Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

It was during the winter of the war year 1916, in Serbia. […] The flickering flame of a slowly burning lamp threw phantasmatic shadows throughout the depths of the room that served as our billet. […] All of a sudden, one of my comrades […] cast into the darkness a portentous question. ‘Do you know that we’re all more or less tormented by vampires?’ […] For a moment, there presided a deadly silence…[…] It was then that from the darkest corner of the room the answer came. Frightened, we saw the old peasant make the sign of the cross - he came forward and […] he whispered to us: ‘Before this wretched war, I was over in Romania. You can laugh about this superstition, but I swear on the mother of God, that I myself knew that horrible thing of seeing an undead.’ - ‘An undead?’ one of us asked. - ‘Yes, an undead or Nosferatu, as vampires are called over there. […] We’ve been pursued and tormented by those monsters forever.’ Again he crossed himself. Then suddenly his voice grew hushed. ‘One shouldn’t speak of them at this hour,’ he resumed, throwing a furtive glance toward the grandfather clock. We followed his gaze…Midnight! Our nerves had grown extremely tense. We pressed him in a single voice: ‘Tell us!’ Today I’m still frozen by a shiver at the memory of that Serb’s terrible story…[…]⁹

The article then proceeds in providing the details of the old peasant’s story – that is also accompanied by a lengthy quotation from an official document used to establish and support the reliability of the account. It is interesting though, how towards the end of the article, Grau also makes a sombre connection between vampires and the destruction brought on by the war. This is an aspect that, as we will see later, could be easily superimposed onto the film and used as a fruitful interpreting tool:

Grau was heavily involved in the world of German occultism and was a close associate of Heinrich Tränker, the inventor of ‘Pansophism’, a system of belief that put together elements of Rosicrucianism, Theosophy and Freemasonry. At the end of January 1921, in association with the businessman Enrico Dieckmann, Grau founded his production company and called it Prana Film, using a Sanskrit word roughly translatable as ‘breath of life’ and a symbol replicating the traditional yin and yang circle.

Despite its initial business plan to produce and release a total of nine films, which were all in one way or another connected with supernatural themes with titles such as Hollenträume (Dreams of Hell) and Der Sumpfteufel (The Swamp Devil), Prana Film, hit hard by the legal controversies triggered by the unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (the details of which will be discussed later on in this chapter) had to file for bankruptcy soon after the release of Nosferatu that thus remained the company’s first and only film.

During the making of Nosferatu, Albin Grau was responsible for the sets, costumes and make-up and was also behind the mysterious and intriguing advertising campaign – of which the article quoted above is part – that preceded the film’s release. Influenced by artists such as Henry Fuseli and Hugo Steiner-Prag, Grau experimented a little with the appearance of the vampire and produced a series of sketches that demonstrate how his visual concept ended up almost unchanged in the final version of the film.¹¹

Grau even created the lettering of the inter-titles and the mysterious alphabet made up of occult symbols, letters and drawings used in the message exchanged between Count Orlok and the estate agent Knock that can be seen in a couple of rapid sequences of the film and that will be briefly discussed in the analytical chapter of this book. In one word, he was the man behind the scenes, the one who had first conceived and envisioned Count Orlok’s world and had then brought Murnau on board to bring this world to life onto the screen.

The task of writing up the film’s script was given to Henrik Galeen (1881–1949), a former journalist who had worked – just like Murnau – for the renowned theatre director Max Reinhardt before starting a career in cinema as screenwriter and director in 1913. Apart from his work on Nosferatu, Galeen should be remembered for at least other four important German films made between 1915 and 1928: Der Golem (The Golem, Henrik Galeen, 1915), Das Wachsfigurenkabinett (Waxworks, Paul Leni, 1924), Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, Henrik Galeen, 1926), and Alraune (A Daughter of Destiny, Henrik Galeen, 1928). Galeen produced his script for Nosferatu by following more or less the events of the original story – although he also inserted into the plot some significant alterations and simplifications that shall be discussed later on in this chapter. As pointed out by David J. Skal:

The original script, reproduced by Lotte Eisner in her biography of Murnau, remains famous for its florid narrative style that sets it miles apart from what would nowadays be considered an acceptable film script. Eisner, introducing the script’s translation in her book, describes it as a typical example of Expressionist writing

The task of filming under Murnau’s direction was given to the UFA cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner (1889–1958) who is now widely regarded as one of the best German cinematographers – along with Karl Freund and Eugen Schüfftan – active between the 1920s and the 1950s. Wagner was a master in reproducing the dark, moody lighting that characterized the Expressionist movement, or as Lotte Eisner simply put it ‘under Murnau’s direction the camera of Fritz Arno Wagner required no extraneous factors to evoke the bizzarre’¹⁴ and ‘[…] it was in the portrayal of horror that the camera of […] Fritz Arno Wagner excelled’.¹⁵ Nosferatu probably remains Wagner’s most famous work, it is worth remembering however that he did work with Murnau on other two films: Schloss Vogelöd (The Haunted Castle, 1921) and Der brennende Acker (The Burning Soil, 1922). Other notable collaborations were those with Ernst Lubitsch (Madame Du Barry, 1919), and Fritz Lang (Der müde Tod – Between Two Worlds, 1921; Spione – Spies, 1928; M, 1931; and Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse – The Testament of Dr Mabuse, 1933).

Of course, in the traditional director-unit, the guiding role and ultimate influence was reserved to the director himself and we know – for instance by reading his notes on the margins of Galeen’s script – that Murnau was actively and heavily involved in all phases of pre-production and filmmaking. The heir of a family of textile manufacturers, Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe (his real name) was born in Bielefeld (Westphalia) in 1888. From the stories recounted by members of his family and from the exhaustive biography published by Lotte Eisner in 1973, we know that he was a child and an adolescent prone to daydreaming and passionate about literature, theatre and art. As remembered by Murnau’s brother, Robert Plumpe Murnau:

In 1907 Murnau moved to Berlin to study philology and soon after that he went to Heidelberg to read history of art and literature. In Heidelberg, his involvement with drama societies proved to be fateful for his future life and career for it was during a students’ performance that Max Reinhardt spotted him and asked him to join his company, the Deutsches Theater. During his years as a student, Murnau developed a profound sentimental and almost certainly sexual relationship with a young poet, Hans Ehrenbaum Degele. It was through Hans, who came from a wealthy family of Jewish bankers and intellectuals, that the future director first got in touch with Berlin’s bohemian underworld where he met and befriended, amongst others, the actor Conrad Veidt, the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, and the Expressionist painter Franz Marc. It was also during this period that Friedrich finally abandoned his family name in order to adopt the stage name of Murnau, an act that was at the same time an homage to the little artist’ colony of Murnau am Staffelsee in the Upper Bavarian region where he had travelled with Hans and a gesture of defiance towards his father who strongly opposed Friedrich’s artistic ambitions. In 1914, Murnau joined the ranks of the German army to fight in the First World War. His experience during the conflict – first in the infantry and then in the Luftwaffe – was profoundly marked by the death of Hans who was killed in action while deployed on the Russian front in July 1915. The American novelist Jim Shepard in his fictionalised but extensively researched account of Murnau’s life (Nosferatu in Love, published in 1998) imagines a Murnau so haunted and obsessed by Hans’ death that all his subsequent work can be read as a mournful reflection on love and loss.

Murnau’s life as a Luftwaffe reconnaissance pilot – an experience that probably had an influence on his subsequent camerawork style – was cut short in 1917 when his airplane got lost in the fog and he was forced to make an emergency landing in the neutral territory of Switzerland. Murnau awaited the end of the hostilities as a prisoner of war in an internment camp in Andermatt where he kept himself busy with amateur theatre performances. In 1919, back in Germany after the armistice, Murnau moved into Hans’ family house – Hans’ mother, the opera singer Mary Ehrenbaum Degele explicitly wished for him to do so in her will – and after setting up a production company with Conrad Veidt, he produced his first eight feature films. After the completion of Nosferatu, Murnau continued to work in Germany until 1926 directing amongst other films Der letze Mann (The Last Laugh, 1924) and an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust (1926) and then moved to the United States where he would work on four more films. In 1927 he directed his only American success, Sunrise: a Song of Two Humans. In 1931, along with documentary filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to film what would turn out to be his last film, Tabu. Back in the United States for the official premiere of the film – that, due to artistic differences with Flaherty, he had completed on his own – the director died tragically in a car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway on the 11th of March 1931. The circumstances of his death created all sorts of rumours within the Hollywood community: Murnau was said to be fascinated by Eastern philosophy, astrology and occultism and on the day of his death he was going to arrange a steamship journey to New York after having been warned not to travel by land. As underlined by Thomas Elsaesser in his study of Weimar cinema:

After completing the film’s casting – that saw Max Schreck (Count Orlok), Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter), Greta Schroeder (Ellen), and Alexander Granach (Knock) in the four main roles – Murnau and his crew started shooting Nosferatu. The filming commenced in August 1921 and lasted until October. It is interesting to notice how, unlike the vast majority of Expressionist films, Nosferatu was mostly filmed on location and the crew travelled extensively between Germany, the former Czechoslovakia and Poland in order to shoot sequences in the Baltic ports of Rostock, Wismar and Lübeck whilst the interiors were shot in Berlin in the Jofa-Atelier studios. In the early 1920s, filming on location was still somewhat of a novelty but it was certainly cheaper than reconsructing sets in studios. In the case of Nosferatu it is quite likely that the decision of filming on location was not simply an artistic one but was also connected to the company’s budget limitations. Throughout the production period, the audience’s curiosity was awakened and maintained alive by the constant release of adverts, posters and articles that Albin Grau cleverly circulated and published in various film magazines such as Der Film, and Bühne und Film. For instance, a reader buying issue number 21 of Bühne und Film (1921) would find – along with the above-mentioned article on vampires written by Albin Grau and a number of posters and sketches – the following publicity that openly challenged the public to be brave enough to face Prana’s first feature film:

In order to further increase the buzz around the film, journalists were at times invited on the Berlin set to observe and report on the work in progress. The publicity created by Prana Film reached its climax on the 4th of March 1922 when Nosferatu finally had its premiere in the Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens. The decision to present the film at the zoo rather than in a place more in tune with a Gothic tale such as a church seems to suggest how, in the minds of its authors, Nosferatu could be regarded as an observation of nature – albeit a nature inhabited by vampires and supernatural beings – and not a purely Gothic fantasy. On March 3rd the Film Kurier anticipated that Prana Film had arranged a party ‘in true American style’ for the launch of their latest film. Starting at eight o’clock, the party was expected to last all night long and to occupy ‘the entire premises of the zoo’. The guests, although not required to do so, were invited to attend wearing Biedermeier costumes.²⁰ A couple of days after the premiere, Alfred Rosenthal wrote a lengthy piece for the special Monday edition of the Berlin Lokal-Anzeiger. Rosenthal reported on the spooky atmosphere surrounding the film’s screening – ‘[…] the room darkened as the projectors began to whir and a title annouced that a symphony of horror should roll across the screen […]’ – and commented with more than a hint of irony upon the celebrities who turned up for the film and the following lavish ball:

Overall, as reported by the Film Kurier, the lauch of the film was a highly successful affair and ‘[…] the guests quickly turned the “symphony of horror and darkness” into a delightful “symphony of joy and light”’.²²

The generally favourable reactions to the film were counterbalanced by a rather venomous article which appeared in the Marxist newspaper Leipziger Volkzeitunger soon after the premiere. The article accused Nosferatu of enveloping the worker in a ‘supernatural fog’ that would masquerade and hide concrete reality with the result of sapping the working class’ revolutionary drive. This numbing ‘supernatural fog’ was a direct consequence of the spiritualist revival – that was secretly steered by the world of finance and industry – that had stormed Europe and America right after the end of the war when people would try to find comfort to the inconceivable grief caused by the conflict by resorting to any available means. Marxists regarded spiritualism as yet another form of opiate for the masses – just like traditional religion – and Nosferatu appeared to be part of this wider conspiracy that aimed at keeping ‘people sufficiently stupid for capitalist interests.’²³ The only possible reaction would be

What none of these articles reported, though, was the fact that the launch of the film had cost Prana more than the feature itself and that the whole project had been realised without obtaining the necessary legal permissions from whoever owned the rights to Dracula – a detail that no one had worried about in the pre-production stage perhaps even thinking that applying some cosmetic adjustments to the plot - such as anticipating the story to the beginning of the nineteenth century and changing the characters’ names – would be enough to keep the film safe from all possible issues. These facts confirm that impression of impracticality and lack of any real business sense that seemed to surround all of the initiatives undertaken by Prana Film during its brief commercial life – and on the long run they also proved to be fatal for the very survival of the company that was now about to encounter its fiercest adversary in the elderly widow of Bram Stoker.

At the end of April 1922, Florence Stoker, the sixty-four years old widow of the Irish writer, received a series of documents from Germany that included the programme and some promotional material for a film premiere that had taken place in Berlin’s Zoological Gardens at the beginning of the previous month. The film advertised in the programme – ‘frei verfaßt von [freely adapted by] Henrik Galeen’ – was obviously Nosferatu, a feature about which Florence Stoker – who partly survived on the unsteady income provided by Dracula’s rights – did not know anything at all since no one from Prana Film had neither thought about asking for her permission nor had considered paying her for the adaptation rights to the story. Outraged and upset, the woman turned to the British Incorporated Society of Authors, which she had joined only a few days before, right after having discovered the film’s existence, for protection and legal advice. After filing a lawsuit against Prana Film, Florence Stoker’s lawyers asked for compensation for the illegal use of intellectual property. The legal battle between the widow and Prana Film would drag on for over three years - and would cause a considerable series of headaches even to the Society of Authors whose secretary, G. Herbert Thring, was literally stalked and harassed by Florence Stoker who still had many influential friends within London’s literary and editorial circles. In May 1922, the Society of Authors surrendered to her pressures and asked its legal representative in Germany – Dr. Wronker-Flatow – to follow the matter with the caveat that should Prana Film wished to fight against the case, the Society would not assist Florence Stoker in taking the question any further. Still unbeknownst to Thring, this initial intention was never really carried through due to Florence Stoker’s fierce determination and singlemindedness in pursuing her German ‘foes’. In June 1922, Prana, whose already precarious finances had been hit hard by the initial legal costs caused by the lawsuit and in order to avoid having to pay even more money, filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile Nosferatu was still being screened in cinemas around Germany and Hungary and in August the legal representative of the production company proposed a compromise to Florence Stoker. She would receive a share in the film’s profits in exchange for the use of the name Dracula in the English and American markets. Stoker’s widow refused to accept the deal and then spent the following two years (1923 and 1924) insisting with the Society of Authors that her case should be taken seriously for principles of both fairness and law. Realising that it was rather unlikely to succeed in obtaining any financial compensation from Prana, she also started demanding the destruction of all the existing copies of Nosferatu – a film she had never even seen – both negative and positive ones. Eventually, on 20th July 1925, a Berlin court ruled that Prana Film was indeed guilty of copyright infringement and, since the company could not meet any monetary reparations, the court ordered to destroy the film. As underlined by David J. Skal in his detailed account of the legal controversy between Prana Film and Florence Stoker,

Florence Stoker’s victory over Count Orlok was only a fleeting and apparent one. The German court did not provide any concrete evidence of the film’s obliteration and, although the original negative never resurfaced, Nosferatu reappeared almost immediately in England where, under the title of ‘Dracula’, it was advertised as part of the showings of a newly-formed British Film Society. Yet again, following the advice of the Society of Authors, Florence Stoker sent a registered letter to the people organising the screenings forbidding any showing of the film anywhere, anytime, and under any circumstances. Even this latest legal act was not enough, though, for the film kept on being offered to cinemas around Britain – with no-one ever being able to locate who was responsible for its diffusion. Finally, after quietly laying dormant for a few short years awaiting for the right chance to rise again, the film resurfaced in the summer of 1929 in the United States where it was advertised for a series of screenings in Detroit and in New York City where it opened at the Film Guild Cinema in the Greenwich Village from where it started once again its unstoppable voyage through space and time.

It is important to notice that, despite its difficult survival, Nosferatu was never really a lost film and there were various copies appearing and disappearing around Europe and the United States. For example, Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, preserved a copy of the second version of the film dated 1926 or 1927. A print from this version – that was in black and white and not with the original tones and tints – travelled to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1947 where its intertitles were translated into English and the names of the characters were changed to those in the novel. This was also the version that returned to Europe and was presented around in the 1960s as a prime example of Weimar cinema that by then was going through a phase of rediscovery and reevaluation. According to the necessities of the various screenings, the film’s intertitles were translated from language to language and with each new copy the deterioration in the image quality became consistent. To further add to the confusion, in 1930, a ‘second’ Nosferatu also appeared on the market: it was called Die zwölfte Stunde (The Twelfth Hour) and was advertised as an ‘artistic adaptation’ of the story by a certain Dr. Waldemar Roger. The film was intended to be released with the accompaniment of sound recorded on a grammophone record and contained additions, shortened sections, additional characters, sequences moved from one part of the film to another and even a happy ending. It is almost entirely thanks to Lotte Eisner’s efforts if today we can watch the film as it was intended to be. In the 1950s she managed to obtain the original script of the film from Murnau’s brother, Robert Plumpe. The script, as we know, presented a series of alterations to Galeen’s original which were handwritten by the director himself and it was used as a blueprint against the copy held at the Cinémathèque Française and other versions of the film. In this way, restorators and film scholars such as Enno Patalas and Luciano Berriatúa, managed to reconstruct an Ur version of the film that was subsequently completed with the original subtitles and colours.

Leaving aside all the legal controversies, how similar Nosferatu really was to its literary source?

In we attempt to compare and contrast the two, it becomes immediately apparent that Murnau’s film preserved the basic plot of the story (a young man travels to an isolated area to sell a house to a mysterious count / the count turns out to be a vampire who travels back to the young man’s town bringing death and destruction with him / the vampire is destroyed at the end of the story) whilst at the same time implementing a series of important changes both in terms of micro details and from a wider narrative perspective.

One of the most interesting features of Dracula is its epistolary structure – the story is not recounted by one narrator but builds up through a series of diary entries, letters, phonographic recordings, newspapers clippings et cetera by means of which the characters relate their experiences to the readers. The multiple documents that constitute Dracula’s narrative peculiarity also imply that the story is constantly reconstructed and retold from a series of different points of view: each character, except from Count Dracula himself, contributes with his/her own segment of the story and it is up to the reader, and to Mina Harker in the second part of the novel, to try and piece things together in a coherent and cohesive way.

Nosferatu attempts to replicate some aspects of the novel’s epistolary structure by introducing five different voices into the action. The film opens up with the pages of a book whose narrator proclaims to be the historical chronicle of the events that took place in the town of Wisborg during the plague epidemic of 1838. This unnamed narrator will appear again throughout the film to clarify, explain and interpret some of the events taking place on the screen. His perspective is removed from the story for we know he did not take part in the events narrated, but time and again, he reports or recalls conversations he had with the surviving protagonists of the plague, such as Hutter, thus providing the story with a degree of authenticity and reliability. The other voices inserted in the film have a very similar role: the entries from the ship’s log bringing Orlok to Wisborg increase our belief in the terrifying events taking place on the schooner during its dramatic journey; the newspaper’s cutting chronicling the spreading of the plague in Transylvania and along the Black Sea ports purports to report real events and increases at the same time the tension connected to the inevitable tragedy that is approaching by sea. Even the Book of Vampires – detailing the nature and main features of the vampire – grounds the monster and the events surrounding him in a concrete reality and not in an imaginary dimension. Finally, the glimpses we get of the letters sent by Hutter to his wife provide us with a window into their intimate relationship and into Hutter’s lack of immediate understanding of what is going on around him.

The similarities in the narrative structure are also counterbalanced by a series of differences, the most obvious and visible of them being the change in the time and place of the story – apart from the parts set in Transylvania that are present both in the book and the film, the novel takes place in London in 1897 while the film is set in the fictional town of Wisborg, a sort of idealised middle-European town, in 1838. These modifications could simply be interpreted as a somewhat clumsy attempt on the part of the filmmakers to distantiate their film enough from its source novel so as to avoid possible copyright problem. Even if the people at Prana Film did not know about the existence of Florence Stoker – and it is rather likely that they did not – the novel was still in print (and so it has remained since its first publication), and it is therefore reasonable to imagine that the copyright issue must have been somewhere in the mind of Grau and his associates. It is important to consider though how these changes also triggered in the film a series of consequences that are worth underlining.

As pointed out by Martin Tropp, Stoker’s novel belongs to a type of fiction in which ‘an unusual individual in touch with private fears at a time when these fears were shared by the outside world consciously or unconsciously exploited the link between the two.’²⁶ Dracula is therefore a novel steeped in late-Victorian London and the proximity to the new century with its social and technological innovations plays an important part in the book both in terms of form and content. Technology is utilised and presented by Stoker under various forms and circumstances: Mina employs a typewriter to put together the different testimonies that will help the hunters to track Dracula down, Dr. Seward makes recordings of his conversations with Renfield, Van Helsing tries to save Lucy’s life by means of blood transfusions etc. These episodes though are not merely accidentals but contribute to increase the insurmountable distance between the evil world of Dracula, which is centuries old and frozen in the limbo of his non-death, and the modern world of the novel’s heroes who can turn to science and modern means of trasportation such as the train to eventually overcome their enemy.

In the film, bringing back the time of the action to the early nineteenth century and more specifically to the Biedermeier era, makes the gap between the modern world and that inhabited by the vampire much smaller and harder to notice, so much so that the rural world of the Transylvanian peasants does not appear too different after all from the one inhabited by Hutter and Ellen. If in Dracula religion and folklore are accompanied by science, in Nosferatu the vampire is destroyed by ancient atavistic forces such as purity and the rays of the sun.

The shift from modernity to the Biedermeier period could also be read as a subtle attempt on the part of Murnau to comment on the stifling state of contemporary German society without raising the question directly and in a way that could result to be too controversial. The Biedermeier period (which can be roughly bracketed between the years 1815 and 1848) coincided with the rise of a new middle-class whose success was boosted by industrial progress and with a generalised lack of political commitment in the arts that was the direct result of the growing climate of political oppression widespread in Europe after the end of the Napoleonic wars. The inward tendencies of the era when combined with the desire of the new bourgeousie to show off its newly acquired wealth, resulted in an increased interest and development in the field of interior design. Biedermeier décor – that had been rediscovered in 1906 at the Centennial Exhibition of the National Gallery in Berlin – was basically a toned down version of the boastful and rich Empire style and was characterised by a rather reliable, common sense and somewhat boring idea of space and furniture. By setting his film in this specific cultural and visual climate – and by often enclosing his heroine within the confined space of her well-appointed bourgeois house – Murnau underlines the sense of oppression and seclusion experienced by marginalised sections of society, such as women and possibly by extension also homosexuals.

Another notable adaptation feature of Murnau’s film can be identified in the change in the characters’ names and also in the drastic reduction of their number and function. The role of some characters thus results to be much more limited than in the source novel; for instance, Renfield, the estate agent who is sent to Transylvania before Jonathan Harker only to come back from his journey deranged and under the spell of the vampire for whom he acts as a sort of minion, is partially replaced in the film by Knock who also fills in the narrative role of Harker’s employer. Other characters instead, have been simply obliterated from the film’s narrative. There is no trace therefore of Dracula’s hunters, Quincey Morris, Dr. Seward and Arthur Holmwood. If Dracula is a choral book, then, Nosferatu really revolves around its three main characters: Hutter, Ellen and Count Orlok.

Hutter – Jonathan Harker in the novel – is portrayed as a brave man in love with his wife who ultimately lacks the necessary degree of empathy and sensitivity to understand her dramatic internal turmoil. His perspective on the events often appears to be rather short-sighted, his energy – especially at the beginning of the film Murnau frequently films Gustav von Wangenheim running or striding briskly through the frame – is made up of short bursts but has no real stamina and more than once during the confrontation with the vampire he becomes passive and ineffectual. For example, when he is attacked by the vampire during his second night at the castle he retreats under his bedcovers like a child and when he discovers the body of the Count asleep in his coffin, instead of attempting to destroy him while he is at his weakest, Hutter runs away in a mad panic. These shortcomings in his personality will make him ultimately incapable of preventing Ellen’s death.

The female heroine in Nosferatu is portrayed in an elusive and subtle way constantly oscillating between passivity and action. Mina, Ellen’s literary counterpart, is a modern Victorian woman: although not a ‘New Woman’ in the purest sense of the word and somewhat conventional in her outlook on life, she nevertheless has a job and knows how to use technology – it is thanks to her proficiency in using a typewriter that Dracula’s movements are reconstructed and the vampire is finally killed – and her character is fashioned as a combination of traditional feminine warmth and masculine determination. As Van Helsing declares in Chapter XVIII of the novel: ‘Ah, that wonderful Madam Mina! She has man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and a woman’s heart.’²⁷ Compared to Mina, Ellen is harder to understand. The first time we see her, she is playing joyfully with a kitten and could at first appear as a rather carefree and even childish character. However, this superficial impression is soon dispelled by what can be interpreted as Ellen’s deep affinity with nature: there are many instances in the film when this aspect becomes clear – see, for example, her reaction in the sequence where she is presented with a posy of flowers by Hutter that will be discussed in the close reading chapter of this book. If Hutter is filmed running about the set, Ellen is often framed in a static situation, embroidering at the window or sitting on a solitary bench on the beach. Yet, her constant proximity to open spaces, such as the window and the sea, seems to suggest the possibility, and perhaps even the desire, for an escape into a different reality to which she seems to be already alert on a deeper and metaphysical level, as demonstrated for instance by those episodes in the film when Ellen ‘feels’ that Hutter is in danger in Orlok’s castle and she reacts by sleepwalking or crying out for help while in a state of trance. When compared to Mina Harker, who eventually survives her encounter with the vampire – or, more precisely, is saved from the vampire by the men surrounding and protecting her – Ellen is also a much more tragic and solitary heroine whose faith almost coincides with that of martyrs. Her death is not caused by weakness but it is rather an act of supreme self-sacrifice – and also of self-assertion – which is first thought out and then carried through entirely on her own will and means and with no help from her husband or any other man who may surround her. As underlined by Matthew C. Brennan:

The formidable adversary that Ellen and Hutter have to face is an intriguing combination of elements taken from the novel, original diversions from it, and features pertaining to the folkloric depiction of vampires. In the second chapter of the book, Jonathan Harker povides a very detailed description of the Count:

Murnau retained some elements of this description: his vampire is characterised by a strong aquiline profile, with a very wide forehead, bushy eyebrows and incredibly pointed ears. The extreme pallor is also maintained and is emphasised by the long black coat with tight lines constantly worn by Orlok that also seems to stress the unnatural thinness and height of the Count. Orlok’s vampire’s fangs though do not protrude over his lips and when we finally get to see them there is an immediate visual connection with rodents’ teeth. Overall, we get the impression of a character that is ‘more spectral, dried-out and leech-like’ than the magnetic and sexually alluring counts portrayed by other successive on-screen vampires such as Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Gary Oldman.³⁰ Despite Count Orlok’s hideous appearance, Murnau’s vampire is not entirely devoid of a certain animalistic allure that can be retraced in Ellen’s obsession for him and in a number of shots towards the end of the film when she is waiting for the vampire’s arrival or when she finally meets him – in her conjugal bed – and her reaction to his shadow clutching her heart can be interpreted as a subtle combination of pain and sexual pleasure.

The ultimate faith of the vampire is another central difference between the film and the book. In Dracula, the Count escapes from London but is chased back to Transylvania by the collective effort of Van Helsing, Harker, Holmwood, Seward, Morris, and Mina and this pursuit constitutes one of the most exciting and breathtaking parts of the book. Once cornered outside his castle, Dracula is then dispatched by Jonathan Harker and Quincey Morris – who will be the only human casualty in this last part of the book – who slash his throat and stab him through the heart. Stoker provides his readers with a neat closure: the Count’s body crumbles to ashes and order is restored – in a coda set seven years after the events we see Mina and Jonathan bringing up their son Quincey, and Seward and Holmwood being happily married. Murnau is not so generous with his audience: the film does not have any major climatic scene. There is no investigative work or collective effort involved in dispatching the vampire but rather a sombre sense of sacrifice and inevitability. Even the very death of the vampire, who simply disappears into a thin puff of smoke when hit by the sunlight coming in from Ellen’s window, appears to be strangely anti-climatic in its rapid deployment. There is closure – after all the vampire is dead – but no real sense of resolution and certainly no happy ending to the story. Interestingly though, the closing sequence in Nosferatu will establish a central convention of the vampiric genre: in Dracula the vampire is weakened during the day but does not fear the direct light of the sun and it is with Murnau’s film that this famous topos begins. Besides, as underlined by Anne Billson:

In terms of characters whose role and importance have either been reduced or modified in the film, the two most interesting examples are those of Professor Van Helsing and Lucy Westenra. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula finds his fiercest adversary and nemesis in the character of Professor Abraham Van Helsing, an energetic and resolute Dutchman who combines scientific knowledge – we know he is a Doctor of Medicine, Philosophy, Letters, and Law – with less orthodox methods, such as magic and folklore. Van Helsing is constructed by Stoker to be the real hero in the novel (he even shares his name with the author) and he is the only character truly capable of destroying Dracula and save Mina and by extension the rest of mankind. Once introduced in the story, by means of a lengthy description in Mina’s journal that can only be compared for its centrality in the book to Jonathan Harker’s description of the Count, he immediately assumes total command in the battle against the vampire. As underlined by Clive Leatherdale, Van Helsing is a ‘scientist-turned-magician’ who is also at the same time a staunch upholder of the strictest moral values predicated by Roman Catholicism and an opponent of materialist bourgeois values and lax moral behaviour.³² Despite his frequent lack of tact and conservative attitudes, though, Van Helsing is undeniably a formidable character to whom his cinematographic counterpart, Professor Bulwer, can hardly be a match. In Murnau’s film, Bulwer is a scientist and a Paracelsian – as it will be clarified in a late sequence in the film where he is shown lecturing a small class of students – and his knowledge should therefore be an inextricable mixture of science and occultism. However, although knowledgeable, Bulwer is ultimately ineffectual and he never gets really involved in the fight against the vampire. It even remains unclear in the story whether he has any grasp or understanding of what is really going on in Wisborg and the film’s closing shot presents him as an old and defeated man shaking his head in disbelief when confronted with Ellen’s sudden and tragic death.

Another character whose importance and role have been modified and diminished in Murnau’s adaptation is that of Mina’s friend: Lucy Westenra. In the novel, the character of Lucy is put into sharp contrast with that of Mina: her flirtatious attitude and implied curiosity towards sex – along with her tendency to sleepwalk at night, a trait that is significantly attributed to Ellen in the film – seem to be crucial flaws in her personality and also the determining reasons in the fact that Dracula chooses her as his first victim in London. After her death, Lucy turns into an eroticised vampire – the ‘Bloofer Lady’ – who preys on little children at night, and is dispatched by Van Helsing and the other male characters in the most brutal and gruesome sequence of the novel. When she is ambushed in the chapel where she should be lying dead, Stoker describes her as a white figure characterised by

Seeing her fiancée, Arthur Holmwood, with the others, she tries to lure him towards her by exercising her newly acquired lack of sexual inhibition:

After this unsettling encounter, it will be up to Arthur ‘the husband’ to bring Lucy’s death to a real completion and to restore her ‘[…] as a holy, and not an unholy, memory’ through an act that scholars have normally interpreted as a travesty for sexual intercourse.³⁵ Stoker is here pretty heavy-handed with his imagery:

In Murnau’s film, Lucy’s character is replaced by that of Anny, the sister of the shipbuilder Harding who offers hospitality to Ellen while Hutter is away in Transylvania. Compared to Lucy, the film’s character comes across as being pretty bland and insignificant. Although it is interesting to see her interact with Ellen and observe the contrast between Ellen’s mournful countenance and Anny’s youthful joy, the overall impression is that left by an accidental character who falls victim to the vampire just like many other innocent Wisborg citizens. If Lucy’s death is a pivotal narrative moment in Dracula and is imbued by a rich subtext feeding from Victorian attitudes towards sex and fears of the new and independent woman on the rise, Anny’s passing is treated by Murnau in an extremely understated, although poetic, way, with the fragile flickering flame of a candle being extinguished by a mysterious wind stirring the curtains of her bedroom.