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Willem Dafoe as actor Max Schreck playing Nosferatu.
A RICH VEIN
For all horror fans - and most cinéphiles - where you first saw Nosferatu is kind of like where you were when you heard the news about Princess Di’s car crash or, if you’re a little older, John F Kennedy’s assassination. Not quite so historic, maybe, but something that sticks fast in the memory all the same.
Murnau’s silent vampire movie, Nosferatu, is an experience Nick Roddick has
never forgotten. So he is happy to get his teeth into Shadow of the Vampire, a funny, scary new film with some startling ideas about how
Nosferatu came to be made.
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Where I was when I saw the film was (of all places) Brussels, at what used to be called the Musée du Cinéma - a small, friendly screening theatre nestling half-way down some steps. By the time I saw it, I knew enough about film history to know that Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror), to give it its full title, was definitely fiction - part of the German expressionist cinema of the twenties, and that its director was Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau.
But I still had the uncanny feeling that the film, with its flickering images, its faces drifting in and out of shadow, and above all its completely unique, dream-like quality, was somehow a documentary. Watching Murnau’s Nosferatu is like seeing the only true image of a vampire ever captured on film.
It wasn’t, of course: the part of Nosferatu was played by an actor who rejoiced in the name of Max Schreck (literally, ‘Max Fright’). He appeared in other films, few of which have survived, and he was dismissed by Murnau’s biographer as “an actor of no distinction”. Since Schreck’s performance in Nosferatu is, in every sense of the word, unforgettable, this seems a little harsh.
Murnau, of course, made other films, including at least two further masterpieces: Der letzte Mann (The Last Laugh), which was shot at the Babelsberg studios outside Berlin; and Sunrise, which he made in Hollywood and which won Janet Gaynor an Oscar at the first-ever Academy Awards ceremony in 1928.
So, yes, Nosferatu is a feature film, complete with some remarkably bad acting, most notably by Gustav von Wangenheim as the male lead and by all the actors playing peasants in the scene where, for the very first time in the history of the movies, a traveller stops at a lonely inn to ask directions to the castle of the sinister Count.
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