Nosferatu or at least some of the film’s most iconic images such as the nightmarish vision of the pale and lanky vampire popping up from a coffin or his long, spidery hands crawling along the walls of Ellen’s home are undoubtedly embedded in popular culture and are thus often quoted.
For instance, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) Gary Oldman’s shadow seems to be endorsed with a materiality and a life of its own that is reminiscent of the portentous shadow projected by Count Orlok in Nosferatu. Murnau’s film has also been parodied: the BBC sketch programme The Fast Show (1994–1997), for instance, featured the recurrent character of a vampire that looked very similar to Orlok who creeps up to a sleeping woman not to drink her blood but to give her betting advice. The film has also been reprised and quoted innumerable times; think for example of the bluish and repulsive Mr Barlow, the terrifying vampire featured in the television adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979).
Its impact is not simply limited to cinema or television: there are comics books featuring Nosferatu as their villain or main character but also operas and rock songs that more or less directly refer to the character. Finding all the references and homages can be a fascinating and amusing journey into the depths of art, pop culture and fan fiction. It is not, however, within the scope of this book to provide the reader with an exhaustive list of all the Count’s reincarnations. Nevertheless, all these quotations, parodies and allusions, although differing from the point of view of quality and artistry, are important in their own right because they act as an everlasting testimony to the vitality and ultimate immortality of the imaginary world that has accompanied the film since its release in 1922. In this final chapter of my study I intend to outline briefly two cinematic reprisals and reworkings of the original film: Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht released in 1979 that can be considered as a legitimate remake of Murnau’s film, and the biopic/making of/vampire flick Shadow of the Vampire directed by E. Elias Merhige in 2000.
Werner Herzog directed his vampire film in 1979. Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht, distributed in English-speaking countries as Nosferatu the Vampyre, cannot be regarded simply as another adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula but it is first and foremost a narratively complex and visually thought-provoking remake and revision of Murnau’s original film. By the end of the 1970s the original novel, published in 1897, had entered into the public domain and Herzog, who also wrote the film’s script, re-adapted the book by implementing some changes that connected it more directly and unequivocally to its literary roots. The repossession of the literary origins of Dracula, however, was not necessarily extended to all the narrative details of Herzog’s film that is characterised in fact by an intriguing mixture of loyalties and departures both from its literary and cinematic sources.
When we compare Phantom der Nacht with the film made in 1922, the most evident of the changes implemented by the director is the reverting of the characters’ names – changed in Murnau’s film because of the copyright issues already outlined in this study – to their original versions. In Herzog’s reworking therefore there is Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) haunting the lives of Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) and his wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) who replaces Mina as the female heroine in the story. We also have the characters of Renfield (Roland Topor), who embodies again the functions of Harker’s employer and Dracula’s first slave, and that of Dr Van Helsing who, although by all means not restored in its literary centrality, will be the one to make sure that the vampire is dead at the end of the film by putting a stake through his heart after Lucy’s ultimate sacrifice. Herzog also restored a couple of Dracula’s iconic speeches in his version of the film, such as the mention of the ‘children of the night’ or the one about the nobility of Dracula’s race. More generally, his vampire is characterised by a willingness to share his existential anguish with the viewer who slowly comes to realise that Dracula, unlike Orlok who is driven exclusively by his physical need for blood, has retained a certain degree of inner life and is suffering because of his undead condition that has forced him to endure century upon century of Nichtigkeiten, the emptiness and meaninglessness of human life protracted well beyond its natural limits. This sense of emotional unrest brings Herzog’s creation somewhat closer to its literary ancestor who speculates at times in the novel about the glorious experience of real death as integral to what constitutes humanity. In the novel’s second chapter, for instance, Dracula declares:
I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.
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Despite these proximities with the original novel, the core of Herzog’s interests remains firmly in Murnau’s work. In terms of narrative loyalty to its cinematic antecedent, Herzog’s film, just like Murnau’s, is set in Wismar in the early part of the nineteenth century and revolves around a plot that roughly follows that of the 1922 film rather than the novel’s. The overall structure of the original Nosferatu is preserved, for example, through the employment of cross-cutting to build up narrative tension and the psychic links that connect the three main characters in the film, which are also reinforced through visual clues such as the contiguous shots that frame Dracula and Lucy advancing in Wismar’s central square both enveloped in long, flowing black cloaks.
Figure 13 Dracula taking possession of Wismar
There are, however, some significant details that have been changed by Herzog and that touch both the construction of the characters’ psychology, such as Dracula’s existential weariness or Lucy’s sexual attractiveness, and the actual events featured in the film. [Fig.
Figure 14 Lucy following Dracula’s steps
From this point of view, it is essential to mention at least the radical departure from Murnau’s work in the film’s ending when we ultimately discover that Lucy’s sacrifice has been pointless and that Jonathan has been turned into a vampire and is now ready to ride off to spread un-death and plague into the world. This dismal ending has often been interpreted as a serious variant of the final sequence in Roman Polanski’s
Dance of the Vampires (1967) where the two main characters, Sarah (Sharon Tate) and Alfred (Roman Polanski) are turned into vampires at the end of the film.
108 As underlined by S.S. Prawer in his insightful study of Herzog’s film:
[In] Murnau’s world […] redemption comes through the love and self-sacrifice of a woman ‘pure of heart’. Herzog’s [world] is more akin to that of Don Siegel’s
Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), whose ending is recalled when Lucy tries frantically to tell her fellow citizens that she knows where the evil comes from and how it can be fought, only to be told to go home, for there was nothing to be done. […] The citizens […] in Herzog’s film push Lucy aside as they go on ceremoniously carrying the coffins of those whom they are shortly bound to join.
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By means of an uncomfortably prolonged closing shot the spectator of Herzog’s film is left with a sense of impending darkness and doom that cannot be retraced in Murnau’s film that, although ending on a note of sadness because of Ellen’s death, also presents a restoration of the natural order through the dispatching of the vampire and ‘the victorious radiance of the living sun’.
If Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht can be regarded as a tribute and remake of Murnau’s original, E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) is a fascinating hybrid that combines biographical cinema and backstage drama with the tropes of traditional vampire film while at the same time commenting and analysing ideas such as that of the vampire as a cinematographic construct, and that of cinema’s inner nature as being equivalent to some kind of parasitic vampire. Before moving on to a necessarily contained analysis of the film’s main points, I would like to add that Shadow of the Vampire has a special place in my list of favourite vampire films and that I was very fortunate to have the chance, while working on this book, to interview Elias Merhige who has provided me with some insightful ideas about his work. The following paragraphs will draw some material from our interview that can be read in its entirety as an appendix to this study.
The story of Shadow of the Vampire revolves around a very simple plot twist based on an urban legend that has long accompanied Murnau’s film: namely the rumour that Max Schreck, the actor interpreting Orlok, was in fact a real vampire. This far-fetched yet captivating idea – also reinforced by the fact that the word ‘Schreck’ can be translated from German with ‘terror’ or ‘fright’, thus sounding like the perfect nom de plume for an actor playing a demonic vampire in a horror film – was first launched by the Greek filmmaker and writer Ado Kyrou who, in his book Le Surréalisme au cinéma (1953), writes:
In the role of the vampire the credits name the music-hall actor Max Schreck, but it is well-known that this attribution is a deliberate cover-up…No-one has ever been willing to reveal the identity of the extraordinary actor whom brilliant make up renders absolutely unrecognisable. There have been several guesses, some even mentioning Murnau…Who hides behind the character of
Nosferatu? Maybe
Nosferatu himself?
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It is moving from this premise that Steven Katz wrote the first draft of Shadow of the Vampire. The transformation of the initial idea into a finished film caused some artistic friction between Katz and Merhige who had rather diverging opinions on how the movie should be made and what should be its main narrative concern. In Katz’s words:
The director [and I] used to fight like hell when I’d say it was a vampire movie, and he’d say, ‘No, it’s not.’ So when they started shooting it, he and producer Nic Cage, with a lot of influence from John Malkovich […] shifted the thrust of the movie. I had originally wanted it to be just a really great vampire flick […] But they stripped away a lot of the layers of horror I had and made […] an art film about the nature of creativity and the relationship between the director and his film, which I had in the script, but as subtext only.
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Despite Katz’s bitterness in recalling his experience, it is indeed the removal of the most obvious layers of traditional vampire horror – the ‘glowing blue eyes’ mentioned by Merhige in his interview – that contribute decisively to the complex and clever nature of Shadow of the Vampire that instead of playing along with the genre’s topoi, tries to overturn them by focusing on the interplay between reality and fiction whose confines are blurred from the very beginning of the film.
Shadow of the Vampire opens with a series of contextualising intertitles – ‘Jofa Film Studios. Berlin 1921’, etc. – that ground the film in the reality of actual places and events. The intertitles are then followed by the contiguous extreme close-ups of what we will discover to be Murnau’s eye and his camera lens: the quasi-superimposition between human and mechanical eye will be central for the development of Murnau’s obsessive character in the film - ‘If it’s not in frame, it doesn’t exist’, he will declare towards the climax of the story - and appears here to be almost suggestive of Dziga Vertov’s concept of the Kino-Glaz (Film-Eye) and reminiscent of its role in perfecting the inadequacy of reality as seen through the flawed human eye:
I am kino-eye, I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, show you the world as only I can see it. Now and forever, I free myself from human immobility […].
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The focus on realism purported at the beginning of the film is apparently confirmed by its second sequence that presents the viewer with the recreation of the cinematographic set where Murnau (John Malkovich) and his crew are filming the opening sequence of Nosferatu. The experience of early filmmaking is re-established in the movie with great precision: Murnau and his assistants are all wearing long white lab coats and dark goggles, the transition between sequences is frequently signalled by iris shots and the whirring of the hand-cranked cameras can often be heard in the background of the film.
Figure 15 Creating enduring cinematographic memories
However, the simple narrative line of the ‘film about the making-of of another film’, visually presented also through the constant switching between B&W and colour photography, is complicated by the use of metafictional devices to remind us that what we are seeing on the screen is the fictional recreation about the realisation of another piece of fictional narrative. This metanarrative approach is further complicated by the twist on the character of the vampire played by Willem Dafoe:
As soon as we find ourselves caught up in the circle of contemplating a ‘real’ actor (Dafoe) playing a vampire (Count Orlok) playing a human (Max Schreck) playing a vampire (Count Orlok), we’ve already been interpolated into
Shadow of the Vampire’s playful structure of meaning - its interrogation of the theatricality of the vampire genre and the cinema’s role in producing the vampires it endlessly pursues and destroys.
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Already in its first few minutes Shadow of the Vampire succeeds in presenting to the viewer many of its central issues: Murnau comes across as a despotic personality ready to manipulate his crew and actors into doing what he wants. For instance, he convinces Greta Schroeder (Catherine McCormack), who has reservations about cinematic acting and would much rather act in a theatrical play, that her role in the film will make her great as an actress and her absence from Berlin will be nothing more than a ‘sacrifice for [her] art’, a line that creepily foreshadows the tragic destiny that will await her at the end of the film. Murnau’s obsession for realistic performance, and his dislike for the ‘artifice’ of in-studio reconstructions, is in line with his belief that cinema can act as a bridge between life and death, memory and oblivion, light and darkness. During a speech superimposed on the images of the train, aptly named Charon, that is transporting the film’s crew on location, Murnau proclaims the manifesto of his new cinematographic art:
Our art […] will have a context as certain as the grave. We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory. But our memory will neither blur nor fade.
The reference to filmmakers as scientists alludes to the perception of cinema as being halfway between science and entertainment that was still common in the early 1920s. On the other hand, though, it could be interpreted as a subtle nod to the long series of mad scientists that have animated the cinematographic screens in their attempts to achieve immortality or restore life.
Most importantly though, Murnau’s obsession for ‘undead’ memories is at the basis of the fiendish pact that he strikes with Orlok who will pretend to be a method actor – ‘one of the Russian school’ – in exchange for the life of Greta Schroeder. The vampire acts in the film as a double of Murnau: in their own, peculiar way, Murnau through the camera and Orlok by means of his vampiric fangs, they both drain the life of those surrounding them in order to achieve immortality. Across the narrative arc of the film, though, their roles get reversed and we end up seeing Orlok as being more ‘human’ and sympathetic than Murnau who, in his Promethean effort to transcend the limits of mortality, unblinkingly sacrifices the lives of many of his crewmembers. In their exchanges Orlok taunts Murnau by underlining the basic similarity of their nature.
Orlok, however, appears to endure his undead condition with increasing weariness. In a way similar to Klaus Kinski’s vampire in Werner Herzog’s film, the vampire in Merhige’s movie resents his immortality and his eternal condemnation to remain an old man and expresses his existential frustration in one of the most intense sequences in the film by reciting a short extract from a poem by Alfred Tennyson that retells the mythological story of Tithonus, the lover of Eos who manages to obtain from Zeus immortality for her companion but forgets to ask for his eternal youth:
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes.
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At the end of the film, Orlok will be finally released from his undead prison and will disappear from the screen consumed by light, the only factor that can destroy both the vampire’s and the cinematic image’s illusion of immortality.
Figure 16 The vampire and the cinematic image consumed by light
Over the course of the months I have spent working on this book, Nosferatu has been very active. New publications, cinematographic retrospectives, and exhibitions have kept alive the Gothic imagination that accompanies the film and have injected new energy into the many questions it still raises on the inner nature of cinema and the enduring fascination for what may be hiding in the darkest recesses of the movie screen. As pointed out by Thomas Elsaesser:
[…] the excess energy of the undead is now readable as belonging to the cinema and its eccentric patterns of propagation and proliferation across the culture at large. Not only in the way films have deposited their coffins in galleries, museums, schools and libraries, but also thanks to the Renfields - cinephiles turned necrophiles - at home in archives, lovingly restoring perished prints and reviving the ‘originals’ at Sunday matiness or special retrospectives.
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Nosferatu is still with us.
