UPDATE: For fans of the seminal classic NOSFERATU, let us note that SHADOW OF A VAMPIRE, a fanciful depiction of events around the making of the film, starring (of course) John Malkovich as Director F.W. Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck (Dracula), hit the screen this fall. You may read my review SHADOW OF A VAMPIRE of it by copying, pasting the following URL to your browser and going to:

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NOSFERATU (The Vampyre), 1922, has suffered less from the onslaught of time than other serious silent films. It is one of the prime examples of German expressionism, and like all expressionism, it has the distorted, fragmentary nature of a dream or a nightmare. Therefore, no matter how much a print has been cut, no matter how scarred the surface, regardless of a fast running speed, something of the film's dark, disturbing power comes across and stays with the viewer.

NOSFERATU was created by Director F. W. Murnau (THE LAST LAUGH, 1925; FAUST, 1927; SUNRISE, 1931), a genius who later brought his influential spatial and camera techniques to Hollywood. He based his film roughly on Irishman Brom Stoker's fascinating epistolary novel Dracula, but moved its setting from England to Bremen, Germany.

NOSFERATU tells the well known story of a property agent who is sent from Bremen to Transylvania in the Carpathian Mountains of the Balkans to arrange a property sale for a Count Orlock. (The change of names was required because Stoker's widow had enjoined Murnau from adapting the novel directly.) He is held prisoner by the Count, who moves to Hamburg and pursues the property agent's wife. After the agent's escape and return, the wife gives herself to Dracula in order to save her husband and to lure the vampire into the morning, where the rising sun will destroy him.

It was this film which led to numerous remakes, notably DRACULA, 1931 (both English and Spanish language versions) and 1958 (British), as well as Werner Herzog's 1979 direct German language remake.

Much of the original's power comes from the extraordinary make up adopted by Max Schreck, who plays Orlock/Dracula. World War I had ended only four years earlier, and many Europeans were familiar with the terrible sight of corpses left unburied. Murnau, Schreck and the technicians at UFA devised an appearance for Dracula that resembled those corpses: bulging eyes, protruding teeth, balding skull, long fingernails.

It is not difficult to imagine the resonance for Post World War I audiences of a story involving a creature who thrives on the blood of the living and feeds on the dead.

A few years ago, the marvelous Munich Film Museum assembled an edition of NOSFERATU, over two hours long, complete with newly struck and tinted prints. The edition loses less than a minute from the original. If you can find it, this version is the one to get.

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Recommended: Yes