Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

In order to analyse a film thoroughly, we should always take into account the elements that constitute a film’s grammar and syntax: mise-en-scène, camerawork, editing, and sound, although normally discussed separately, must be thought of as interconnected and inter-dependent. The mise-en-scène – that is to say, all that is visible on the screen at any given moment – is constituted by a large number of different elements that can be roughly divided in pre-cinematic features (such as sets, costumes, light, etc.) and cinematographic elements (camera angles, distance, focus and so on).

Sets and locations are amongst a film’s most immediate and visible features. In Nosferatu, sets and locations are used in a highly creative and innovative way. The film is not characterised by the typical Expressionist sets that, reconstructed in large movie studios, generally hinted at the existence of a partially or wholly imaginary fantastic and delusional world as in the case of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. On the contrary, the film employs real locations and realistic interiors that are subsequently invested with a poetic treatment that enhances their atmosphere to the point of transforming them into highly meaningful entities that do not simply act as backdrop for the characters but underline specific psychological or narrative passages without being too obtrusive or heavy-handed, as it happens on occasion in more traditionally realised Expressionist films. The real locations used in Nosferatu, amongst them the Carpathians mountains, the wild river along which the vampire’s coffins are transported on a barge, the lingering night shots of forests that at times interrupt the action, the roaring sea filmed from the schooner taking Orlok to Wisborg, transmit a profound sense of supernatural events lurking in the shadows of reality – they are chilled by what Béla Balázs called ‘the glacial draughts of air from the beyond’⁷⁸ – and

If the outdoors locations straddle the line between fantasy and naturalism, the sets reconstructing the indoor sites – Hutters’ home in Wisborg, Knock’s office, Orlok’s castle and such – tend to present elements that can enrich our understanding of the relationships and power struggles at work in the film. For instance, in the scenes where Ellen and Hutter interact, Murnau often places some obstructive element in-between the two characters, such as a door or a bed frame, to increase the underlying impression of incommunicability that can be repeatedly perceived in their interaction as a couple. The sense of stifling respectability that triggers Ellen’s ultimate rebellion/ sacrifice is equally conveyed in the film by the heavy Biedermeier interiors of her marital home. Albin Grau, in his role as the film’s set designer, fills up Hutter’s home to the brim with flowery wallpaper, tiny portraits, wooden cabinets and furniture that seem to suggest a heaven of peace and conventional sentimentality. At the same time though, this same heaven is pierced through and through by the high number of windows, mirrors, and doors that deconstruct the space and unsettle its neatly organised structure. The décor becomes at once an index of the period and a subtle critique of bourgeois conformism (see figure 2).

Another good example of an apparently simple décor used as a hint to the balance of power amongst the film’s characters can be identified in the chequered floor that appears in the sequence of Hutter’s first night in Orlok’s castle.

The resemblance of the floor to a chess-board, along with the blocking scheme applied by Murnau to his actors on the set, subtly but unmistakably suggests to the spectator that once entered into the castle, Hutter has become a piece in the strategy game played by Orlok in his plan to move from his remote Carpathians abode to the teeming streets of Wisborg. The power of this short sequence thus derives largely from the tension implied in the contrast between the apparently innocent set up – a large but otherwise rather non-descript castle dining hall – and the precise execution of the delicate manoeuvre that Orlok is plotting at the expense of Hutter.

The employment of recurrent architectural motifs such as arches, doorways, stairs, and bridges is another striking feature in the mise-en-scène of Nosferatu. Murnau frequently frames or limits his shots by means of arches; think for example of the series of arched shapes that provide the visual boundaries to Orlok’s first appearance towards the end of the film’s first act (see figure 4) or of the doorframe shaped as a pointed arch that encases the vampire in the attack sequence discussed in the close reading section of this book. By framing and enclosing the subjects, the arches also act as a visual reminder of the sense of threat that is closing in around the innocent characters in the film – for instance, when Hutter enters his tiny bedroom in the inn, there is a prominent arch in the background of the image that eerily anticipates the arched door of his room in the castle where he will be attacked by the vampire.

The other architectural elements featured in the film are all connected with the aspect of liminality that is an integral part of vampire mythology and more generally of supernatural stories where often the crossing of a threshold – into a haunted mansion, a forbidden forest or a parallel dimension – provide the connective link between reality and the other world: Hutter crosses two bridges before entering into Orlok’s castle, Ellen sleepwalks along the ledge of Harding’s terrace in a state of trance, the mate on the Empusa descends the stairs into the schooner’s hold to try and unravel the origins of the mysterious illness that is taking over the ship: these are just a few examples of how Murnau manages to exploit transitional spaces by charging up their everyday appearance and function with deeper psychological and narrative implications. Thus, very subtly but in an unmistakable manner, the film finds itself in a web of references that stretch from the in-betweenness of the vampire’s body – who is dead and alive at the same time – to the liminal nature of cinema itself where each image exists on the threshold between light and darkness, reality and its reproduction and comes to life only to be exhausted and ‘killed’ by/into the following frame.

The employment of frames, thresholds and passageways as visual clues is also linked inextricably with the recurrent act of violating and trespassing them. This action does not simply take the story’s events forward but could also be interpreted as the visual representation of some of the deeper motives at work in the film that sees in the dynamics between outside and inside one of its main narrative hinges. The first image of the film, moving in from a panoramic shot of Wisborg into Hutter’s home, immediately suggests a sense of contrast between the apparently safe heaven of home and the menace that can come from without those familiar boundaries. The whole narrative of Nosferatu, and of Stoker’s novel before it, appears in effect to be permeated by the foreboding of a threat coming from outside and the vampire has been interpreted at times as the embodiment of the fear of the foreign Eastern European intruder who lands in Germany to violate its women and kill its men thus destroying the inner fabric of German society.

Although often remembered for the daring and innovative camera movements devised for his later films, such as The Last Laugh (1924) shot by Karl Freund in 1924, Murnau’s choice for the camerawork in Nosferatu appears to be of an entirely different nature: in this film the camera does not move much. The only notable movements are a few panoramic shots – for instance, those surveying the majestic Carpathian mountains – and the shots of the schooner sailing to Wisborg that were taken from another boat and from a sea plane. Rather than slowing down the pace of the action though, these static shots greatly contribute to increase the sense of doom that dominates the film: for instance, when the Empusa makes its sombre entrance into Wisborg’s harbour, the fact that we are watching it from a side-lined position and are not moving along with it to follow its trail, makes us feel even more overwhelmed by the fear and premonition of the terrible tragedy that is about to strike – our immobility as spectators replicating the helplessness of the citizens that will soon be hit by the plague brought on by the vampire. Alexandre Astruc wrote that ‘[…] with Murnau each image demands annihilation by another image. Every sequence announces its own end’, there is a palpable sense of an encroaching and terrible outside world that bounces and reverberates between the images and the wider narrative of the film.⁸⁰

Instead of being conveyed by camera movements, power relations and the characters’ psychological states are often expressed through the use of angles. For instance, Murnau photographs the vampire taking over the ship using an extreme low angle that emphasises his power over mortals and renders the monster even more intimidating. In general, whenever Nosferatu is on screen, the weight of his commanding presence seems to dominate – or to ‘colonise’ and ‘vampirise’ as suggested by Ken Gelder – the surrounding space, regardless of the angle through which he is being framed.⁸¹ As Eric Rhode wrote:

At the opposite end of the scale the director films the vertiginous drop from Hutter’s window in the castle from an extremely high angle that stresses the verticality of the castle’s walls and by extension the character’s desperate predicament and hopelessness in looking for a way out. For a fleeting second, we too are there with Hutter as he frantically looks around for an escape route. Murnau, who was clearly deeply aware of his technique, discussed on various occasions the nature of what his critics at times called ‘a passion for camera angles’. For instance, in a passage quoted by Lotte Eisner in her biography of the director, he claims that

There should be no such thing as ‘an interesting camera angle’. The angle in itself has no significance, and if it does not intensify the dramatic effect of the scene it can even be harmful. When you have the opportunity of seeing the rushes of a film every day, you are sometimes very enthusiastic at the time about certain shots that seem very clever. But afterwards, when you see the film as a whole, with all those so-called interesting camera angles, you realise they damage the action: they only lower, instead of intensifying, the dramatic interest of the story, because they are merely ‘interesting’ without having any dramatic value.⁸³

What I think comes across very clearly from this quotation is how far removed Murnau was from the passion for unusual angles that characterises so strongly many Expressionist films. An impressive angle with no dramatic value has a very limited, and exclusively aesthetic, interest and the director stressed this idea yet again in 1928 when he wrote an article for the American women’s magazine McCall’s entitled ‘Films of the Future’ in which he discussed how he imagined the future of cinema. Amongst many interesting reflections on sound cinema, the advent of colour and the perfect silent drama that should dispense completely with intertitles, Murnau wrote:

In Nosferatu some of the most unnerving sequences are set up around very basic, straight-on but highly ‘dramatic’ angles – think, for example, of Orlok’s first appearance in the castle’s courtyard when the eye level shot gives us the impression of being directly scrutinised by his malevolent stare (see Figure 4) or when, thanks to the cross-cutting technique and the use of the same camera angle, Murnau establishes a direct connection between Orlok and Ellen despite the fact that the two characters are spatially separated (see for this Figures 6 and 7). What we are left with is the overwhelming impression that in Murnau’s cinema ‘feeling […] surpasses fact’ and even the most apparently innocent shot can hide and convey an exceptional degree of disturbing intensity.⁸⁵

The choice of angles in the film also has an impact on the degree of depth through which the scenes are photographed. From a general point of view, Nosferatu is a film devoid of shallow focus shots: the film’s locations are usually filmed in deep focus and our eyes are free to roam around them looking for details and hidden meanings. The real horror in Nosferatu does not lie in what is unseen or in what can only be glimpsed at through blurred vision but can be found instead in the possibility of seeing things in such a sharp and unforgiving manner. This aesthetic choice is reflected onto the narrative: Ellen is tormented by the clear image of the vampire longing for her in the abandoned warehouse that is always shot in deep focus behind her bedroom’s window. What she sees and what she senses, her acute feeling of being observed and stalked, become intertwined with her conscious research for an explanation that is provided in the film by her reading of the Book of Vampires. Observation and knowledge can often channel a sense of control over reality and we could therefore argue that it is exactly Ellen’s capacity of ‘seeing through’ or ‘seeing beyond’ what is immediately apparent that makes her, on the one hand, more vulnerable to the vampire but on the other also the sole character who is capable of finding a way to destroy him.

One of the most important cinematographic aspects in the film can be found in the key role played by the use of light and shadow that are exploited in order to create a dialectic between reality and the world of darkness inhabited by the vampire and to transform into visuals the film’s sombre Stimmung (mood). Nosferatu opens up on the everyday image of the city of Wisborg bathed in glorious sunshine: from the top of the tower where Murnau placed his camera – as he confesses in ‘Films of the Future’: ‘[…] I ask that they make me special equipment so that I can get my camera where I want it’⁸⁶ – we can observe the place going about its business, oblivious of the tragedy that is about to unfold. The extreme long shot that frames the diminutive citizens already appears to be stressing their vulnerability and fragility and our position as external observers seems to eerily anticipate somehow the famous opening sequence in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) during which we trail Jack Torrance’s yellow VW Beetle from a detached perspective that Roger Luckhurst compares to that of malevolent gods toying with human faith.⁸⁷ From this point on, though, the film initiates a descent into darkness both narratively – through the staging of the vampiric plague that relentlessly kills anyone who crosses its path – and visually, since shadows are used in a prominent manner in many of the film’s key events. Consider, for instance, Orlok’s attack on Hutter, or the shadow theatre re-enacted at the climax of Knock’s chase sequence or the scenes featuring Ellen’s somnambulism and ultimate sacrifice.

Always beautifully photographed, Murnau’s film is also enriched by the numerous intertextual references to art that are a direct result of the director’s artistic sensibility and background studies in Art History first in Berlin and then at Heidelberg University. Some of these connections have already been mentioned in the close reading section of this book and there are also many scholars who have underlined and discussed this important aspect in Nosferatu. Amongst them, Angela Dalle Vacche has identified the wide range of references present in the film as oscillating between two polar opposites: that of Romantic painting – especially the works of Caspar David Friedrich that are recalled in many outdoors shots and in the recurrent use of the Rückenfigur – and that of modern Expressionist art – identified in the allusions to the works of Franz Marc, Arnold Böcklin, Edvard Munch and others. Dalle Vacche also underlines how these two groups of references, although perfectly integrated within the film and with each other, may not be the product of the same set of intentions:

The frequent allusions to art serve a double purpose in the film. On the one hand, they achieve the practical result of reinforcing the impression of cultural prestige that was an important concern of Weimar filmmakers who strived to combine in their films their artistic sensibility with popular appeal and box-office potentiality. In years when cinema was still regarded by some – the guardians of the moral of differing religious and political orders – as immoral and corrupting, investing a film with a veneer of cultural respectability protected the work from possible attacks also improving at the same time the filmmakers’ chances to obtain funds from potential sponsors and would-be producers. On the other hand, these hints create a continuity line that goes from the sense of supernatural wonder and longing often expressed in Romantic paintings and that feeling of horror for modern life and the unfulfilled desire to revert to a more human dimension that was enhanced by the shock caused by World War One and was conveyed by those Modernist movements, such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, that are successfully conjured up in the film by means of its visual allusions.

For most of its narrative, Nosferatu’s plot unfolds in a linear fashion and we witness the events as they take place, discovering what is happening pretty much at the same time as the characters, although, as we have seen, thanks to the process of phasing we end up being able to put things together more quickly than, for instance, Hutter. The world recreated by the filmmakers is therefore a coherent universe that despite allowing for the existence of a supernatural dimension maintains and preserves the logical links between cause and effect. From a cinematographic point of view, this world is put on the screen through an editing style that follows the principles of classical continuity: the viewers are normally not expected to put together scattered pieces of action or to find their way around shots that can put out of balance their perception of space and time, for instance through the use of jump cuts or shots that contradict the 180-degree rule. The frequent employment of the iris in/out technique contributes in giving a sense of closure to the various segments of the plot that fade to black at the end of their narrative arch thus allowing for a smooth transition to another event, location, or time. There are however a few instances where Murnau shakes the linearity of his narration by experimenting with the technique of cross-cutting. Most notably, the director switches to this narrative mode in all the sequences that constitute crucial narrative turning points within the film’s action. As we have already seen then, Orlok’s attack on Hutter is intercut with Ellen’s somnambulism whilst the vampire’s voyage towards Wisborg is orchestrated as a piece of cinematic virtuosity when is cross-cut with four other narrative strands. Finally, the narrative climax of the film intertwines three storylines: Ellen waiting for Orlok in her bedroom, the vampire’s shadow approaching along the stairs, and Hutter going to fetch Dr. Bulwer for help. Murnau’s use of dramatic cross-cutting can be regarded as one of the most interesting features in the film and it fully validates the use of the word ‘symphony’ in the film’s subtitle. The director’s approach to the cross-cutting technique is also notable throughout the film because Murnau invests it with a series of complex and highly symbolic meanings that seem to anticipate the principles of Sergey Eisenstein’s ‘montage of attractions’ (1923), an editing style focusing on

If in a film like D.W. Griffith’s The Lonely Villa (1909), to name just one example, the cross-cutting is used exclusively to produce narrative tension, in Nosferatu the various events, characters and sets are interlocked through a series of sinister correspondences and analogies that could appear to be shocking or somewhat inconsequential to a distracted eye (think for example of the use of the shadow of the vampire’s hands that connects in a circular narration the attack on Hutter and Ellen’s sacrifice) but that are in fact perfectly interconnected – even though they are not characterised by the overtly political and ideological imprint that strongly distinguishes Eisenstein’s and more generally Soviet cinema in the 1920s from other kinds of narrative cinema. This all-encompassing approach to film editing, one that brings together narrative threads and deeper correspondences, has at the same time an anticipatory and intellectual quality: it brings the action forward by providing the film with a frantic pace, especially in the film’s second half that is entirely sustained by the tension caused by Hutter’s and Orlok’s parallel rush to Wisborg. At the same time, though, simultaneous actions resonate at a deeper and visionary level by filling the narrative gaps that are inevitably created between events taking place in distant spaces and times.

The visual and editorial complexities of Nosferatu presented in the last paragraph also had an impact on the numerous interpretations that have been attached to the film since its release in 1922. The sheer number of these interpretations and their great variety both in terms of focus and scope are a testimony to the ultimately elusive nature of the film and to its enduring vitality. With this paragraph, I aim to provide the readers with an overview – by no means exhaustive – of the film’s most influential and interesting interpretations. At the same time though, I will avoid going too much into detail because it is not my intention to plainly reproduce here the critics’ ideas and words that should instead be read and investigated in their entirety: consider this section as a starting point from where to begin the journey of discovery into the possible meanings hidden behind the film’s visuals.

Some critics might argue that today, more than ninety years after the film’s completion, Nosferatu may have lost some of its allure and that some of the elements constituting the film – for instance, the exaggerated acting style of some of its interpreters or the use of certain special effects such as the cranked-up motion of Orlok’s carriage – may result old fashioned or even involuntarily comical. However, I would personally argue against this reading: it may be true that the performances of Alexander Granach or Gustav von Wangenheim may be overstated even by silent cinema standards and it may also be true that the film’s special effects are rather simplistic compared to modern canons but it would be wrong to evaluate the film according to the ‘scare-factor’ we might expect or hope to get from a contemporary horror film. It would be wrong to let these details diminish the impact of the film that instead should be sought in the overall strength of its construction. The visionary imagination that can be glimpsed behind the way the story is developed onto the screen, the invention of the vampire itself as a frightening living corpse and the long series of aesthetic and narrative choices discussed in this volume still make the film genuinely chilling and animated by an undercurrent of tension that would be impossible to deny. As film critic Roger Ebert wrote:

The initial responses to the film were generally positive. As we have seen previously, the German press reacted well to Nosferatu and appreciated its gloomy atmosphere and tragic darkness and the only voice rising against the film was that of the Marxist newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung that lamented the film’s descent into visual and narrative darkness by interpreting it as a refusal to engage with reality and politics. Even when the film was presented abroad either soon after its release or in the years immediately following it, its reception was overall a positive one. The French Surrealists, for instance, adored Nosferatu and regarded it as a prime example of ‘liberating cinema’ – a cinema that could free the mind from the shackles of reality and, by entering into the deepest recesses of the human mind, create a genuine dimension of the marvellous where imagination could have free rein. As already mentioned in a previous chapter, André Breton wrote about the film on two occasions in 1926 and 1932 but also other Surrealist artists and intellectuals celebrated Nosferatu in their writings. The poet Robert Desnos, for instance, wrote about it in three of his articles, one of which appeared in the Belgian newspaper Le Soir in 1927. In his article, Desnos conjured up the film using the kind of eerie and evocative language that was typical of Surrealist writing:

Perdu dans une forêt profonde dont le sol est fait de mousse et d’aiguilles de pin et dont la lumière est filtrée par les hauts eucalyptus […] le voyageur moderne cherche le merveilleux. Il croit reconnaître le domaine promis à ses rêves par la nuit. Celle-ci tombe ténébreuse, pleine de mystère et de promesses. Un grand projecteur magique poursuit les créatures fabuleuses. Voici Nosferatu le Vampire […].

[Lost in a deep forest where the soil is made of moss and pine needles and where the light is filtered by the tall eucalypti […] the modern voyager is in search of the supernatural. He believes he recognises the land promised to his dreams by the night that falls on him, dark, full of mysteries and promises. A big magical searchlight hunts the fabulous creatures. Here comes Nosferatu the Vampire.]⁹¹

If the Surrealists were able to naturally grasp the hidden significance of Nosferatu, more mainstream French critics appreciated the film at least on the basis of its technical merits and often compared it, although not necessarily in a favourable way, to that staple of France’s popular theatre that was at the time the Théâtre du Grand Guignol, famous for its staging of horrific and gruesome plays.

Due to its problematic legal life, Nosferatu did not enjoy regular visibility in the years immediately after its completion and serious readings of the film only started after the end of the Second World War when the copy preserved at the Cinémathèque Française in Paris finally resurfaced. This finding, along with a more generalised interest in German cinema, gave the opportunity to several critics and scholars to start analysing the films produced during the Weimar Republic as a means to find an answer or an explanation to the dictatorial drift that had brought Germany and the rest of the world on the brink of annihilation. As a consequence, post-war readings of the film immediately took on a much darker tone.

The first major study to discuss the film was published by the German critic and social scientist Siegfried Kracauer in 1947. Associated with the Frankfurt School, Kracauer considered cinema as a good indicator to study major changes in society. In other words, due to their complex nature straddling the line between art and business enterprise seeking popular approval, films could encode and transmit new ideas and attitudes that could mirror, influence or shape social shifts. Kracauer’s study entitled From Caligari to Hitler. A Psychological History of the German Film is based on the central assumption, already clearly expressed in the book’s title, that the films produced during the years of the Weimar Republic encrypted and passed on a series of disturbing hidden ideas that ultimately contributed to the success of the National Socialist Party. Amongst these ideas, Kracauer analyses the desire to retreat from reality – embodied, for instance, by the artificially reconstructed sets typical of Expressionist cinema or the fatalism and mental confusion that characterised Germany in the years following the end of World War One and that resulted in a series of films constructed around narratives steeped in a fantasy world often populated by doppelgängers or highly contrasting figures that brought onto the screen the ultimate political dilemma between conservatism and revolution that stirred the country between 1918 and 1933. In Kracauer’s words:

The indecision between order and chaos faced by the German people is thus connected by Kracauer to the considerable number of films featuring a tyrannical character in their narrative. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is considered as a prime example of these films ‘specialized in the depiction of tyrants’⁹³ and is thus discussed at length in the book. Kracauer, however, also analyses other films that he considers to be characterised by the same attitude and Nosferatu – along with Vanina (Arthur Von Gerlach, 1922) and Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler – is amongst them. In his interpretation of the film, the vampire is decoded as a tyrannical figure that can be seen to stand as a metaphor for the hyperinflation that in the 1920s was quite literally sucking the blood out of the Germans’ finances. The vampire inflicts pain and suffering to whomever crosses his path and his predominance is hardly ever challenged; Hutter, Bulwer and the other characters are either incapable or strangely unwilling to contrast him. The only person who can face the challenge is the virginally pure Ellen that manages to destroy the monster only through the supernatural power of her love. The closing of Nosferatu’s narrative is thus explained by Kracauer as a clear example of that retreat from reality that characterised the Weimar Republic: Germany’s social and financial crisis cannot be resolved through political actions but only by means of a wish-fulfilment fantasy, a miracle that will make society’s evils disappear magically in a cloud of white smoke – or by extension in a sea of swastika flags. This interpretation of Nosferatu contributed to create the idea that the film could be read as an endorsement of the anti-Semitic attacks that right wing political groups, especially the National Socialists, conducted in the years of the Weimar Republic against the Jewish community that was considered to be responsible for Germany’s defeat in the war through the spreading of the so-called ‘stab in the back’ myth: the idea that Jews, along with socialists and communists, had not supported the war effort but had instead betrayed their own country by selling Germany to its enemies. According to this interpretation then, Count Orlok should be seen as the personification of the Jew taking advantage of Germany’s social, financial and political disarray whilst Ellen could be read as the embodiment of the resilience and purity of real German values that are finally triumphant even through sacrifice. This reading of the film also echoes a rather common interpretation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that sees the vampire as the symbol of a wave of reverse colonisation that threatened from the East the values of Victorian England. Furthermore, some of the physical features of Count Orlok could be seen as a give-away to further endorse this interpretation.

The hooked nose, the spidery limbs, the sunken eyes are all features that we can identify in the film’s depiction of the vampire, however, other elements, the really prominent ones such as the long beard and the hunchback, are missing from the character’s mise-en-scène. In any case, the presence of these visual traits is hardly enough to justify such a radical interpretation of the film that also seems to be contradicted by other, more biographical, elements. We know for example that Murnau was not a political radical and that he had long-standing and friendly relationships with many Jewish individuals: his lover Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele came from a prominent Jewish family that practically adopted Murnau after Hans’ death in the trenches and also Alexander Granach, who had known Murnau since the days spent together in Max Reinhardt’s Deutsches Theater, confirmed in his autobiography the director’s lack of anti-Semitic sentiments:

Finally, when the film came out no one underlined, praised or criticised a possible anti-Semitic interpretation of the film that even appears to demonstrate, especially towards the end of its narrative arch, a certain degree of sympathy for the vampire’s pitiful isolation.

Although still fascinating and very influential, Kracauer’s study of Weimar cinema has at times been criticised for the tightness of its scope and for its forced reading of the films discussed that are analysed in a sort of ex-post fashion: already having clear and well-established arguments in mind, Kracauer looks for confirmation in the films by explaining them in his own terms that do not leave much space to any real discussion of the features’ cinematographic specificities. Of course, reading a film from a sociopolitical perspective is a perfectly viable option but some interpretations stemming from Kracauer’s work appear to have further narrowed down the scope of their reading thus reducing the film’s complexity to simple one-dimensional schemes that do not take into serious account the layered mechanics behind film production and social shifts. The most successful sociological interpretations of Nosferatu are therefore those that have managed to apply to the film a framework that put into relation cinema and society while at the same time taking into consideration the specific aspects of filmmaking, both in terms of aesthetics and production process. From this point of view, it is particularly interesting to take into consideration Anton Kaes’ reading of Weimar cinema as an example of shell-shocked cinema that manages to translate onto the screen that sense of trauma and disruption suffered by Germany after the traumatic events of World War One.⁹⁶ Through his interpretation Kaes sees Nosferatu as a metaphor of the lost generation of 1914 and turns it into a radical piece of criticism directed against German conservative and military elites.

[…] the film takes recourse to vampire lore to narrate the war experience: for Murnau, the vampire’s need for blood and his ruthless victimization of innocence connotes the nature of war. In Nosferatu, Hutter’s story parallels that of a soldier from the lost generation, while his equally traumatized wife, Ellen, embodies the home front living in fear and gripped by a death wish. […] Count Orlok […] (whose name is evocative of oorlog, the Dutch word for ‘war’), invades the town and brings mass death with him. The killing does not stop until a young woman sacrifices herself for the community. A lost generation indeed.⁹⁷

There are also several other studies (Wood, 1970, or Sklar, 1993) that have analysed Nosferatu by interweaving the film’s cinematic characters either into a more or less ample social metaphor or along the lines of a psychological or psychoanalytical reading: the film, and especially the central character of Ellen and the ambiguous love triangle between her, Hutter and Orlok have been scrutinised from a feminist perspective or discussed in terms of a complex analysis of human desires. Thus in some interpretations, such as that by Jo Leslie Collier,⁹⁸ Ellen becomes the embodiment of the Romantic ideal of the ‘asexual madonna’, a woman regarded as a Higher Being, wholly unattainable by man on a physical level but thoroughly desirable on an ideological one. Burdened with the heavy inheritance of Romanticism’s idealised woman, Murnau decides to challenge it by breaking its mould and creating a female heroine who is ready to resist and go against the role traditionally assigned to her, for instance by consciously breaking Hutter’s prohibition to read the Book of Vampires:

Collier also connects Murnau’s construction of her rebellious female characters – not exclusively of Nosferatu’s Ellen – to the director’s covert criticism of German society’s suppression of the homosexual subject who was forced to live in a repressive society that still applied Paragraph 175, a law provision created in 1871 that considered sexual acts between males as a crime and appealed to ‘the people’s consciousness of right and wrong [to condemn] these activities not merely as vice but also as a crime’,¹⁰⁰ and that by 1924 had brought to prison about seven hundred people.¹⁰¹ Other scholars, such as Stan Brakhage, have favoured an analytical approach that attempted to find in the film clues about Murnau’s sexual orientation and it would be thus possible to read the figure of the vampire and his interaction with Hutter as a codified and hidden representation of homosexual subjects and relations. Besides, as underlined by Harry M. Benshoff: ‘[…] homosexuals, like vampires, have rarely cast a reflection in the social looking-glass of popular culture’ and horror cinema – by its very nature already centred on a perversion of normality – can easily be read in queer terms that identify the monster living at the margins of society with the rejected homosexual subject.¹⁰²

Along with Kracauer’s book, the other influential post-war study of Weimar cinema was certainly The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in German Cinema published in 1969 by Lotte Eisner who also published important biographies of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang. Eisner worked as Chief Archivist at the Cinémathèque Française from 1945 to 1975 thus having privileged access to the films preserved there under the directorship of Henri Langlois. Lotte Eisner’s approach was essentially stylistic and was profoundly shaped by her idea of ‘influence’ that saw Weimar cinema and Expressionism as a product of the artistic, literary and theatrical seeds planted in German culture from the Romantic movement of the 1820s onwards. Throughout her study then, she proceeds to construct a dense web of intertextual references that have the ultimate aim to prove the existence of a sense of continuity in Germany’s aesthetic sensibility. Eisner’s book is certainly a fascinating study and to this day, it can still be considered an important source book for the sensitivity she demonstrates in handling the mutations undergone by Romanticism once it entered the realm of the moving pictures.¹⁰³ If Kracauer avoided discussing the visual complexities of the films under analysis, Eisner’s approach is completely opposite: her book, also enriched by a wealth of fascinating stills and pictures, examines the lighting, texture and composition of the films in great depth: Nosferatu is particularly praised for the majestic beauty of its shots which are described with lyrical terms that testify to Eisner’s intense admiration for Murnau, who is unmistakably identified as a genius. Rather interestingly, Eisner also proceeds in establishing a tentative connection between Murnau’s evocative and painterly cinematography and the Scandinavian cinema of the 1910s that presented in the works of directors such as Viktor Sjöström, Benjamin Christensen, Mauritz Stiller and others a profound interest for outdoor realism and the poetic treatment of nature that can be also found in Nosferatu and in other films by the German director: