Murnau's Nosferatu: a symphony of horror between occultism and plague
F. W. Murnau's 1922 film, the occultist Albin Grau and the lawsuit by Stoker's heirs: the story of the most unsettling vampire of silent cinema.
In March 1922, in Berlin, a film with an eloquent subtitle was presented with great ceremony: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, a symphony of horror. It was directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, then a director in his early thirties, and produced by a small, newly founded company, Prana Film. The company's name, taken from a Sanskrit term for the vital breath, already reveals the interest in the occult of one of its founders.
Albin Grau, producer and occultist
Albin Grau, an architect, painter and designer, was the artistic director of Prana Film and designed its posters and sets. He was connected with German occultist circles and later became a prominent figure in the Fraternitas Saturni, an esoteric lodge founded in Berlin in the 1920s. According to a story attributed to Grau himself, the idea of a vampire film came to him during the war while listening to a Serbian farmer talk about the undead; the story cannot be verified and should be taken as an anecdote.
Signs of this interest appear in the film: a letter covered in mysterious symbols, a book on vampires consulted by the protagonists, a professor who studies carnivorous plants and polyps as images of predatory nature. These details place the horror within a worldview in which occult forces run through the natural realm as well.
An unauthorised Dracula
The screenplay, written by Henrik Galeen, was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897. To avoid trouble the names were changed: the count became Orlok and the setting moved to a northern German town, Wisborg. Stoker's widow, Florence, sued and won a court order for copies of the film to be destroyed. Fortunately some survived abroad, making later restorations possible.
The film introduced an element destined for great success: the vampire's death in sunlight, absent from Stoker's novel, where the count can move about by day, though with reduced powers. Since then the idea that morning light destroys the undead has become part of the common imagination, so much so that many believe it to be an ancient element of folklore.
Real landscapes and shadows
Unlike Caligari, shot entirely in the studio with painted backdrops, Nosferatu was largely filmed on location, in Wismar, in Lübeck and in the Slovak Carpathians, where Orava Castle became the count's home. Murnau achieved the supernatural effect with simple means: negative film, accelerated shots, superimpositions and above all shadows, such as the famous one of the hand climbing a staircase.
Max Schreck gave the count an appearance far from the aristocratic seducer of later versions: bald, with pointed ears, very long fingers and the teeth of a rodent. The vampire arrives by sea with the rats and brings the plague with him, joining the fear of the undead to the ancient fear of the epidemics that had devastated European cities.
Nosferatu thus remains a work in which dark Romanticism, Balkan folklore filtered through literature and the occultism of Weimar Berlin converge. Its strength lies not in spectacular effects but in its ability to make the landscape itself seem inhabited by something alien. A century after its release, Orlok's silhouette remains one of the most recognisable images in the history of cinema.