Nosferatu eine Symphonie des Grauens (translation: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror) is a 1922 German silent horror movie by F. W. Murnau. It was based on the Dracula novel by Bram Stoker.
The movie was shot in 1921 and was released in Germany in 1922 and in the US in 1929. It is about a vampire or "Nosferatu" named Count Orlok (starring Max Schreck) who lives in a castle on top of a hill. The movie is in the public domain in America but not in Germany.
The movie was a commercial failure and caused the company Prana Film to be shut down due to copyright infringement. The movie was the only movie by Prana Film.
The movie got a strong cult following. Not only this, the movie has received overwhelmingly positive reviews. On Rotten Tomatoes it got a "Certified Fresh" label: 98% of critics gave the film a positive review with a "fresh" rating, based on 46 reviews.
In 2010, it was ranked twenty-first in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema".
Cast
Max Schreck as Count Orlok
Gustav von Wangenheim as Jonathan Harker
Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter
Alexander Granach as Knock
Georg H. Schnell as Harding
Ruth Landshoff as Ruth
John Gottowt as Professor Bulwer
Gustav Botz as Professor Sievers
Max Nemetz as The Captain of The Empusa
Wolfgang Heinz as First Mate of The Empusa
Heinrich Witte as guard in asylum
Guido Herzfeld as innkeeper
Karl Etlinger as student with Bulwer
Hardy von Francois as hospital doctor
Fanny Schreck as hospital nurse
Plot
In 1838, Thomas Hutter lives in the fictional German city of Wisborg. His mysterious employer, estate agent Herr Knock, sends Hutter to Transylvania to visit a new client named Count Orlok who plans to buy a house in Wisborg. Hutter entrusts his loving wife Ellen to his good friend Harding and Harding's sister Annie, before embarking on his long journey. Nearing his destination in the Carpathian Mountains, Hutter stops at an inn for dinner. The locals become frightened by the mere mention of Orlok's name and discourage him from traveling to his castle at night, warning of a werewolf on the prowl.
The next morning, Hutter takes a coach to a high mountain pass, but the coachman declines to take him any further than the bridge as nightfall is approaching. A black-swathed coach appears after Hutter crosses the bridge and the coachman gestures for him to climb aboard. Hutter is welcomed at a castle by Count Orlok. When Hutter is eating dinner and accidentally cuts his thumb, Orlok tries to suck the blood out, but his repulsed guest pulls his hand away.
Hutter wakes up to a deserted castle the morning after and notices fresh punctures on his neck which, in a letter he sends by courier on horseback to be delivered to his devoted wife, he attributes to mosquitoes. That night, Orlok signs the documents to purchase the house across from Hutter's own home in Wisborg and notices a photo of Hutter's wife, remarking that she has a "lovely neck."
Production
Nosferatu is Prana Film's only production. Prana Film was founded 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and Albin Grau. Grau had the idea to shoot a vampire film; the inspiration arose from Grau's war experience: in the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the Undead.
Diekmann and Grau gave Henrik Galeen a job to screenplay inspired from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, despite Prana Film not having rights to the film. Galeen was an experienced specialist in Dark romanticism ; he had already worked on Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) in 1913, and the screenplay for 1920's Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (The Golem: How He Came into the World). Galeen set the story in a fictional north German harbour town named Wisborg and changed the character names. He added the idea of the vampire bringing the plague to Wisborg via rats on the ship. He left out the Van Helsing vampire hunter character. Galeen's German Expressionism screenplay was poetically rhythmic, without being so dismembered as other books influenced by literary Expressionism, such as those by Carl Mayer. Lotte Eisner described Galeen's screenplay as "" ("full of poetry, full of rhythm").