The Vault of Horror: Nosferatu at 90

Showing posts with label Nosferatu at 90. Show all posts

Friday, September 7, 2012

Nosferatu at 90: Florence Stoker, Vampire Hunter

The year is 1912. Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, has passed away. Some attribute the cause to syphilis. Left behind is his beautiful wife, Florence Anne Lemon Stoker, née Balcombe, a demure and striking stage actress when she married the Irish theatrical agent in 1878 at the age of 20. Now a widow in her 50s, with one grown son starting a family of his own, Florence finds herself struggling financially--a sad burden compounded no doubt by the rumors surrounding her husband's death. Ironically, the one thing that remained to her as far as financial means was the copyright to her late husband's famous vampire novel.

Fast forward a decade. A relatively new entertainment medium, cinema, is finally hitting its full stride and one of the epicenters of the explosion is Germany, where an Expressionist movement is taking the country by storm. A small art collective known as Prana Films, spearheaded by artist and spiritualist Albin Grau, produces a vampire film called Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, whose screenplay, penned by Henrik Galeen, has taken for its direct inspiration Stoker's Dracula. However, to avoid having to pay anything for intellectual rights, Prana Films never seeks permission from Florence Stoker, still alive and well in Britain. The names and places in the silent film are all changed from the novel in a naive attempt to avoid infringement. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlock.


Florence Balcombe, sketched by her former love interest, Oscar Wilde.

On March 4, 1922, Nosferatu enjoys a lavish premiere at Marble Hall of the Berlin Zoological Gardens, complete with live musical accompaniment and sound effects. The following month, Florence Stoker receives an anonymous letter from Berlin, containing a program from the premiere. The program directly states that Nosferatu has been "freely adapted from Bram Stoker's Dracula". Having received no permission requests, nor even being aware of the film's existence up to this point, the 62-year-old widow, still depending on whatever income she can get from the novel's copyright, is outraged.

What follows is a one-woman crusade the likes of which has never been seen in film history, before or since. Represented by the British Incorporated Society of Authors, Florence Stoker, as literary executor for the estate of her late husband, files a sweeping lawsuit against Prana Films which calls not only for financial compensation for the use of her intellectual property, but also the complete and total destruction of the film itself.

The legal battle would rage for over three years. Prana Films declared bankruptcy due to legal costs, and also in an attempt to avoid making payments to Mrs. Stoker. Meanwhile, the company's lone production, Nosferatu, continued to play throughout Germany and Hungary, but nowhere else, its international distribution halted by the litigious ruckus. Ironically, the success of the film in its homeland had made Stoker's copyright even more valuable than before. Prana would even try to make a deal with her, offering to cut her in on the film's profits if she would allow them to expand the release and use the Dracula name. She refused, insisting again on the torching of the film.

Hamilton Deane

While the suit took its course, Stoker was simultaneously negotiating with producer and Dublin neighbor Hamilton Deane, who sought to bring the novel to the stage. His officially licensed theatrical production of Dracula would premiere in Derby in 1924. It was an immediate hit, and its success helped boost the fortunes of Florence Stoker, who was also on the verge of winning her lawsuit with the doomed Prana Films.

In July 1925, the court ruled that Prana Films was in direct copyright infringement of the intellectual property of Florence Stoker. Financial reparations were ordered, but the failed company was unable to pay. The court also ordered that the negative of Nosferatu, as well as all known prints, be rounded up and promptly destroyed--the only known case of a "capital punishment" ruling on a major motion picture. It would be the only movie ever made by Prana, and had not been seen by anyone outside of Germany and Hungary--including Florence Stoker.

With Nosferatu seemingly destroyed, Stoker continued to reap the rewards of Deane's official stage adaptation. In fact, she granted the American stage rights to producer Horace Liveright in 1927 and Liveright hired John L. Balderston to adapt the play for U.S. audiences. It premiered on Broadway with virtually unknown Hungarian actor (had he seen Nosferatu during its release?) Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, and ran for a year on Broadway and two more on tour. However, in another case of intellectual property shenanigans, it turned out that Bram Stoker had never properly seen to the U.S. rights for his novel, and so it was in the public domain. This meant that Florence Stoker never received her full payment for the American production from Liveright, who was no longer even alive by the end of the play's run.

Meanwhile, it turned out that much like a vampire itself, Nosferatu the film was not exactly dead. Somehow, there were prints that survived the court-ordered obliteration. One of these made it to America in 1929, and it was then that the film finally made its US debut, against Stoker's direct wishes, screening in New York and Detroit. And when budding Hollywood movie studio Universal, nearly a decade after the film's release, sought to make their own talkie adaptation of Dracula based on the stage play, they also studied Nosferatu closely, and the influence can be seen in their 1931 film version, also starring Lugosi.

Florence Anne Lemon Balcombe Stoker died in London on May 25, 1937 at the age of 78, survived by her son Irving Noel, granddaughter Ann Elizabeth, and newborn great-grandson Richard Noel. In her later years, she no doubt enjoyed greater financial prosperity thanks to the stage production of Dracula, as well as other licensed properties like Universal's film and it's 1936 sequel, Dracula's Daughter. It's unknown whether she was aware of Nosferatu's survival, or how she felt about it if she did know.

The film remained an obscurity for decades, playing here and there, but never being fully embraced by audiences. It finally reached a wider audience in the 1960s, when it found its way to late-night television, along with whatever other public domain films were available at the time. Renewed interest in the film finally led to the resurfacing in 1984 of a complete print--the first found since its attempted destruction nearly 60 years prior. The uncut version played at Berlin's Film Festival that year, a stone's throw from where it had debuted in 1922. Free at last from the shadow of Florence Stoker's wrath, Nosferatu took its rightful place as the seminal vampire film that it is. It was released to home video for the first time in 1992, and the 2007 DVD release is the very first home video version to include the original music, all original scenes, plus the original color film tints.

Florence Stoker and son Noel,
circa 1882.

Whatever its merits, justification, or lack thereof, Florence Stoker's crusade had failed in the end. Nosferatu the film, in true Dracula fashion, could not be completely destroyed. And it's thankful for us that it wasn't--for as horror scholar David J. Skal wrote in his 1990 book Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, "Nosferatu mined Dracula's metaphors and focused its meaning into visual poetry. It had achieved for the material what Florence Stoker herself would never achieve: artistic legitimacy."

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Nosferatu at 90: The Jew as Vampire

It's a perplexing issue. One of the most revered--and effective--horror films of all time though F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu may be, it is also tainted for many by the shadow of one of history's most persistent prejudices.

The notion that Nosferatu contains anti-semitic overtones is certainly not a new one. Critics and historians have debated the matter for decades. I submit that although the basis for the story and the characters does indeed come from Bram Stoker's 1897 English novel, the particular direction and slant its first cinematic adaptation chose to take was motivated at least in part by the time and place in which it was made: Weimar Germany between the World Wars.

Do I believe Murnau and his crew were necessarily virulent anti-semites and so chose to make a film to specifically carry a message of ethnic hatred? No. I believe that Nosferatu is, first and foremost, an adaptation (albeit a copyright infringing one) of Bram Stoker's Dracula. However, it is also foolish and naive to believe that it was not influenced implicitly by the cultural milieu of its time.

Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany's leader
during World War I.

Germany after the First World War was a place of great bitterness and national impotence. Soundly defeated and humiliated, the country was reeling after the fall of the Kaiser, before the Third Reich arose to give the nation a sense of vindication and purpose once again. The Reich came to power in part by playing off a rampant ethnic bias that had become more virulent than ever.

Contempt for Jews was certainly nothing new in Christian Europe. But by the 1920s, it had reached a modern high in Germany, where many blamed the Jews for sabotaging the war effort, even of secretly conspiring to use their supposed wealth and power to undermine Germany and hand it over to its enemies. In short, they were scapegoated, and it became more acceptable than ever to resent and mistrust them. This is the leverage that Hitler and his cronies would use to ascend to power, promising to rid the Fatherland of the vermin polluting it.

Four years after the Treaty of Versailles, and eleven years prior to Hitler's ascendancy to Chancellorship, F.W. Murnau directed Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror--the first vampire film, and arguably the pinnacle of German Expressionist cinema. The film is a masterpiece, but also a product of its time. And it can be no coincidence that this subject matter was chosen in particular, as well as the manner in which it was presented.

It is important to remember that at this time, the bulk of Germany's anti-semitism was directed at Eastern European Jews who had immigrated to their country in recent decades. There was a broad xenophobia at work--a fear of the other, of foreign menaces coming to weaken and dilute. It was in this environment that Murnau chose to adapt a novel in which a monstrous bloodsucker travels from the wilds of Eastern Europe and heads west to cause mayhem and destruction. Except in Murnau's version it would not be England that he targeted... but Germany.

As many have pointed out, Murnau’s version of “Dracula”, a.k.a. the repulsive Count Orlok, possesses many physical features commonly found in stereotypical caricatures of Jews at the time: A long hooked nose, long claw-like fingernails, bushy eyebrows, a large forehead with bald head, and a general feminization of his appearance which was also common. His appearance is not only comparable to anti-semitic imagery, but he is also made to look something like a rat, in accordance with the disgusting rodents he brings with him. This, in turn, ties back into the Jewish stereotype, as Jews were often equated with rats as well.

Orlok brings filth and plague with him—not unlike prevalent fears regarding Eastern European immigrants. It’s worth noting that this attitude was not just a German one, but could be found in many Western nations, including the United States. He is an outsider, traveling West to literally infect and suck the country dry.

Medieval woodcut depicting the ritualized murder by bleeding of a
Christian child at the hands of Jews.

The parallels between vampirism and European anti-semitism go back much further than Nosferatu, and were in fact part of the continental zeitgeist for centuries. Jews—as well as gypsies, another popular scapegoat target of post-World War I Germany—were often depicted as bloodsuckers, and some have even traced the vampire’s aversion to Christian imagery to this parallel. There was also a popular myth that circulated for centuries regarding the alleged Jewish practice of drinking the blood of Christian children.

Compared to the native German Jew, the Eastern European Jew was seen as more of an alien influence, dissimilar in dress, language and appearance. Like Nosferatu—and notably unlike later cinematic vampires—they stood out blatantly from the rest of the populace. They were obviously, visually “other”. And the indigenous populace responded with paranoia over being overrun, of their nation being transformed or infected, as by a disease. They were seen as parasites.

Taking all this into account, it is reasonable to assume that Murnau knew very well that his audience would understand the symbolism and underlying message implicit in the Dracula story that informed Nosferatu. I do not by any means descry Nosferatu as a piece of pre-Hitlerian anti-semitic propaganda; however, I do find it obvious that there is an element of that way of thinking which informs the film throughout. It is not the entire message or point of the work, but it is a component.

Anti-semitism had been popular in Germany throughout the 19th century, and was magnified to the tenth degree under the influence of the Nazi party. Bridging the gap between those two eras was the time during which Nosferatu was made. It was a time during which commonly held prejudices were being congealed and codified into something far more sinister and institutionalized, and the influence of that time period on a film like Nosferatu is undeniable. It is a work of its time, designed in part to play on the fears of its target audience.

It was these festering fears, which boiled over during the Weimar years, which allowed Hitler and his ilk to get the populace on board with their plans for a return to German dominance, and to cleansing their Fatherland of the alien influence which had, they insisted, weakened it and brought it low. The Jew—along with the gypsy, the homosexual and any other element deemed a threat to the purity of the Aryan race—would be routed out in a Final Solution more horrifying than anything Murnau, Stoker or any other purveyor of fiction could have imagined.

While far from a work of pre-Nazi propaganda, and I would never characterize it as such, I can see the influence of these nascent strains of thought on the picture, both as a Jungian product of social subconscious and also, it must be said, through conscious intent. Yet these tropes inform much of early vampire literature and film, and I cannot discount their merit or their power as works of art on that basis. There is nothing wrong with enjoying Nosferatu—it is certainly a landmark film worth cherishing. But there’s also nothing wrong with remaining open to understanding the culture and social mindset from which it came.

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Nosferatu at 90: Who Was Max Schreck?

His very name is the German word for "terror". Perhaps this was one of the reasons why many believed it to be a pseudonym--surely no actor known for playing such a terrifying role could really have a name like that. Or perhaps it was not a pseudonym after all--perhaps, as some fancied for years, the man himself was no mere actor at all, but actually was what he portrayed onscreen--a bloodsucking member of the undead.

The legend of his mysterious nature was so persistent that it even formed the basis of the 2000 mock biopic Shadow of the Vampire, in which director E. Elias Merhige postulates that the man who played Count Orlock, a.k.a. Nosferatu--truly was a vampire himself. A testament, if nothing else, to his iconic, thoroughly convincing performance as the silver screen's first such creature.

Schreck sans vamp makeup...

But nevertheless, to the disappointment of goths everywhere, Max Schreck was a mere mortal after all.

He was born Friedrich Gustav Max Schreck on September 6, 1879 in the Friedenau section of Berlin, Germany--although the details of his early life are admittedly sparse, we know this much is true. And he was most certainly an actor--one, in fact, who was quite passionate about his calling, heading directly to the State Theatre of Berlin for instruction as soon as his regular schooling was complete.

It was in 1902 that a 22-year-old Schreck finished his training and emerged on to the German dramatic scene during a time when motion pictures were still in their earliest infancy and the stage was still really the only place for a young performer to make his name. Seeking to learn his craft, he toured his native country for a few years with various troupes until finally settling in with the highly prestigious company of Max Reinhardt--then one of the world's leading stage impresarios and a producer responsible for launching the careers of many of a future film star.

Schreck would turn out to be one of these, as the actor approached the prime of his career just at the moment that Germany was exploding onto the cinematic scene as one of the leaders in the burgeoning technological art form. Expressionism was taking root in a big way, and in the wake of the first World War, Germany was reestablishing itself as a hotbed for the new medium.

It was while appearing in the Drums in the Night, the debut production of soon-to-be acclaimed German playwright Bertolt Brecht, that Schreck was approached to be in his first motion picture--Der Richter von Zalamea. The gaunt, almost otherwordly actor was a natural for the movies, especially during the silent era, when the face was everything. This was doubly true of the Expressionist era, during which stage histrionics of the sort used by Schreck and others were all the more grandiose when projected on to a giant screen.

The role that immortalized him...

That first role would lead to the part that would eventually make him famous--or infamous--throughout the world. F.W. Murnau, one of the leaders of the German Expressionist film movement, was busy adapting--unofficially--Bram Stoker's novel Dracula into the world's first feature-length vampire film, and Schreck seemed the perfect fit for the lead role of the monster. Specifically in Murnau's vision of the story, the Count--here called Orlock to avoid a lawsuit from Stoker's widow that would come anyway--was to be vastly different from the furry aristocrat the Irish author had envisioned.

Rather, in line with Expressionistic aesthetics, Murnau wanted a hideous, demonic-looking vampire--one who closely resembled the rodents he carted across Europe with him. We'll never know if Schreck was insulted the director wanted him for the part, but we do know that he took it, and it would go on to become the single thing he would become known for, to the exclusion of all else.

So thorough was his immersion in the part that, combined with the relatively nothing that was known about him by the world at large, it came to be assumed by some that he might actually be the thing they saw on screen. Even for those too well-grounded to believe in such stuff, there was no denying the man's thick aura of mystery. Here was this strange German actor, who seemed to just appear out of the blue to play this nightmarish villain on screen, and then promptly return to obscurity afterward.

Add to that the notoriously tortuous path the film took to the general public--getting banned by a German court due to copyright infringement, and having nearly all copies destroyed to the point that it would take decades for the silent gem to finally emerge as a rare cult classic--and it's easy to understand why Schreck became such a fascinating character to movie buffs.

A totally un-Nosferatu-like role in 1927's Dona Juana...

But despite the fact that the world at large would only know him decades later as the first filmic vampire, Max Schreck did not actually vanish into a puff of smoke following the release of Nosferatu in 1922. Rather, he continued to have a busy career in the German cinema. He did some slapstick comedy work for Brecht in the playwright's own one-reeler short, Mysteries of a Barbershop. He rejoined Murnau for the 1924 comedy The Grand Duke's Finances, and appeared in many other films such as The Street and Dona Juana. His career even survived the advent of talkies, as Schreck continued to appear in movies well into the 1930s, and well into his 50s.

After making a return to the stage at the age of 56 to play the Grand Inquisitor in the play Don Carlos, Schreck was taken to the hospital on February 19, 1936. He died early the next morning of a heart attack--a most un-vampiric way to go if ever there was one. He was buried March 14, 1936 in an unmarked grave at the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof cemetery in Berlin, and as far as we know, has remained there ever since.

The actor late in life...

There's no denying Schreck was a strange fellow, and even his own contemporaries described him as such. A born loner with a reportedly unique sense of humor, he didn't do much to endear anyone to him, except perhaps his wife, fellow German silent film performer Fanny Normann (the couple had no children). He was said to enjoy walking through dark forests alone, and lived metaphorically in a "remote, strange world", according to his 2008 biography, Max Schreck: Ghost Theatre.

He was also an actor of great skill and versatility, who never quite got his due, especially outside of his home country. Not even Nosferatu made him a star, as that film was all but lost to the moviegoing public for many years after its release. Today, his name is literally synonymous with cinematic horror, and deservedly so. He gave us one of the first great movie monsters--and perhaps still the most frightening.

He may have been just a man after all--but thanks to Nosferatu, his legacy is now as undying as the rumors once held him to be.

Monday, January 9, 2012

Nosferatu at 90: Still the Greatest Vampire Film Ever Made

Greetings, and welcome to the first edition of a brand new year-long series here in The Vault of Horror. For me, dear readers, the year 2012 means only one thing--and that's the 90th anniversary of one of horror cinema's true unassailable classics, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. It's hard to fathom that this film is almost a century old, and even more impressive is its continued ability to shock and terrify no matter how much time passes. Just as I did in years past with A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho and An American Werewolf in London, I'll be posting throughout the next 12 months on this, the first and greatest of all Dracula adaptations.

How is it that this film still can effect us so profoundly, when so much of horror's power is drawn from the unexpected? One would think that age would be the death knell of a great horror movie, and yet films like Nosferatu prove this to be dead wrong. Whether you're discovering it for the first time all these decades later, or watching it for the 90th time, Nosferatu has the power to utterly creep you out. Personally, I credit it to the merits of German Expressionism.

And Murnau was undoubtedly one of the pioneers of this form of cinema, cutting edge for its time and a far cry from the American, Hollywood style that would soon dominate filmmaking in the years to come. Make no mistake, the silent era of film belonged to the Europeans, and the Germans, in particular, in addition to the Russians and the French, certainly left their mark. Like the best of his peers, Murnau achieved that defining goal of Expressionism in all its forms, namely to evoke pure emotion through the visual medium. Expressionistic works are in a sense dreams brought to life, and in the case of Nosferatu, that dream is most decidedly a nightmare.

The film oozes atmosphere from beginning to end, and is jam-packed with iconic imagery that has stood the test of time for a reason. Interestingly enough, it also set a standard for vampire films, and Dracula adaptations in particular, that was not really followed (at least not for many years). Nosferatu stands out on its own as a unique and truly cinematic retelling of the Dracula story, with liberal license taken, of course. It is vastly different from the Hamilton Deane and John Balderston play that would first be staged two years after its release--the version which inspired Universal's famous talkie version with Bela Lugosi at the start of the next decade.

Nosferatu chooses a different path, eschewing the nascent sex appeal of the vampire to take a more traditional, folkloric approach. The vampire here is still in his repulsive, pre-modern form--there is nothing at all sexy or alluring about Count Orlok (Unless you're into that sort of thing. Who am I to judge?) If anything, the vampire here is a metaphor for plague, and even possesses certain undeniable anti-Semitic overtones (but that's a post for another day).

Still, the story is undeniably Bram Stoker's. So much so that Stoker's widow and her crack legal team nearly had the film eradicated from the face of the earth (another post for a later day). Thankfully for film lovers everywhere, Ms. Stoker was not successful in her efforts, and the movie remains extant to this day for new generations of horror fans to discover and relish. There are many horror classics that stand the test of time, but few are as truly timeless as this one, defying changing filmmaking styles and changing filmgoing tastes to remain a favorite of genre fans. It is just as fresh now as it was when it emerged from a Germany still reeling from the First World War.

In addition to its Expressionistic roots, or perhaps in connection to them, I have always found that the film retains so much power largely because it is so visual in nature. Of course, this was very much necessary due to the limitations (or some might say advantages) of silent cinema, in that the visual was the easiest and most effective way to get your message across. Later versions of Dracula--and indeed horror films in general of the next couple of decades--would rely less on imagery and more on dialogue and cerebral scares. This is not to say that Nosferatu is not a psychologically frightening film, but I would submit that more of the terror it inspires is derived from the direct impact of what we see on screen. It is not so much suspenseful as it is downright terrifying to look at.

As has been the case throughout most of film history, America has been resistant to foreign films, and so this film did not even have a chance to be released here when it first was made in 1922. In fact, it wasn't until the 1960s, many years after a single surviving print had made its way to these shores in defiance of a court order, that it began to attain the cult following in the U.S. that it now enjoys. I have had the privilege of witnessing Nosferatu on the big screen with live musical accompaniment not once, but twice. And although I had my gripes with both viewings (an ironic, snarky crowd the first time out; and wholly inappropriate music the second time), I still consider myself fortunate to have had the experience.

At the time, Nosferatu was largely overshadowed by the Universal Dracula, and later the Hammer Dracula of the 1950s-70s, and yet its interesting to note that nowadays, most horror fans would place Max Schreck right alongside Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee as one of the screen's iconic Counts. In fact, many vampire aficionados--including this one--will still argue that Nosferatu, the original vampire film, remains the very best to this day. A puzzling notion maybe, in that nobody has been able to top it in 90 years; and yet instead of bemoaning the state of vampire cinema for the past century, I will choose instead to celebrate the fact of Nosferatu's existence. And if it so pleases you, I invite you to join me in doing so for the remainder of 2012.