Last night my wife and I went to a showing of Nosferatu at The Mayan Theatre in Denver, CO.; F.W. Murnau's masterpiece from over a century ago. Live music was provided by Quarkestra, also Denver based, who have also scored Metropolis. Their music is available on Bandcamp, and most likely all the other places. The score is synced with the 2013 release from KinoLorber.

They... they also did foley effects! Clippy-cloppy horses, the insane laughter of Knock, a million other things I didn't even think twice about, all timed impeccably and done live. Give it a listen.

The audience, too, was very engaged and enthusiastic, and skewed towards the millenials from what I could see. I think it makes sense for Denver to be a good place for such things. The man who introduced the film asked the crowd how many had never seen a silent film. A handful of hands (if such a phrase works) went up, which gratified the man who said on previous occasions at least a quarter of the room would raise their hands. There were several points throughout the film, but mostly near the beginning, that the audience found very funny. Mostly with good reason: our hero, Hutter, is such a great silent film actor-type, very expressive, not too bright. The audience also laughed at the werewolf, which was clearly, to our modern eyes, a hyena, and pretty small compared to the horses it was frightening. Not exactly the big hulking CGI grotesque we think of nowadays when we think of modern movie werewolves. Cries of awwwww! could be heard on the close-ups of the hyena (I can sympathize to a degree, but I also wouldn't want to come face to face with a hyena in the wild, would you?). That same person made distressed noises later on when one of the dockworker's feet were covered in rats, he's bitten, and proceeds to try to whack some of them. I wanted to remind that audience member that the film talked heavily about the plague, and what animal traditionally brings the freakin' plague?? Whack them plague rats!

I had forgotten that, as Count Orlok arrives at his destination, a seeming plague follows him. No one knows what's killing the sailers and dockworkers, and all the townsfolk are ordered to quarantine. Flashbacks to just a few years ago with covid. To give some historical context with the film, 1922 was only a few years past the Spanish flu epidemic, which I'm just now discovering had very little to do with Spain, specifically. Wikipedia calls it the Great Influenza epidemic, one of history's worst. And of course this is very shortly after the Great War, as well. The setting, though, is in 1838 Germany.

Seeing this was such a strong reminder that this is how these movies especially are supposed to be seen: projected, with an audience, with live music. A hundred years maybe they played records, rather than always live music, I'm not sure. Live music is much my preferred way. Back in college I had the pleasure of seeing a pianist from Chicago play live for a showing of Phantom of the Opera. That was much less involved, and I think, if I recall aright, that the pianist improvised a lot of what he did. What he did was very good. What we saw last night was incredibly rehearsed for sure, to everybody's benefit. All four(?) members of Quarkestra appear to be multi-instrumentalists, and their love and enthusiasm for silent film comes through their score. I got pleasurable chills in several of the most iconic scenes, largely due to their incredible emotional impact of the music.

What am I waiting for? The film is in the public domain, and as such can be seen in various forms on YouTube, the Internet Archive, and so forth. I can't speak for any other soundtrack than the one I just experienced, but here's the film itself. Feel free to listen to the Quarkestra score (it may not align entirely to this version, I'm not sure), or whatever other music you feel would do it justice. I hear tell there's showings of Nosferatu scored with songs from Radiohead.

It is not exactly the most subtle of vampiric tales, but it so gosh dang iconic and so amazingly influential on cinema at large. Possibly the simplistic fairy tale aspect of it even helped keep it in the public's imagination. And to think the litigious Stoker estate tried to have the film eradicated from history for borrowing more-than-heavily from Bram's 1897 magnum opus Dracula. While Nosferatu may technically be a knock-off, it stands as its own take on the vampire legend. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979, with Klaus Kinski taking on Max Schreck's role of Orlok, the titular Nosferatu. For Christmas this year of our lordy 2024 we're getting a new version from Robert Eggers, featuring Bill Skarsgård as Orlok, as well as Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult. I'm curious about Herzog's version, and I'll be curious about Eggers's, though it does look legitimately terrifying:

Herzog's version also looks like it could be pretty terrifying, as well. What strikes me the most about watching the trailers is how much they reference the original; it's impossible to get away from, and why would you want to. I can see from a director's point of view the desire to expand the original, to remake the original film with modern technology and over 100 years worth of cinematic innovation.

Two more things before I end this post. I hear tell there's a film from 2000 called Shadow of the Vampire, which is a fictional dramatization of the making of the original Nosferatu. It stars Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, who might actually be a vampire (I haven't yet seen it). It also stars Eddie Izzard, John Malkovich, Cary Elwes, and Udo Grier. How have I never heard of this before?!

And lastly, a journal entry from the French author and noted diarist, Andre Gide, dated Monday, 27 February 1929:

Yesterday, Nosferatu, the Vampire.

A rather nondescript German film, but of a nondescript quality that forces one to reflect and to imagine something better. Terror, just like pity, can be excited in the mind of the spectator (at least of this spectator) only if he is not too much aware of the author’s concern to move to terror or pity; furthermore, I doubt whether the classic precept:

If you wish me to weep, you yourself must grieve first.
(Horace: Epistolae, II, iii. 102-3.)

is a very good recipe.

In Nosferatu the hero’s terror checks, gets in the way of mine. The hero, who is depicted as dashing, venturesome, and even very pleasingly bold, undergoes a dreadful change and passes from excessive joy to the expression of excessive terror. I should myself be more frightened if I were less aware of his being afraid.

If I were to make over the film, I should depict Nosferatu — whom we know to be the vampire from the start — not as terrible and fantastic, but on the contrary in the guise of an inoffensive young man, charming and most obliging. I should like it to be only on the basis of very mild indications, in the beginning, that any anxiety should be aroused, and in the spectator’s mind before being aroused in the hero’s. Likewise, wouldn’t it be much more frightening if he were first presented to the woman in such a charming aspect? It is a kiss that is to be transformed into a bite. If he shows his teeth at the outset, it becomes nothing but a childish nightmare.

How much cleverer it would be, instead of constantly emphasizing that concern with terror, to pretend on the contrary a desire to reassure the spectator: No, not at all, there is nothing terrible there at all, nothing that is not quite natural; at most something a bit too charming; even though one might have to let Nosferatu be more open about it on the boat with the sailors.

Likewise for the pseudo-scientific part, presented here with a truly German heavy hand; absurd. How much cleverer it would have been, beside the fantastic explanation, to provide the spectator with a perfectly rational and plausible explanation based on this little precise fact that we all know: that a plague can be transmitted by rats!

In a well-constructed fantastic tale the mind must be able to be satisfied with the natural explanation. It must be almost able to suffice; but the narrator will go about it in such a way that the skeptic is he who does not happen to be satisfied with it. It is the materialistic and positivistic mind that must appear as naïve in this case.

The wonderful thing in Goethe’s Erlkönig, for instance, is that the child is not so much terrified as charmed, that he surrenders to the mysterious blandishments the father does not see. At first all the fright is on the father’s part. I should have wished that, likewise, the young woman of Nosferatu, though conscious of her sacrifice in the beginning, had lost that consciousness, so to speak, yielding to the vampire’s charms, and that he had not been horrible in her eyes. It might be rather startling, furthermore, for the vampire to yield to the woman’s charms, to forget the hour. . . . I can easily see him appearing a hideous monster to everyone, and charming only in the eyes of the young woman, a voluntary, fascinated victim; but that, fascinated in turn, he should become less and less horrible until he really becomes the delightful person whose mere appearance he only took on at the first. And it is this delightful person that the cock’s crow must kill, that the spectator must see suddenly disappear with relief and, at the same time, regret.

In short, a film that was completely spoiled.

Translated from the French & annotated by Justin O’Brien
Published 1949 (two years before Gide’s death)
Alfred A. Knopf : New York

Andre Gide would've made an incredible film critic. And with that, sleep tight, and don't let them Nosferatus bite!