"The mysterious Count Orlok summons Thomas Hutter to his remote Transylvanian castle in the mountains. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house near Hutter and his wife, Ellen. After Orlok reveals his vampire nature, Hutter struggles to escape the castle, knowing that Ellen is in grave danger. Meanwhile Orlok’s servant, Knock, prepares for his master to arrive at his new home." 

OUR REFLECTION:

For me, Nosferatu has lingered in that weird limbo most film school graduates probably understand: I’ve basically seen the entire movie through various class lectures and video essays, but never sat with it from beginning to end. With the upcoming release of Robert Egger’s take on the film that looks jaw-dropping, this critic decided to go back to the original in able to draw an educated comparison. After all, I don’t want to be one of those people that praises the remake on something that was directly lifted from the original!

Thanks to Kino Lorber’s wonderful restoration and preservation of the film, the visually-stunning Blu-ray release makes a great home viewing experience. The HD color-tinted film scans are sharp and bright, and the reconstructed score from Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra is a wonder in itself. It’s amazing to witness what was once an unauthorized Dracula adaptation 102 years ago survive, create a legacy, and inspire many works we see today. It also added on vampire lore, being the first piece of media to see a vampire die by daylight. Sure, it’s through the rules of a curse because we see Mr. Nosferatu himself kill a few people in broad daylight, but it’s death by sunlight nonetheless!

Though Nosferatu doesn’t entirely work today, with a lot of its effects and staging coming off silly due to our current use of the visual language, the 102-year-old film still feels eerie in a magical way only film can create. When combined with an appropriate score, Nosferatu is elevated to a quality where one can see why this vampire story has endured through the ages, even if it's a blatant rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel. It’s a story that understands how human emotions need to be at its core; not only in the main characters’ instincts of survival and protection of the ones they love, but also the deep desire that lies within Nosferatu himself, motivating his course of action that dooms an entire country and invoking fear in the viewer knowing nothing will change his course. It’s hard to tell if that direction was a conscious choice or happened by accident in an era where the language of film was still being discovered, but it’s my takeaway as a current viewer.

Honestly, with a film as classic and monumental as Nosferatu, one need not go further than Roger Ebert’s essay in his The Great Movies series which states “Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us. It shows not that vampires can jump out of shadows, but that evil can grow there, nourished on death. In a sense, Murnau’s film is about all of the things we worry about at 3 in the morning–cancer, war, disease, madness. It suggests these dark fears in the very style of its visuals.”

Simply put, that one episode of Spongebob, as much of a classic it is, holds no candle to Nosferatu.