DIRECTOR: FW Murnau
PRODUCERS: Albin Grau, Enrico Dieckmann
PRODUCTION CO: Prana-Film
SCREENPLAY: Henrik Galeen, based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker
PHOTOGRAPHY: Fritz Arno Wagner
PRODUCTION & COSTUME DESIGN: Albin Grau
WITH: Max Schreck (Count Orlok), Alexander Granach (Knock), Gustav von Wangenheim (Hutter), Greta Schröder (Ellen, Hutter's wife), Georg Heinrich Schnell (Harding), Ruth Lansdorff (Ruth)

REVIEW

“In Nosferatu, FW Murnau departed from the artifice associated with German Expressionism to invest the natural world with an unnerving incandescence that surpasses any studio-created image. Filming on location, he managed to draw from the jagged profiles of the Carpathian Mountains, and the narrow streets and distorted architecture of a Baltic village, the most horrific sense of all: that of a real world. As the vampire, Max Schreck embodies for all time a figure of living death, existence and nonexistence, a walking ruin leaving devastation in its wake. Linking cinema to gothic literary tradition and to the pictorial love of ruins and decay in nineteenth-century romantic painting, Nosferatu ‘is in many ways the archetype of the horror genre in its extremely sophisticated awareness of the significance of the ‘monster.’ Here, the vampire is clearly the embodiment of the forces that civilization represses, and the film can be read as an account of the appalling cost of that repression’ (Robin Wood).” 

–  Pacific Film Archive

Rooted in turn-of-the-century poetry and visual arts, which foregrounded the artist’s emotions and ideas over realism, German expressionist cinema flourished after the first world war. It was an appropriate fit for the angst-ridden Weimar era, its tilting sets, pooling shadows and haunted human faces giving expression to post-war trauma and economic devastation. Nightmarish plots abounded in films such as Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), FW Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis(1927), all of which influenced generations of directors – you can see the hallmarks in horror films such as Psycho and The Babadook and the noirish sci-fi of Blade Runner and Dark City.

_ Guardian

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