In the 20s, several years after a worldwide plague had decimated the population of the globe and the U.S. government had lifted public mask mandates - and while Russia was undergoing a widely-publicized political upheaval - audiences gathered in theaters to watch a silent vampire movie called Nosferatu. Wait, hang on a second, my notes must have gotten confused...
No, astounding as it is to believe, those really were the circumstances that F.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece was created under, and if they seem almost uncannily familiar, that just speaks to the curious novelty of the movie’s main character: vampires just seem to keep coming back.
Every culture in every part of the world throughout history has had some version of the vampire legend, horror tales to frighten children and the superstitious according to respective mores and traditions around death - corpses that shrugged off their grave shrouds and prowled their hometowns after dark, evil spirits that could be warded off with garlic or silver, charming tempters that you could never, under any circumstances, allow to cross over your threshold. I've made a long study of as many of them as I could get my hands on, and a highlight of my professional career has been teaching some of the better ones to high school seniors enrolled in my Horror & Mystery classes of the Pinkerton Academy English Department. Did you know that right here in New England, for example, a young tuberculosis victim was exhumed from her grave in 1892, beheaded, staked through the heart, and burned, for fear that she was spreading her infection to relatives in a small Rhode Island town? Heartwarming stuff, that's how I like to think about it... even if that's only because those hearts were literally warmed to the point of incineration to end the "vampire's" curse.
The remarkable achievement of Irish writer and theater manager Bram Stoker was to gather many of these disparate threads together and weave them for the first time into a cohesive whole with 1897’s Dracula; the eponymous fangy Transylvanian Count has since become arguably the most recognizable character in world literature.
Last night, my dad and his co-workers at Middlesex Community College held a special screening of the first filmed adaptation of that story as part of their new ongoing series of classic films held at the historic and newly-renovated Boston & Maine Theater in downtown Lowell. To the accompaniment of a live four-piece band (who composed their own original score for the silent flick), a packed room of Lowell theatergoers settled ourselves in for a perfect Halloween season treat.
Nosferatu follows a young real estate lawyer, sent by his mysterious employer deep into the mountains of the frontier East for a private land sale. He is greeted with displays of terror whenever he speaks of his mission to local peasants and villagers, who all inform him in no uncertain terms that he is heading into terrible danger and present him with gifts like a Bible and a crucifix. Spectacularly, comically ignorant of these warnings, the lawyer chooses to press on and arrives at his castle destination, where he is greeted by the monstrous Count (in Nosferatu, named Orlock), a hideous vampire with a bald skull, rat’s fangs, and sickle claws for hands.... not to mention a peculiar penchant for human blood that the Count doesn’t even attempt to conceal. The lawyer has a beautiful and devoted wife at home, who reacts to news of her husband’s travel assignment with terror and dread from the outset. While he is away, she maintains a constant vigil of prayer for his well-being and safe-return, and it is this divine brand of protection that ultimately saves her husband when the Count begins prowling his castle at all hours of the night. The contracts purchased and deeds signed, the Count departs for the lawyer’s hometown in coffins filled with soil from the burial fields of plague victims, literally bringing pestilence in his wake. When the plague soil arrives in port, the town goes into an emergency quarantine lockdown, leaving the Count free to prowl the streets; only by sacrificing herself, luring the Count to her bedroom for a meal of blood, does the lawyer’s wife keep the vampire out long enough to be caught in the first rays of sunlight, vanquishing him forever.
It was a unique and unforgettable experience seeing this classic (which I'd seen before only on Youtube, with a prerecorded score) performed in circumstances nearly identical to those of its original release, and it required no very great leap on the audience's part to understand why the film was such a huge success upon its release both in its native Germany and abroad. It has the distinction of being one of the very first critically and commercially successful horror movies, as well as a landmark production from a country that was still morally and financially ravaged by unfair reparations in the wake of the First World War. There was perhaps only one dissenting voice in heaping praise upon the production, however - that of Bram Stoker’s widow, perhaps understandably outraged that her husband’s ideas and entire bestselling novel had been plagiarized without so much as a name credit, let alone a cent of royalties. Mrs. Stoker took her case to court and sued, where the judge ruled very obviously in her favor (it would have been impossible for any case to be easier), and all copies of the film’s print were summarily ordered for destruction.
Thankfully, however... vampires are very hard to kill, their films likewise. A very few private prints escaped destruction by hiding away in collectors vaults, and it is only through the discovery and restoration of these that we are able to enjoy Nosferatu today in 2022. Nearly a decade after Nosferatu’s release, Austro-Hungarian heartthrob Bela Lugosi immortalized the character for Universal Studios as tall, dark, and handsome; since that time, vampires have become everything from breakfast cereals to sex symbols for teenage girls who glitter in the sunlight. Count Orlock himself is probably most well-known to today's audiences for sharing scares and flickering the lights with the Hash-Slinging Slasher in "The Graveyard Shift," what I personally believe to still be the single greatest episode of Spongebob Squarepants ever animated. But last night was a perfect reminder, in all its black and white glory, of the very first attempt at capturing this bloodsucker onscreen (the rule that says he can’t appear in mirrors evidently doesn’t apply to celluloid reels), and a rock solid argument could be made that nothing in a century has bettered what was achieved there on the first go-around.
100 years on, and we here are perhaps closer to the original climate of Nosferatu than any audience before us has been since its initial release; when the villagers slam their windows shut to quarantine in a plague outbreak, we in 2022 are uniquely equipped to understand the kind of visceral horror effect F.W. Murnau intended. The jump scare hadn’t been invented yet, but make no mistake, this vampire is here to chill your blood before he tries to drink it. I can only hope that audiences in the next 100 years remember their garlic and crucifixes to ward him off.
