Movies - Nosferatu

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	Movies - Nosferatu

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens ("A Symphony of Horrors" in German) is a German Expressionist film shot in 1922 by F.W. Murnau. He had wanted to film a version of Bram Stoker's Dracula
, but his studio was unable to obtain the rights to the story. Murnau decided to film his own version and made only slight changes to the story. The resultant movie has many similarities to Stoker's original tale. "Dracula" became "Nosferatu" and the names of the characters changed, with Count Dracula changed to Count Orlok. The role of the vampire was played by Max Schreck. Other major actors in the film were Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, and Alexander Granach.

Relation to Dracula

Stylistically, Nosferatu is similar to Dracula, although the first official version of the story would not be made until 1931. Nosferatu leaves the core characters (John and Mina Harker, the Count, Dr. Seward, etc.) but weeds out many of the secondary players, such as Lucy. All the characters' names were changed as well, although in some versions of this film the Dracula names have been reinserted.

The ending is also substantially different than that of Dracula. Count Orlock (Dracula) is ultimately destroyed when the 'Mina' character sacrifices herself to him. In the book (and many later versions of the story) Dracula is destroyed physically. The timeframe of the story is also set back significantly: according to the logbook of the ship captain, it takes place in 1838, while Dracula takes place in the 1890s.

About the film

This was the first film of the production company Prana-Film GmbH; it was also the last as they declared bankruptcy after Bram Stoker's estate—acting for his widow, Florence Stoker—sued for copyright infringement (plagiarism) and won. The court ordered all existing prints of Nosferatu destroyed, but a number of copies of the film had already been distributed around the world. These prints were then copied over the years, resulting in Nosferatu gaining a reputation as one of the greatest movie adaptations of the vampire legend.

With the influence of producer and production designer, Albin Grau, the film established one of two main lines of vampire depiction in movies. The "Nosferatu-type" is a living corpse with rodent features (especially elongated fingernails and incisors), associated with rats and plague, and neither charming nor erotic but totally repugnant. The victims usually die and are not turned into vampires themselves. The more common other line is the "Dracula-type" (established by Bela Lugosi's version of Dracula and perpetuated by Christopher Lee), a charming aristocrat adept at seduction and turning his victims into new vampires.

Parts of the film allegedly showing Transylvania were filmed in Slovakia. Nosferatu's castle, for instance, is Orava Castle in northern Slovakia, and other locations are in the High Tatras and on the Váh River around Strečno Castle.

Murnau's Nosferatu is in the public domain, and copies of the movie are widely available on video—usually as poorly transferred, faded, scratched video copies that are often scorned by enthusiasts. However, pristine restored editions of the film have also been made available, and are also readily accessible to the public.

Origins of the name

The original meaning of the word "nosferatu" is difficult to determine. There is no doubt that it achieved popular currency through Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, and Stoker identified his source for the term as the 19th-century British author and speaker Emily Gerard. Gerard introduced the word into print in a book chapter ("Transylvanian Superstitions" - 1885) and in her travelogue the Land Beyond the Forest (1888) ("land beyond the forest" is literally what Transylvania means in Latin). She merely refers to it as the Romanian word for vampire. Internal evidence in Dracula suggests that Stoker believed the term meant "not dead" in Romanian, and thus he may have intended the word "undead" to be a calque of it.

Numerous other interpretations of the word nosferatu have subsequently appeared, as there are a number of reasons to suspect that Stoker's apparent interpretation was not entirely correct, the foremost being that "nosferatu" does not mean "not dead" in Romanian.

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Movies - Nosferatu

Relation to Dracula

About the film

Origins of the name

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