15 Favorite Horror Movies: Nosferatu (1922)

When Jess suggested that the Filthy Horrors crew come up with our 15 favorite horror films, I thought of a couple of different ways of approaching it. I could of course try to figure out my actual, fifteen all-time favorite horror movies, ranked from most favorite to 15th favorite. But that sounded like a lot of work that would probably be inaccurate as soon as I started posting it. My favorites change all the time depending on the day and my mood.

So instead I've come up with a list of favorites from different decades. I've got at least one movie to represent each decade from the 1920s to the 2010s. Instead of ranking them by my personal preference, I'll just go through the list chronologically starting with 1922 and FW Murnau's unofficial Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu.

I've written about it before, but the gist is that while Nosferatu does have story problems (Professor Bulwer, the Van Helsing character, has no purpose in the movie, for example), the style of the film is so strong, and its vampire is so utterly horrifying (thanks both to Max Schreck's performance and the way Murnau filmed him), that nothing else matters. It's not only a great adaptation of Dracula, it's possibly the best vampire movie ever.

In addition to its style though, I love how the film handles Ellen, the Mina Harker character. Like in the novel, she's the one who figures out what's going on and understands how to defeat the vampire. But in the movie, she learns that the only way to do this is to willingly letting the Count feed on her until daybreak so that he's trapped and destroyed by the sun. It's a horrible, but emotional fate for her and I'm always moved by it no matter how many times I've seen the film.

She's such an interesting character: extremely sensitive and at first glance, irrationally paranoid. But her fears are always proved prophetic and I end up loving her insight and her sacrifice.

Dracula Adaptations | Nosferatu (1922)

Who's in it?: Max Schreck (Batman Returns), Greta Schröder (Der Golem)

What's it about?: This unauthorized German adaptation changes the names of the characters, the setting (England has become just another town in Eastern Europe), the ending, and even the metaphors.

How is it? (SPOILERS): I rarely judge film adaptations anymore on how faithful they are to their source material. And Nosferatu is a perfect example of why that is. It is very much not Bram Stoker's novel, but it's the most legitimately chilling, scary version of the story I've seen. It doesn't bother me that the monster is now an allegory for the plague instead of a metaphor for sexual seduction. And I don't even really mind the story problems created by messing around with some of the characters.

For example, Harker's boss from the novel is combined with Renfield to become a madman named Knock. In this version, Harker is named Hutter and his boss has not only been in contact with Orlok (Dracula), but apparently knows that he's sending Hutter to his doom when he goes to Transylvania. In the novel, Dracula doesn't begin to affect Renfield until Dracula arrives in England, but in Nosferatu, Orlok controls Knock from afar. The film never explains how this happens.

And then there's Professor Bulwer, the Van Helsing character, who has no purpose in the movie. Really, Van Helsing and Dr Seward almost don't exist in this version. Oddly, they're two separate characters (Van Helsing becomes Bulwer; Seward becomes a Professor Sievers), but they're generic, interchangeable characters with only minor lip service paid to Bulwer's having any experience in the supernatural. Bulwer certainly doesn't contribute to Orlok's defeat. That's 100% Ellen (the Mina character, played by Greta Schröder), who sends Hutter to find Bulwer just to get Hutter out of the house so that Ellen can do what she needs to do. Bulwer doesn't even directly interact with any other characters until that last scene and even then it's only to observe.

Some other changes are less of a problem. Hutter is mostly the same as Harker and his wife Ellen is an excellent version of Mina. Arthur Holmwood has become Harding, a wealthy ship owner who's a friend of Hutter/Harker. Hutter sends Ellen to Harding's to live while Hutter goes to Transylvania. Standing in for Lucy is Harding's sister (not his fiancée as in Stoker), Ruth.

Ruth/Lucy doesn't play as big a role in the movie as she does in the novel. Ellen/Mina is the main focus of Orlok's obsession. There's a hint that Ruth could be experiencing some weirdness, but Orlock is defeated before anything comes of that.

Like the novel, Ellen/Mina is the one who best figures out what's going on and understands how to defeat Orlok/Dracula. But in the film, Ellen learns that the only way to do this is to sacrifice herself, willingly letting the count feed on her until daybreak so that he's trapped and destroyed by the sun. It's a horrible, but emotional fate for her and I'm always moved by it no matter how many times I've seen the film. Ellen is such an interesting character: extremely sensitive and seemingly irrationally paranoid, but her fears are proved prophetic 100% of the time. She more than makes up for any issues I have with Knock and Bulwer.

And when I consider just how strong the visual style of Nosferatu is, I can't even see flaws anymore. Orlok is so utterly horrifying (thanks both to Max Schreck's performance and the way director FW Murnau shot him), that nothing else matters.

Rating: Five out of five Minas

31 Days of Gothic Romance | Nosferatu

Even though Nosferatu is an adaptation of something we already talked about, it's different enough from Dracula that it bears mentioning on its own. It's got the same themes about decay and the same count who's trying to overpower the same girl, but it's everyone's reactions to the count (Orlok in this version) that sets Nosferatu apart.

As a way to simplify the plot, Ellen's support team is severely cut back. Some of that we're used to in later versions. Quincey and Lord Godalming almost never makes it into films, and Seward is often turned elderly and made Mina or Lucy's dad. Not that there's anything wrong with being elderly. It suits Van Helsing just fine. But Seward as a father is never a powerful ally.  In Nosferatu, the Seward character is about the same age as Ellen and her husband, but he also pretty much disappears once Orlok arrives in town and stuff gets real. And weirdly, so does Nosferatu's version of Van Helsing. The only person who really sticks close to Ellen is her husband, but he's just recently escaped Orlok's influence himself and is still weak.

That changes things because it makes Ellen the sole defender of her village against Orlok. Heroically, she's not even concerned about herself, especially when she learns that the way to defeat Orlok will require a profound act of self-sacrifice. Because of that and how she handles it, I really like Mina in Dracula, but I love Ellen.

7 Days in May | Holmes, Hood, and the Headless Horseman

Nosferatu (1922)



I've seen this so many times, but watching it again, I noticed a couple of story problems. How does Orlok get control of Knock? And Professor Bulwer, the Van Helsing character, has no purpose in the movie. He doesn't even directly interact with any other characters until the very last scene and even then it's only to observe what the real characters are doing.

But the style of Nosferatu is so strong, and Orlok is so utterly horrifying (thanks both to Max Schreck's performance and the way director FW Murnau shot him), that nothing else matters. It's not only the best adaptation of Dracula, it's the best vampire movie ever.

The Paleface (1922)

This lesser Buster Keaton short is full of racial stereotypes and hard to watch. They can't all be winners.

Cops (1922)

I love Buster Keaton's usual brand of slapstick, but the action in this short becomes more absurd than I like. It's also mean-spirited in that a lot of the comedy happens at the expense of innocent people. And finally, the plot that sets up Keaton's being chased by an entire police force is shakier than what I'm used to from him. It's still very funny in places, because Keaton, but not one I'll come back to a lot.

My Wife’s Relations (1922)

This is more like it. Due to a language barrier with a judge, Buster Keaton accidentally gets married into a rough family. As expected though, he stoically and resourcefully holds his own. I especially love the dinner table scene where he can't get a bite of his own food for having to constantly pass dishes up and down the table to the others. I've been there, pal.

Sherlock Holmes (1922)



Sort of "Scandal in Bohemia" meets Young Sherlock Holmes, only Holmes and Watson meet in college. It also plays up Holmes' feelings for Irene Adler (renamed Alice Faulkner, but it's following the "Scandal" plot) to a level that's unbelievable for Holmes fans. And it not only inserts Moriarty into the tale; it makes him the reason for Holmes' becoming a detective in the first place. So, lots of liberties taken here.

It's not a strong mystery either and Holmes says things like, "It's easier to know so-and-so is guilty than to explain how I know it." In other words, it barely feels like Sherlock Holmes. John Barrymore is handsome in the role, but I wish he was in a more faithful adaptation. Enjoyable; just not essential.

The Blacksmith (1922)

A really strong short with Buster Keaton as a blacksmith. I can't tell if he's a partner or an apprentice in the business, but he works with another smith who's played by ubiquitous Keaton co-star/nemesis, Joe Roberts. The two are adversaries, but when Roberts' character finally takes his abuse too far and goes to jail, Keaton takes over the whole business. The gags mostly involve Keaton's destroying everything he touches, but they're all funny and I particularly like the bit where he fits a horse for new shoes.

The Frozen North (1922)

This is apparently a parody of William S Hart melodramas, but I've only seen one Hart movie, so I didn't get the joke. It's strange seeing Buster Keaton play a thieving, murderous villain, but not as strange as the plot, which was hard for me to follow. Some of the gags got chuckles from me, but this is low on my ranking of Keaton films.

The Electric House (1922)

When Buster Keaton is mistaken for an electrical engineer and hired to wire a new home for electricity, I thought the gags would involve his incompetence to do the job (especially since I watched this back-to-back with The Blacksmith). Surprisingly, he does a great job and fills the house with awesome gadgets, including an escalator and a train system to deliver food from the kitchen to the dining room table. The jokes come from Keaton's being the wrong person to operate the house as he demonstrates it to the owners, but once he leaves, that's going to be a cool place to live.

Robin Hood (1922)



It's an origin story, so Robin Hood as we know him doesn't appear until halfway through the movie. But thanks to the charming Douglas Fairbanks and some great humor, even the Hoodless half is a lot of fun. Once the movie enters familiar territory, it gets even better with lavish sets and Fairbanks proving why he's the king of the swashbucklers. Highly recommended. I may even like this one better than Errol Flynn's (which I like a lot).

Day Dreams (1922)

Cute, but slight short film in which Buster Keaton writes letters to his sweetheart back home to report on his progress in building the fortune he needs to marry her. He'll tell her that he's "cleaning up on Wall Street" and she'll daydream about his being a stock tycoon, but of course he's actually a street sweeper. This kind of thing repeats a few times until he finally comes home to reveal his failure and face the consequences. It's a depressing scenario, but the individual gags are still very funny.

The Headless Horseman (1922)

Pretty faithful, silent adaptation of the Washington Irving story. Will Rogers isn't quite as lanky an Ichabod Crane as I like, but he's fine. And the Headless Horseman effects are surprisingly great.

It pads itself out though with extra subplots. There's one about the mother of one of Ichabod's students and how she wants to drive Ichabod out of town because he's not Dutch. And another has Brom Bones try to get rid of Ichabod by making the town believe that the schoolteacher is practicing witchcraft. It's interesting enough stuff, but not necessary, especially when I'm anxious to get to the ghost at the end.

I also don't care for how the movie robs the story of what ambiguity it has about Ichabod's fate. I mean, I think Irving's tale is pretty clear about what happens to Ichabod, but it leaves room for different opinions. This movie picks a side and shows it outright, acknowledging the other point of view, but basically mocking it as nonsense.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling



This is my first time reading this, but I've seen the movie many many times. I enjoyed unfilmed scenes like Nearly Headless Nick's party and the additional tension around everyone's thinking that Harry is the Heir. I also hadn't picked up from the film that Dumbledore wasn't the headmaster during Tom Riddle's day. And the Chamber of Secrets sequence flows a lot better without the long chase.

Like in the first book, Harry's successes rely more on coincidence than I'd like, but all-in-all it's a fun book and I'm looking forward to Azkaban.

Oyster War by Ben Towle

While I love sea adventure stories, very few of them are fully satisfying to me. The Unsinkable Walker Bean is one of those, and now Oyster War is another. It combines Ben Towle's knack for well-researched, detailed historical fiction with exciting action, captivating characters, humor, and lots of imagination. And the book is packaged handsomely in an oversized, hardcover album with thick paper, so it's as pleasurable to hold as it is to read.

Nosferatu (1922) on the big screen

A couple of nights ago, the Heights Theater in Columbia Heights screened Nosferatu accompanied by the Rats and People Motion Picture Orchestra of Minnesota. I've seen the movie lots of times with lots of different scores, but never on the big screen and never with a live band.

Rats and People is great. The Heights has an awesome organ, so that got used of course, but there was also a string quartet and a percussionist, with a couple of the strings switching out on guitar and theramin. I'll say that last one again. There was a theramin!

The score they played was original music composed specifically for the movie; full of discordant, staccato strings, spooky organ, weird electronics, and measured percussion that counted time and increased tension. I'll be looking for other opportunities to see these guys accompany films.



The film itself is one of my favorite horror movies. It's easily the creepiest adaptation of Dracula I've ever seen and Max Schreck is unbelievably non-human as Count Orlok. There's been so much written about Nosferatu that I don't have much to add to that discussion, but seeing it on the big screen did change my perspective on it a bit.

There are details that I've missed on smaller screens, like the enormous pipe that Harding (sort of the Dr. Seward of Nosferatu) is smoking before he rescues Ellen (the Mina character) from sleepwalking on a balcony rail. I'd also never noticed that Professor Bulwer (Nosferatu's Van Helsing) cries at the end; probably because I've always been focused on the part of the shot that he's crying about. In addition to all that though, it's fascinating to see the characters' faces so much larger than I'd ever seen them before. It made me pay more attention to their performances and gave me a really good look at their makeup. But that's a double-edged sword.

The only frustrating thing about seeing Nosferatu on the big screen is seeing it with an audience, some of whom have never seen the movie before or, deducing from their reactions, any silent movie before. I'm not judging or suggesting there should be any requirements for attending a screening like this, but people come at these films from different places and that means that they react in different ways. For a lot of the audience I was in, that reaction was laughter.

I experienced this last Halloween at screenings of Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. There are moments in those films - especially Bride - that are supposed to be funny, but there was also a lot of laughter at things that aren't intended as humorous, but are dated. Styles of acting, lines of dialogue; stuff like that. Matt Zoller Seitz wrote a pretty good post about the reactions of an audience to a recent screening of From Russia With Love. He's a lot angrier about it than I am (and his audience sounds much more rude than mine was), but I can relate to his frustration. It's tough to immerse yourself in a movie you like when people around you are laughing at the monster.

Even more frustrating is that it affected my son's experience with the film. He had a great time, but his opinion of the movie is that it's funny and not at all scary. He's seen silent movies and enjoys them, so he's familiar with that acting style, but the audience's laughter influenced him and got him laughing too. I don't think he would have had that reaction had he been introduced to the movie at home.

But I'm not saying he's wrong. Or even that the rest of my audience is wrong. On the big screen, where you can see every detail of Orlok's face, he can come across as comical. Take this shot for instance.



You can read that a couple of ways. If you're into it, Schreck's expression and movements can seem inhuman and creepy. But if you're not as invested, it can look completely ridiculous, especially when it's blown up to giant size on a movie screen. A benefit of seeing the film on the small screen is that you're not picking up as many details, so there's more mystery, which creates more horror.

So I'm torn. For fans of Nosferatu, seeing it on the big screen is a treat. But if you're hoping to introduce it to someone who's never seen it before, and you want them to think it's scary, find a good print that you can show them at home. Buster Keaton and Douglas Fairbanks are better big screen introductions to silent film.

Ashley Quach's 'Das Wampyr' cards

A while back I contributed to the Kickstarter for Mark Sable and Salgood Sam's Dracula: Son of the Dragon. One of the rewards I signed up for was a set of three 'Das Wampyr' cards from Ashley Quach, the wonderful cartoonist behind Sassquach. They arrived this week, and they're so awesome that I have to share them.

Backers could choose any vampires they wanted, so being a movie fan, I asked for each card to have an element from the three most iconic film Draculas.

First, I asked for old school Nosferatu:



Then, instead of Bela Lugosi as Dracula, I asked for his three brides:



And finally, I asked for Hammer Dracula:



Ashley is pretty great.

31 Days of Dracula | Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)

When F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu in the '20s, he had to change the characters' names and some story details to avoid copyright infringement on Bram Stoker's Dracula. Even so, the inspiration was undeniable and Stoker's widow succeeded in obtaining an order for all copies of Nosferatu to be destroyed.

Fortunately, some prints escaped, so by the '60s the Dracula copyright had expired and the movie began to be circulated again. German director Werner Herzog became a huge fan of the film and decided to remake it. And since Dracula was now in the public domain, he could even use the names of Stoker's characters.

Still, Herzog's Nosferatu is a remake of Murnau's film before it's an adaptation of Stoker's novel. Murnau's plot changes still show up, including Renfield being Harker's boss, as well as the awesome way that (spoiler!) Dracula is ultimately destroyed. What doesn't make any sense is that Harker's wife isn't called Mina in Herzog's film, but Lucy. It's an odd, pointless change.

There's also an additional twist in the last scene, but that one sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, I haven't seen the film yet, but I'm adding it to my list.

31 Days of Dracula | Max Schreck (1922)

It's October 1 and the first day of the Official Countdown to Halloween. I started early with Casper and the 50 Horror Classics movies, but my original plan was to follow up last year's countdown with a similar theme. Frankenstein is my favorite monster, but Dracula runs a close second place. I identify with Frank, but Dracula is who - in darker moments - I wish I could be. Maybe not the blood sucking part, but his charisma and power are qualities I'm tempted to envy.

So all this month I'll be focusing on a different interpretation of the world's most famous vampire. Some of the entries will be more inspired by Dracula than direct adaptations of him, but I'm sticking to vampires with obvious connections to the original Count and his unique sense of style.

Like last year, we'll do this in chronological order, so the natural place to start is Max Schreck's classic performance in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. Technically, Schreck is playing Count Orlok, not Dracula, because Nosferatu changes all the characters' names. But it's a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's plot and Orlok is undeniably Dracula at heart if not in appearance.

Schreck is the most frightening version of Dracula ever. He and Murnau gave up charisma for sheer power and horror, and some of the images in Nosferatu are scarier than anything in the last 90 years.