This classic of the silent era gave us an iconic new image of the vampire. Ninety years after it was made, the images still haunt us
Last two parts I mentioned how filmmakers like George Melies and Fritz Lang were ahead of their times. The science fiction and fantasy genres as we know them today are really a product of the Twentieth Century and many of the seminal works were produced after World War II. With Horror fiction it’s sort of reversed. Much of the classic works were written in 19th Century. The Victorians may have been buttoned down but they enjoyed a good scare.
By the 1920s the genre was well established and respectable. Frankenstein was by then over a century old and had been a staple of live theater for almost as long. Poe and Hawthorne were now being marketed to young readers. The decades previous to 1920 were very rich for creepy stories with tales like Turn of the Screw. The problem now was how to create horror that would stand out.
Some people like HP Lovecraft thought all this respectability went against what horror was all about. He set himself to making the genre dangerous and controversial again. He succeeded maybe a little too well in that it would be several decades before anyone even tried to adapt his stories to the cinema. Movie makers in the silent era were satisfied to bring Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to the screen. F.W. Murnau wanted to adapt Dracula but couldn’t obtain the rights. Out of that obstacle a classic was born.
Nosferatu keeps a lot of plot elements from the Dracula novel but in every other respect it is completely different. Count Orlok is a human rat rather than handsome and seductive. His appearance is meant to do one thing; terrify.
The imagery in Nosferatu is some of the scariest in any vampire movie. Murnau used light and shadow to maximum effect. This is one of the first films to show just how cinematic the horror genre would become.
There is no romance to this vampire film. This is about a monster relentlessly attacking a group of people until he is finally destroyed.
Nosferatu instantly became one of the first horror movie classics. People who have never seen a minute of the movie recognize its iconic vampire. To this date there are only two iconic images of the vampire; the seductive Count Dracula and the monstrous Count Orlok.
Next up: Thief of Baghdad
0 comments:
Post a Comment