"Is this your wife? What a lovely throat." Graf Orlok
Nosferatu (1922) runs like a nightmare, silent and eerie.
Directed by F. W. Murnau.
Starring Max Schreck, Greta Schroder, Gustav Von Wangenheim and Alexander Granach.
Albin Grau one of the founders of Prana Films during WWI had been told by a Serbian farmer that his father had been a Vampire. Grau tried to get permission to make Dracula from Strokers family estate. when Albin was rejected by Strokers Estate he hired Henrik Galeen to write a screenplay based on Bram Stroker's Dracula. Grau had Galeen change the names of the characters and the title of the film. After the film was completed Bram's Estate sued Prana Films and won. Only one print survived after a court ruled in favor of Bram Stroker's estate and ordered the destruction of all the known prints in circulation. A similar situation occurred with David Leans' Lawrence of Arabia (1962) where only one original print survived and film restorers where able to make a new digital print from the original celluloid negative prints of the film.
No vampire film has equaled the artistry that F.W's created in Nosferatu. Murnau introduced the montage sequence of two separate scenes intercut together. The beauty of this film lies in the direction and camera work. Watch in the scene below how evil comes onto the screen via shadows from the corners of the bottom. Then Murnau intercuts to a woman in another scene screaming out loud to save her lover from the evil that is slowly consuming him while he sleeps. Nosferatu plays like a nightmare you have late at night in bed. The silence in the film adds to the horror story as I've never seen before.
Trivia - The scenes with blue tint represent night in the official versions. This was done to correct the error of filming during the day instead of night.
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