of the earlier film’s plot that brings Herzog back closer to Stoker’s novel Dracula. Herzog observes the major conventions of the vampire genre as a whole (so often absent in the former film) but which of course first had to be developed and consolidated since Murnau’s day. The self-sacrifice of a woman pure of heart as a variant of the well-known Beauty-and-the-Beast legend is much more obvious than in the earlier version. As Lucy spends the night with the Count, the underlying sexuality of the topic becomes more obvious than Murnau dared to show in his time (or felt, due to his homosexuality.)

"Herzog’s NOSFERATU is not a remake of Murnau’s masterpiece, it is a rebirth," says Eisner. The film, indeed, is distinctively Herzog. There are once more the astounding stories about the film-making, sometimes on the brink of being more important than the film itself. This time, about the 11,000 white rats, painted grey, Herzog released in the streets of Delft, defying an order prohibiting just this. There are Herzogian landscapes - from the mountains of Czechoslovakia to the Dutch town of Delft. There are shots that are again typical of Herzog, like the Transylvanian inn that brings HEART OF GLASS to mind; or the grotesque mummified corpses Herzog found in Mexico; the racing clouds over the castle and again above the blowing sand on the infinite beach at the film’s end. With Murnau, the political background of the film is two-fold. There is the social-psychological longing for horror in times of turmoil, as touched on earlier in this introduction. And there is the oppressed world of the Biedermeier lifestyle in which the film is situated, which allows even for the interpretation of sexual symbols. With Herzog, the eruption of the plague by way of rats - already made a potent symbol by Albert Camus - brings a seemingly comfortable bourgeois world tumbling to the ground. This is clearly another aspect in Herzog’s continuing saga about the fragility of civilisation - with the cinema the supreme medium for conveying this fact.

The emphasis of Nosferatu himself has been gradually shifted towards a kind of reptile with demonic, even apocalyptic overtones. With great claws, fangs, bloodshot eyes, domed head and whitened face - the traditional Japanese make-up alone took up to five hours each day to put on. Kinski by sheer intensity and convincing acting injects focal strength into NOSFERATU. Yet the once ghoulish Count has been rendered uncomfortably sympathetic. "He is not just a figure of horror, but also of pity. Cursed with eternal life (nosferatu is Romanian for `undead`), like Frankenstein’s monster and King Kong before him, he yearns for affection and understanding" (....).

But even the magnificent performance by Kinski can’t hide the weaknesses of Herzog’s version. Cinematographic style supplied the strength of Murnau’s version - and is the most apparent weakness in Herzog’s. Much seems just too polished, too slick, too chic to inject fear or horror. His continual insistence in the beauty of visuals seem to have made him blind to some over-exaggerated acting and unreasonable reacting to events. Kinski is always at his best in Herzog’s films, despite or because of their love-hate relationship. But that does not cover the fact that Herzog obviously knows much better how to tackle a landscape than to deal with actors. Even famous ones like Isabelle Adjani and Bruno Ganz are no exception from this sad rule. As a result, portions of the film seem funny, and unintentionally so. But then perhaps one is meant to laugh at the manic character of Renfield, the Real Estate agent. And perhaps even Dracula is meant to be both tragic and comic.

NOSFERATU was Herzog’s first big budget production, in this case for 20th Century Fox. Looking back on 20 years of New German Cinema it seems our directors fare much better artistically with lower budgets that force them to rely more on their creativity. Murnau’s NOSFERATU, as stated, was low-budget. Maybe that is why it even after 70 years still looks fresh today?