The Film

NOSFERATU
Silent film, Germany 1921
Digitally restored complete version 2006
With new piano soundtrack by Markus Horn
Running time: approx. 94 minutes

Shot in 1921 and released in 1922, Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, "vampire" became "Nosferatu" and "Count Dracula" became "Count Orlok"). Stoker's heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ruling ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However, one print of Nosferatu survived, and the film came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.

The etymological origins of the word "Nosferatu" are difficult to determine. Source for the term seems to be 19th-century British author and speaker Emily Gerard, who used it in her travelogue "The Land Beyond the Forest". She merely refers to it as the Romanian word for vampire.

The Story

In the town of Wisborg, estate agent Mr. Knock is pleased to receive a commission from Count Orlok to find a house for him. He dispatches his young assistant, Hutter, to Orlok's castle in the far off Carpathians. He tells Hutter to get him to buy the vacant house just opposite Hutter's own. Hutter arrives at his destination safely and the Count is all too eager to buy the proposed property especially after he sees a photo of Hutter's pretty young wife Ellen. Hutter soon realizes the evil he's dealing with and is locked away while Orlock makes his way by ship to Wisborg.

As Orloc travels to Wisbourg, plague descends in his wake and the people of Wisbourg begin to sense the coming of evil. Hutter eventually escapes Orloc's castle determined to return home as quickly as possible but exhausted and ill, finds himself in hospital. Hutter nonetheless arrives home the same day as Orlok and the townsfolk begin to panic over the increasing number of deaths....

Deviations from the novel

The story of Nosferatu is similar to that of Dracula and retains the core characters—Jonathan and Mina Harker, the Count, etc.—but omits many of the secondary players, such as Arthur and Quincey, and changes all of the characters' names (although in some recent releases of this film, which is now in the public domain in the United States but not in most European countries, the written dialogue screens have been changed to use the Dracula versions of the names). The setting has been transferred from Britain in the 1890s to Germany in 1838.

In contrast to Dracula, Orlok does not create other vampires, but kills his victims, causing the townfolk to blame the plague, which ravages the city. Also, Orlok must sleep by day, as sunlight would kill him, while the original Dracula is only weakened by sunlight. The ending is also substantially different from that of Dracula. The count is ultimately destroyed at sunrise when the "Mina" character sacrifices herself to him. The town called "Wisborg" in the film is in fact a mix of Wismar and Lübeck.

Production

In Lübeck, the abandoned Salzspeicher served as Nosferatu's new Wisborg house, the one of the churchyard from Aegidienkirche served as Hutters and down the Depenau coffin bearers bore coffins. Many walks of Lübeck took place in the hunt of Knock who ordered Hutter in the Yard of Füchting to meet the earl.

Further exterior shots followed in Lauenburg, Rostock and on Sylt. The exteriors of the film set in Transylvania were actually shot on location in northern Slovakia, including the High Tatras, Vrátna Valley, Orava Castle, the Váh River, and Starhrad. The team filmed interior shots at the JOFA studio in Berlin's Johannisthal locality and further exteriors in the Tegel Forest.

For cost reasons, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner only had one camera available, and therefore there was only one original negative. Director F.W. Murnau prepared carefully; there were sketches that were to correspond exactly to each filmed scene, and he used a metronome to control the pace of the acting. He followed Galeen's screenplay carefully, following handwritten instructions on camera positioning, lighting, and related matters.

Nevertheless Murnau completely rewrote 12 pages of the script, as Galeen's text was missing from the director's working script. This concerned the last scene of the film, in which Ellen sacrifices herself and the vampire dies in the first rays of the Sun.

Cast

Max Schreck as Count Orlok
Gustav von Wangenheim as Thomas Hutter
Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter
Alexander Granach as Knock
Ruth Landshoff as Annie
Wolfgang Heinz as First Mate of The Empusa
Georg H. Schnell as Harding
John Gottowt as Professor Bulwer

Gustav Botz as Professor Sievers
Max Nemetz as The Captain of The Empusa
Heinrich Witte as guard in asylum
Guido Herzfeld as innkeeper
Karl Etlinger as student with Bulwer
Hardy von Francois as hospital doctor
Fanny Schreck as hospital nurse

Max Schreck

Max Schreck Max Schreck was born in Berlin-Friedenau, on 6 September 1879. Six years later his father bought a house in the independent rural community of Friedenau, then part of the district of Teltow. His father saw Schreck's ever-growing enthusiasm for theater and did not approve. His mother provided the boy with money, which he used to secretly take acting lessons. Only after the death of his father did he attend drama school.

After graduating, he travelled briefly across the country with Demetrius Schrutz. Schreck had engagements in Mulhouse, Meseritz, Speyer, Rudolstadt, Erfurt and Weissenfels, and his first extended stay at the Gera Theater. Greater engagements followed, especially in Frankfurt am Main. From there he went to Berlin for Max Reinhardt and the Munich Chamber Games for Otto Falkenberg. From then on he began to work in films. Schreck received his training at the the State Theatre of Berlin which he completed in 1902. He made his stage début in Meseritz and Speyer, and then toured Germany for two years appearing at theatres in Zittau, Erfurt, Bremen, Lucerne, Gera, and Frankfurt am Main. Schreck then joined Max Reinhardt's company of performers in Berlin. Many of Reinhardt's troupe made a significant contribution to cinema.

For three years between 1919 and 1922, Schreck appeared at the Munich Kammerspiele, including a role in the expressionist production of Bertolt Brecht's début, "Drums in the Night" in which he played the "freakshow landlord" Glubb. During this time he also worked on his first film "Der Richter von Zalamea", adapted from a six act play, for Decla Bioscop. In 1921, he was hired by Prana Film for its first and only production, "Nosferatu". The company declared itself bankrupt after the film was released to avoid paying copyright infringement costs to Dracula author Bram Stoker's widow, Florence Stoker. Schreck portrayed Count Orlok, a character analogous to Count Dracula.

In 1923, while still in Munich, Schreck appeared in a 16-minute (one-reeler) slapstick, "surreal comedy" written by Bertolt Brecht with cabaret and stage actors Karl Valentin, Liesl Karlstadt, Erwin Faber, and Blandine Ebinger, entitled "Mysteries of a Barbershop", directed by Erich Engel. Also in 1923, Schreck appeared as a blind man in the film "The Street". Schreck's second collaboration with Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau was the 1924 comedy "The Grand Duke's Finances". Even Murnau did not hesitate to declare his contempt for the picture. In 1926, Schreck returned to the Kammerspiele in Munich and continued to act in films surviving the advent of sound until his death in 1936 of heart failure. On 19 February 1936, Schreck had just played The Grand Inquisitor in the play "Don Carlos", standing in for Will Dohm. That evening he felt unwell and the doctor sent him to the hospital where he died early the next morning of a heart attack. His obituary especially praised his role as The Miser in Molière's comedy play. He was buried on the fourteenth of March, 1936 at Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Stahnsdorf in Brandenburg.



Gustav von Wangenheim

Gustav von Wangenheimwas born 1895. Both of his parents were actors; his father appeared in over 200 films between 1910 and 1960. Wangenheim made his screen debut in 1914 in "Passionels Tagebuch" and went on to star in many silent features. Among his works were Fritz Lang's early science fiction film "Frau im Mond", where he portrayed Windegger, and Karl Heinz Martin's "Das Haus zum Mond". In 1921, Wangenheim was cast in what would prove to be his most enduring role, that of Thomas Hutter in F. W. Murnau's "Nosferatu".

A member of the Communist Party of Germany since 1921, Wangenheim founded the Communist theatre company “Die Truppe '31” in 1931. “Die Truppe '31” produced three plays, authored and directed by Wangenheim, before it was shut down by order of the Nazi regime in 1933.

Wangenheim fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and found refuge in the Soviet Union. While living in exile at Moscow's Hotel Lux, he continued writing and producing movies, such as Der Kampf (1936), an anti-Nazi protest film, and was the head of the German language Cabaret "Kolonne Links". In 1936, during the Stalinist purges, he denounced his colleagues Carola Neher and Anatol Becker as Trotskyites. Becker was executed and Neher died in the Gulag system after five years in prison. Von Wangenheim's son later stated the accusations that his father denounced Neher and Becker were one-sided and inaccurate. Gustav von Wangenheim's son claimed his father, after being arrested by the NKWD and a lengthy interrogation, signed a statement that implicated Carola Neher as being "anti soviet" but had in fact explicitly refuted the accusation that Neher and her husband Anatol Becker had planned to murder Stalin.

Wangenheim was a founding member of the National Committee for a Free Germany. After World War II, he returned to East Germany, where he worked for the DEFA as screenwriter and director. He was married to Inge von Wangenheim, née Franke, from 1931 to 1954, when the marriage was annulled. The couple had one son, Friedel von Wangenheim, and 2 daughters, the twins Elisabeth and Eleonora von Wangenheim. Wangenheim died in East Berlin on August 5, 1975 and is buried in the Friedrichsfelde cemetery in Berlin.



Greta Schröder

Greta Schröder(1892 – 1967) was a German actress. She is best known for the role of Thomas Hutter's wife and victim to Count Orlok in the 1922 silent film "Nosferatu". In the fictionalized 2000 film, "Shadow of the Vampire", she is portrayed as having been a famous actress during the making of "Nosferatu", but in fact she was little known.

The bulk of her career was during the 1920s, and she continued to act well into the 1950s, but by the 1930s her roles had diminished to only occasional appearances. Following a failed marriage with struggling actor Ernst Matray, she was married to actor and film director Paul Wegener until his death in 1948.



Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau(1888 – 1931) was one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era, and a prominent figure in the expressionist movement in German cinema during the 1920s. Murnau was greatly influenced by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen plays he had seen at the age of 12, and became a friend of director Max Reinhardt.

Arguably Murnau's best known work is his 1922 film "Nosferatu", an adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula". The film was considered a masterpiece of Expressionist artwork. He was also known for his work with the 1924 film "The Last Laugh" and his interpretation of Goethe's "Faust" (1926). He later immigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made three films, including "Sunrise" (1927), "4 Devils" (1928) and "City Girl" (1930). Of the 21 films Murnau directed, 8 have been completely lost, leaving 12 surviving in their entirety.

During World War I he served as a company commander at the eastern front and was in the German air force, surviving several crashes without any severe injuries. After World War I ended, Murnau returned to Germany where he soon established his own film studio with actor Conrad Veidt. His first feature-length film, "The Boy in Blue", a drama inspired by the famous Thomas Gainsborough painting, was released in 1919. He explored the popular theme of dual personalities, much like Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, in 1920's "Der Janus-Kopf" starring Veidt and Bela Lugosi.

Murnau's most famous film is "Nosferatu", a 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Dracula" for which Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. Murnau lost the lawsuit and all prints of the film were ordered to be destroyed, but bootleg prints survived. The vampire, played by German stage actor Max Schreck, resembled a rat which was known to carry the plague. The origins of the word are from Stoker's novel, where it is used by the Romanian townsfolk to refer to Count Dracula and presumably, other undead. Nearly as important as Nosferatu in Murnau's filmography was "The Last Laugh" (1924), written by Carl Mayer and starring Emil Jannings. The film introduced the subjective point of view camera, where the camera "sees" from the eyes of a character and uses visual style to convey a character's psychological state. It also anticipated the cinéma vérité movement in its subject matter. The film also used the "unchained camera technique", a mix of tracking shots, pans, tilts, and dolly moves. Murnau's last German film was the big budget "Faust" (1926) with Gösta Ekman as the title character, Emil Jannings as Mephisto and Camilla Horn as Gretchen. Murnau's film draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as on Goethe's classic version. The film is well known for a sequence in which the giant, winged figure of Mephisto hovers over a town sowing the seeds of plague.

Murnau immigrated to Hollywood in 1926, where he joined the Fox Studio and made "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans" (1927), a movie often cited by film scholars as one of the greatest films of all time. Released in the Fox Movietone sound-on-film system (music and sound effects only), Sunrise was not a financial success, but received several Oscars at the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1929. In winning the Academy Award for Unique and Artistic Production it shared what is now the Best Picture award with the movie Wings. Murnau's next two films, the (now lost) "4 Devils" (1928) and "City Girl" (1930), were modified to adapt to the new era of sound film and were not well received. Their poor receptions disillusioned Murnau, and he quit Fox to journey for a while in the South Pacific.

Together with documentary film pioneer Robert J. Flaherty, Murnau travelled to Bora Bora to make the film Tabu in 1931. Flaherty left after artistic disputes with Murnau who had to finish the movie on his own. The movie was censored in the United States for images of bare-breasted Polynesian women. The film was originally shot by cinematographer Floyd Crosby as half-talkie, half-silent, before being fully restored as a silent film — Murnau's preferred medium.

A week prior to the opening of the film "Tabu", Murnau drove up the coast from Los Angeles, California in a hired Rolls Royce. The young driver, a 14-year-old Philippine servant, crashed the car against an electric pole. Murnau hit his head and died in a hospital the next day, in nearby Santa Barbara, before the premiere of his last film. Murnau was entombed in Southwest Cemetery in Stahnsdorf near Berlin. Only 11 people attended the funeral. Among them were Robert J. Flaherty, Emil Jannings, Greta Garbo and Fritz Lang, who delivered the eulogy. Garbo also commissioned a death mask of Murnau, which she kept on her desk during her years in Hollywood.