The Breakdown: While on a business trip to Transylvania, Hutter finds himself entangled with a dangerous and sinister character from Transylvanian folklore. Essentially this is an unlicensed version of Dracula.
Watch If: You like old, silent, black and white films.
Not If: You have trouble staying focused without really being handed any stimulus.
SECONDARY FACTS
Overall Rating: 2.8 (when you overlook all of its historical relevance.)
Length: 1:34
Country: Germany
Language: Silent
A Note From The Reviewer: This film is from 1922. That's almost as old as a movie can get, and by reviewing this film, I am in no means trying to minimize the huge leaps in technique, or the artistry that it took to create this film with absolutely minimal technology and no previous influence. This is quite literally, the first Dracula film, and for that it deserves more praise than it could get.
Rather, I am trying to use this particular review as a means to break down original privilege (the idea that a film is better than any subsequent version for no reason other than that it came first), and deconstruct the idea that, just because it's old, you're uncultured if you don't enjoy the process of watching this. By modern standards, it's boring. It's slow, and its a story that has been done so many times since and so much more entertainingly.
This review is written, not to tear apart a classic, but to take a hard look at what makes a film fun to watch, and to perhaps concede that being old and important, doesn't mean you have to enjoy it to appreciate it.
REVIEW
THE QUICK AND DIRTY
There are scenes that will emblazon themselves into your mind, and enormous chunks of film that you will sleep through if you don't make an effort to stay awake. The story is Dracula, though without Stoker's permission, so if you've seen pretty much any other Dracula movie from 1930-1970, you've seen a more entertaining version of this story.
PREMISE: 2
I try to give early films credit where they're due it, for example, this being the first Dracula film, it doesn't lose points for all of the remakes that came after. What it does lose points for, is that this is an unapproved, unlicensed film that didn't get permission to use Stoker's story. They tried, clumsily, to change all the names to avoid a lawsuit, and they failed. Bram Stoker's widow sued them.
In order to avoid persecution, Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau, the founders of the studio that made the film, declared bankruptcy almost immediately, and all copies of the film were ordered to be destroyed (which I find very silly).
So this film loses points on premise for the fact that, whether or not it went on to be a genre-building price of cinema, it was built upon a stolen idea.
ACTING: 4
By modern standards, a lot of this film is cheesy and difficult to take seriously, but it's important to understand that there was no real difference between screen acting and theater acting, and films at the time being silent, actors often had to be heavy handed in their deliveries just to make sure the audience knew what they were trying to convey. Couple that with the fact that Max Schreck was the first person to play any Dracula figure on screen. He had no previous version to model himself after, all he had was the story, and his own ideas about how to be terrifying, and he did a phenomenal job, and set the bar for any actor who came after him when it came to being creepy and still, somehow, sympathetic.
AUDIO AND VISUALS: 3
Visually, for it's time, this film is chock-full of techniques and decisions that completely changed the way people looked at film. it set the boundaries of what one could and couldn't do, and was, in all fronts, groundbreaking. There are more than a few scenes that have maintained icon status throughout the years.
On a less historically practical note, this film used a lot of imagery to convey things, and going to it from a modern perspective, in which we have been thoroughly spoiled by the miracles of scene-to-scene editing, many of the pieces of this film feel like that- pieces. Just a series of images spliced together, and it becomes incredibly difficult at some points to have an exact understanding of what is going on on screen.
Then there's the music. Now, another thing you have to understand going into this film, is that there wasn't a horror genre. Lovecraft had only started publishing fiction on a regular basis three years earlier, in 1919. There was no understood or recognized way to convey horror through sound. There was nothing to reference or pull from (except the Deus Irae, which i didn't find in the score anyways, and that's an entirely different conversation.)
The effect of this is that, the big-band, orchestral music that scores Nosferatu seems, by modern standards, extremely atmosphere-breaking. There were a few points where it honestly nearly sent me to sleep, and those that didn't almost felt like a parody of the film itself.
To be clear, I am not saying the music was bad, but it definitely didn't fit.
ATMOSPHERE: 2
So, remember in that last section, where I mentioned that the 'horror' genre didn't really exist at the time this film was made? well, at the time what would eventually evolve into horror was known as Gothic. As opposed to the extensive, teeth grinding, gore fueled horror we've come to know and love, it focused on a much headier version, with emphasis on death and fear, put simultaneously with a more floral style, and a greater focus on romanticism and tragedy. There were less monsters, and more unexplained terrors, and a lot of tragic ghosts. It really wasn't until the rise of weird fiction in the 1930's that horror the way we recognize it was born.
That's a lot of writing to say that this film isn't trying to be horror. It's trying to be gothic. And while, for the time they did a great job, the creepiness of the film doesn't outlast the novelty of the fact that it is a film. That is to say, most of the wonder of this film comes in the fact that, when it was created, there was nothing else like it at all. But if you step away from that, (which I'm not saying you should, but if you do) it looses any of the magic it might have held at its creation.
DELIVERY: 3
It's hard to watch by modern standards, I'm not going to sugar coat it. The music is unfitting to the film, there are several scenes that are incredibly hard to follow, the acting is difficult to stomach.
But here's the thing. None of that makes the film any less relevant or important to modern cinema. It will always be one of the grandfathers of horror cinema. It was borderline revolutionary for its time, and it pioneered the horror genre before many of the modern influences of the genre even existed. And that's not easy to do.
There's nothing wrong with not liking films from way back when, as long as 1. You don't write off all films from that era without giving them a chance, and 2. You take them in context. I didn't like watching this film. I got bored, it annoyed me, and I flat out laughed at some of the imagery that was meant to be taken more seriously. And that's OK, because that doesn't take away from what this film accomplished for cinema as a whole, and I know that. I get the history and the relevance. You can not like something, and still understand why it's important. I think too often we forget that in an effort to seem intellectual and cultured, or when we're young and still trying to piece together out future identities.
Starring
Written By: Henrik Galeen
Director: F.W. Murnau
Producers: Enrico Dieckmann, Albin Grau
Cinematography: Fritz Arno Wagner
Sources
Bailey, Jonathan. “Dracula vs. Nosferatu: A True Copyright Horror Story.” Plagiarism Today, 17 Oct. 2011, www.plagiarismtoday.com/2011/10/17/dracula-vs-nosferatu-a-true-copyright-horror-story/.
“Lovecraft's Fiction - Publication Order.” The H.P. Lovecraft Archive, www.hplovecraft.com/writings/fiction/publish.aspx.
“Nosferatu.” IMDb, IMDb.com, 4 Mar. 1922, www.imdb.com/title/tt0013442/.
Valjak, Domagoj. “All Copies of the Cult Classic ‘Nosferatu’ Were Ordered to Be Destroyed after Bram Stoker's Widow Had Sued the Makers of the Film for Copyright Infringement.” The Vintage News, 21 June 2017, www.thevintagenews.com/2017/04/05/all-copies-of-the-cult-classic-nosferatu-were-ordered-to-be-destroyed-after-bram-stokers-widow-had-sued-the-makers-of-the-film-for-copyright-infringement/.