 |
| Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror, 1922 |
A knockoff of Dracula, it barely escaped an attempt by Bram Stoker’s widow Florence to have every print detroyed.
But it changed a lot of the subtext if not the plot, with Graf Orlok as a clearly inhuman monster, a walking plague - and this was just a couple of years after the influenza epidemic that followed the Great War. It also introduced the vampire being burned to death by sunlight, which has become more common than not since.
I first saw Nosferatu in 1993 as the opening film for the first Dead By Dawn horror festival, with live piano accompaniment - he got a huge laugh when stopped abruptly at the shot of everybody at the inn turning when Hutter/Harker announced he was going to the castle. By that time I already knew the look from my early curiosity about vampires and horror in general. Now I own the BFI restoration disc with a score by Hammer Dracula composer James Bernard, but have gone to see it with live accompaniment more than once since, most recently in the 2017 Fringe in a chapel with music by an Australian piano and percussion duo.
We see the lineage of Orlok in the remakes by Werner Herzog and others (with more on the way) and Shadow Of The Vampire, as well as in other not-so-pretty vampires like Barlow in the original ’Salem’s Lot miniseries, the Reapers in Blade II, the Master in Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the Strigoi in The Strain, various elders in What We Do In The Shadows and in the forthcoming Morbius, and other monsters like the Gentlemen in Buffy and the Pale Man in Pan’s Labyrinth and the Remans in Star Trek: Nemesis, while Batman Returns has both a clammy Caligari-ish Penguin and Christopher Walken as a villainous businessman called Max S(c)hreck. See also Total Eclipse Of The Heart, which was written for musical adaptation.
In gaming, Nosferatu inspired variant vampires and other monsters in various settings, and most notably White Wolf lifted the look and name for one of the original clans in Vampire: The Masquerade. Tim Bradstreet referenced Klaus Kinski in Herzog’s version in his chapter frontispiece, and worked on Blade II in turn.
 |
| Tim Bradstreet for Vampire: The Masquerade Rose Bailey modelled for V20. |
Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the midnight call of the Bird of Death?
No comments:
Post a Comment