Halloween Horror: Spectres of Plague and Death in Murnau's Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)

As we discussed in our Roundtable earlier this year, March 4, 2022 marked the 100th anniversary of one of cinema’s greatest and most influential works of horror: F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. I rewatched the film before the anniversary (which I had not seen since 2006), and after all this time it still holds a gloomy yet mesmerizing power.

Nosferatu is famously an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The producers, Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau (who also designed the costumes and sets), had screenwriter Henrik Galeen draw on Stoker without obtaining the film rights, which eventually led Stoker’s widow to sue. The exact nature of the legal rights situation (which I’ve read differing accounts of) is beyond my purposes here. What’s important is that Nosferatu is clearly indebted to Stoker’s novel—Dracula is the urtext for all modern vampire stories—while also consciously distinct. The changes made go beyond Galeen simply changing the names of the characters and relocating events from England to Germany.

While key elements of the core story remain the same, the aim of Nosferatu and its effect are different. Dracula and Nosferatu both concern the journey of a young clerk (named Jonathan Harker in the novel, and Thomas Hutter in the film) to a strange count’s estate in far away Transylvania, and the clerk’s eventful stay there. Many subsequent screen versions of the story, whether it is the 1958 Hammer Horror adaptation or Francis Ford Coppola’s version from 1992, play up the Gothic elements through stylized sets and camerawork that exaggerate the conventions of the genre, especially in the scenes set in the Count’s castle. 

In comparison, Murnau’s early adaptation looks unadorned (in spite of the elaborate make-up used to render Max Schreck’s Count Orlok, or the charming German town scenery). Many scenes in the movie, such as the ones depicting the castle and the surrounding forests and mountains, were shot on location during the day (probably due to the necessity of natural lighting at the time). In contrast, most works of German Expressionism are known for their elaborate, stylized sets. This location shooting contributes to the uniqueness of Nosferatu, within German Expressionism as well as the subsequent vampire film tradition. One of the effects is that Nosferatu feels more realistic than most vampire movies, especially in the scenes amid the forested mountains of Transylvania. Viewed in 2022, Nosferatu seems at times like a newly discovered historical record.

Murnau’s film version also intentionally feins historicity. Stoker’s Dracula was set at the end of the 19th century, when the novel was written. In contrast, Nosferatu is not set when it was made, that is, in the early 1920s, nor is it set during the novel’s fin de siècle period. Galeen changes the date and setting to 1838. In fact, many of the title cards themselves are meant to pass as excerpts from a historical document, as an intertitle at the start of the film tells us: “I have reflected at length on the origin and passing of the Great Death in my hometown of Wisborg. Here is its story.” Although Wisborg is a fictional city, the film pretends to be a thoughtful, authentic document from the past, which is a feature of many Gothic works.

Setting the Dracula story further back in time alters its themes. Many scholars have noted Dracula the novel’s consistent thematic dichotomy between London in the West and its modernity and rationality and Transylvania in the East and its medievalism and superstition. Likewise, critics note how, in Stoker’s novel, the heroes use (at-the-time) cutting-edge technology to defeat the ancient evil, such as phonographs, telegraphs, and trains. Stoker explores what lurks beneath the surface of modernity. This dichotomy is largely absent in Nosferatu, which uses the vampire to address other themes.

During the Covid pandemic, I spent a lot of time studying different plague texts. Watching Nosferatu in 2022, I was struck by how much the movie is about plague and its connections to the vampire, with evocations of the Black Death throughout. I didn’t remember this aspect of the film from previous viewings. For instance, after the opening credits, a title card states: “An Account of the Great Death in Wisborg anno Domini 1838.” I’ve noted another intertitle that portrays the film as a historical record above. 

Much is made of Count Orlok’s sea journey in the movie; these scenes contain some of the most famous images. Events on the ship carrying coffins full of plague-ridden earth, as well as the sleeping Count, are intercut with Hutter’s return by horse and other means to Wisborg. Not only does the sequence capitalize on the potential of cinema, using editing to heighten the story’s suspense, it also draws on the deep reservoir of the collective imagination to build tension. Plague arriving on ships. Rats. The Black Death coming to Europe. In Nosferatu, the corrupting power of the vampire is linked to that most symbolically potent infectious disease, bubonic plague, with its centuries of history and the power to generate fear.

If Murnau’s film reaches back into the horrors of medieval Europe, with its imagery of the Black Death, it is also a work that has been said to look forward to the horrors of Hitler and Nazism in Germany. Siegfried Kracauer most famously put forward this argument in his 1947 book, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. While more recent film scholars dispute Kracauer’s account, it remains influential and suggestive. For example, there’s the remarkable “scapegoating” of Knock in the film, a man driven mad by “the master.” The citizens of Wisborg frantically and lethally mob the henchman of Orlok. Others have read the film’s portrayal of Orlok as antisemitic, his ratlike features evoking the vicious physical stereotyping of Jews in interwar Germany. How much of the film is a spectre of the troubled German soul after WWI, and where it was heading? It’s worth noting that the mobbing scene is not found in the novel.

Produced amid an environment of social Darwinism during the interwar years, it is noteworthy that Nosferatu depicts the vampire as the embodiment of nature’s worst potential. Professor Bulwer is the Van Helsing character in the film, and although he is featured less prominently, through the Professor’s lectures, the vampire is presented to the audience as a natural phenomenon, a predatory force akin to carnivorous plants, polyps with tentacles, or blood-sucking insects. It is not incidental that Hutter writes a letter to his wife saying that he thinks the bites on his neck are the result of mosquitoes.

Nosferatu is obsessed with death. It comes up in odd dialogue intertitles early in the film. When Hutter the clerk brings his wife, Ellen, flowers, her reaction is to ask: “Why did you kill them… such beautiful flowers…?!” Similarly, when Hutter is running down the lane, the professor stops him, saying, “Not so fast, my young friend! No one can outrun their fate.” Such bits of dialogue seem strange unless we fit them into the film’s wider concern with death as a fearful yet inherent aspect of nature. 

The Count’s connections to plague in the film also further link the vampire with natural forces. Noticeably, there is little superstition around the vampire, except that, for some ambiguous reason, the vampire has to sleep in his plagued earth during the daytime. In one of the film’s few vaguely religious accounts of the vampire, a book Hutter finds in his room in an inn in the Carpathian Mountains explains that “the Vampyre, Nosferatu,” who is “the seed of Belial” and an “unholy creature,” lives in coffins, “which are filled with cursed earth from the fields of the Black Death.” It seems that Orlok must be physically intertwined with the killing plague for his own preservation. While the vampire seems to have powers of speed and strength, such as in the scene when he lifts all the coffins onto the wagon extremely quickly, there is limited association between Nosferatu and supernatural evil. 

The vampire is largely de-spiritualized in Nosferatu; he is not predominantly an evil spiritual force that can be overcome by the potent deployment of Christian relics and sacraments. He is defeated not by Christian good but by Nature, the sun rising, and Ellen Hutter’s sacrifice. In contrast, in Stoker’s novel, sunlight only makes Count Dracula weak: it doesn’t obliterate him.

The vampire’s materiality and associations with natural forces does not mean, however, that Nosferatu lacks psychological control over his victims. He haunts the minds of his prey, as he does in Stoker’s novel. In fact, the film often returns to dreaming. Transylvania is called “The land of phantoms.” The famous shadow of Nosferatu walking up the stairs is not only a memorable cinematic image but also a signal of the vampire’s nature. He’s a spectre. A force fuelled by human fear. 

The opening title card states: “Nosferatu. Does this word not sound like the deathbird calling your name at midnight? Beware you never say it––for then the pictures of life will fade to shadows, haunting dreams will climb forth from your heart and feed on your blood.” The film is concerned with altered states of mind, foregrounded in the opening text, and then present throughout the film. One memorable title card explains that “As soon as Hutter crossed the bridge, he was seized by the eerie visions he so often told me of…” The intertitle reinforces the film’s self-portrayal as a record of actual, albeit strange, happenings. 

In the climactic scene, when Nosferatu hears the cock crow at dawn, he is defeated. At this moment, the narrative is centred on the symbolic defeat of the spectre, rather than, as in the book and in so many other vampire movies, the culmination of a cat-and-mouse game of figuring out how to defeat the monster. 

This ending is where the expressionism of Nosferatu takes over. The ending is not narratively exciting, or all that satisfying in some ways, but it takes on potent symbolic power. When Nosferatu perishes he disappears and only some dust remains. It is as if a figment of the mind has been dispelled. The bad dream has ended. Fears of the possibly unpleasant and dangerous—the spectre—have been driven away. The Great Death is finally extinguished, “as if obliterated by the triumphant rays of the living sun,” as the title card tells us. The final image is of the Count’s castle in ruins. We need no more conclusion than that image—a testament to the effectiveness of silent cinema.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922, Germany)

Directed by F. W. Murnau; screenplay by Henrick Galeen, based on the novel by Bram Stoker; starring Max Schrek, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach, Ruth Landshoff, and Wolfgang Heinz.

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