ROOOOOAAAAARRGGHH!! Sorry to all my friends whose stuff I should have been reading, but I've been aw...
ROOOOOAAAAARRGGHH!! Sorry to all my friends whose stuff I should have been reading, but I've been away for ages! But now I have returned! Heavy Metal Rules!
Member since:14.12.2000
Reviews:65
Members who trust:19
I will first admit that I watched this film purely because it is a classic of the genre - I wasn’t actually expecting the film to be any good. I certainly wasn’t expecting to be scared. All of these expectations just made the actual experience of watching the film much better.
Made in 1922 this is essentially the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula moved to Germany, filmed by the genius FW Murnau, one of the great film directors. The story, if you’ve never read the book, is that an estate agent travels to an out of the way location in order to business with a mysterious nobleman, Count Dracula, in the book, Graf Orlock in this version. There he sells the Count property in a large city, Bremen in this case. But while staying at the castle he discovers the awful truth - that the Graf is a vampire, who plans to move to fresh pastures where his evil is unknown. He is imprisoned in the castle as the Graf leaves, but escapes and pursues the vampire, who has set eyes on his young wife. He follows through apparently plague ridden towns, actually suffering the depredations of the vampire. He arrives back, but the vampire is being helped by his servant, a mad man imprisoned in the local asylum. At the end of the tale, the vampire is destroyed by being lured into the sunlight.
The film is surprisingly very creepy for a silent movie, or possibly because it is a silent movie. The fact that there is no sound but mournful music, and the whole things is filmed in stark black and white, gives the hole films a dark and brooding quality.
But what really makes this film is Graf Orlock. He has none of the human features of later vampires of film - his head is bald, his ears are pointed like a bat’s and his incisors are grotesque and huge, giving him a ratlike appearance. His head constantly darts from side to side, and his beady eyes seem to gleam. The fingers are horribly elongated and clawed, and he is constantly accompanied by plague bearing vermin. Plague is a constant feature of the film, and the scenes of the plague which the creature brings to towns on his journey is horrifying. The thing is the very epitome of parasitic evil, and some suggested that Murnau unconsciously predicted the evil of Hitler in his portrayal of the insidious creature. The use of shadows is also a touch of pure genius. Instead of not casting a shadow like many vampires, Orlok’s shadow precedes him and enlarges to fill vast spaces, giving him a terrifying looming presence. The scene where he mounts the stairs to feast on Greta, and his long fingered, distorted shadow goes before him, is genuinely chilling. You can even see a homage to this in the latest Dracula film, the 1994 version by Francis Ford Coppola.
In conclusion, this is a genuinely scary film. Not in a "jump out and slash off someone’s head and give you a bit of a shock" way, but in a genuinely unsettling way. The sense of darkness is almost impenetrable. Interestingly the film also invented the idea that the vampire is vulnerable to the light of the sun - the scene where the cock crows and Orlock melts away like a ghost at the touch of the light is magnificent, and created a precedent which most people take for granted. So if you want a real creepy classic of the vampire genre, get hold of this magnificent film right away.
How helpful would this review be to a person making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
Production Year: 2000 - Horror - Director: Keenen Ivory Wayans - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Carmen Electra, Anna Faris, Kurt Fuller, James Van Der Beek, Keenen Ivory Wayans
full title of the film is Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nossferatu, a symphony of dread). Nothing could sum it up better. Max Schreck was Nosferatu by the way. Nice opinion.
Spongly 02.02.2001 14:11
Cheers Sy!
I'd heard of the film - Shadow of the Vampire - it's released today in fact. I don't know who's in it apart from the fact that John Malkovitch is Murnau.
Klaus Kinski was in the 1979 remake of Nosferatu, and was really good - I hope he's in this one too.
Oh, and in case you're wondering about the other comments, they're not entirely serious...I hope.
Feb 2nd, 2001
very helpful by (90%):
helpful by (10%):
