The Horror Classics Box Number 1 surprises here with a pretty decent looking print. What strikes me as strange is the changing of the character names in the intertitles back to the names from Stoker's Dracula (on which Nosferatu is loosely based). Someone must have thought this a good idea after the trouble Murnau had with Stoker's estate had faded. But why change "Wisburg" (in our reality Wismar) to Bremen? It's puzzling.
Quite bizarre acting real estate agent Knock/Renfield sends his young protégé Hutter/Harker to Transylvania to sell a house in Wisburg to a certain Count Orlok/Dracula. Hutter leaves behind his beloved wife Ellen/Nina (yes, I know that her name should be Mina) without a suspicion that he will soon unwittingly send plague and death back to his hometown.
I think I have already mentioned how much I tend to watch silent movies for their dreamlike qualities. This way I don't have the trouble accepting the reality of what I see that many people of my generation (at least those parts that actually know of their existence) seem to have with films this old and so far away from modern sensibilities.
More expressionist films like Nosferatu are not exactly making this difficult, since they never wanted to be naturalistic anyway. (Nothing ages as badly as yesterday's realism)
I can not add very much to the amount of clever things already written about this movie, so I'll just comment shortly on two points.
Firstly, I am awed by the effectiveness of Max Schreck as Orlok. His simple and effective make-up, but most of all his body language completely convince me of him as an ancient, terrible being, so out of touch with time and life itself he cannot bring anything but plague and death.
Secondly, does it seem strange if I see Ellen Hutter, who sacrifices herself to save her husband and her hometown in an act of astounding courage, as the mother of all courageous horror heroines?
Friday, May 2, 2008
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