Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

A pioneering film in the silent German expressionist movement, F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (not to be confused with Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake) is almost unique in imagining a vampire who is not darkly attractive, but corpselike and ghastly. Even so, his dread fascination remains troubling; the hero’s wife seems repelled but also mesmerized even as she seeks to destroy him.

An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu made few concessions to copyright beyond name and place changes: Count Dracula became Count Orlok (Max Schreck), Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), Mina Harker became Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder), and scenes set in England were moved to Bremen, Germany (yet the vampire’s arrival by sea is retained, illustrating just how superficial the changes are).

Perhaps unfortunately, Murnau’s film all but eschews the traditional role of Christian iconography, of crucifixes and holy water, in vampire mythology, retaining only a few vestigial references (e.g., an allusion to the seven deadly sins). (Herzog’s remake, which restores Stoker’s original character names, also reincorporates Stoker’s religious imagery.) However, Murnau more than makes up for this with a major new contribution to vampire mythology: It was in this film that the vampire was first imagined to have a deathly vulnerability to sunlight.

Nosferatu, like Dracula, has been the subject of numerous Freudian and sociological interpretations: The vampire is sex; the vampire is the id or animal desire; the vampire is wantonness; the vampire is venereal disease.

As applied to Stoker’s novel, at least some of these theories may be worth exploring; but Murnau’s film fundamentally alters the equation in ways that upends such interpretations.

First, it leaves Dracula’s wives out of the story, eliminating the seductive scene in the book that leaves the protagonist Harker in a debilitated condition. Second and more importantly, it changes the rules about destroying vampires: Whereas Stoker’s Dracula could be opening attacked with stakes and holy artifacts, Murnau’s Orlock must be distracted till dawn by a pure virgin surrendering herself to his thirst, even at the cost of her life.

This is no simple metaphor for sex or animal appetite, for Orlock is too obviously evil, destructive, and moribund; yet in making surrender rather than resistance the means of destroying the monster, the film hardly evokes wantonness or venereal disease. The imagery resists allegorization, remaining simply, unsettlingly, itself.