Nosferatu 2.0

So the classic 1922 silent PSA about the dangers of out-of-country home ownership, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, is officially getting a remake. It's good to see that these new filmmakers understand the central theme of vampire stories -- that eternal preservation and an unwillingness to move on from the past can yield monstrous things -- and have come together for a moment of revitalization. It's amusing to see that purists are up in arms, having missed the irony. Especially since a little irony is good for the blood.

Ba-dum tschhh.

Nosferatu is the first cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula and a classic icon of German Expressionist horror. It's a beautiful film. Director F.W. Murnau got the horror to work on a scratchy, shaky monochrome level that remains chilling even in 2015, and it works in absolute silence.

Real life horror is often silent itself: no churning background music or scare chords turn on for us real life creatures. It's hard sometimes to recognize horror, silent horror, and to process it. The eerie cello music defines the genre on the screen, but everyday moments have to make do without it.

People have called Nosferatu the best horror film ever made. I don't know who these people are or what precisely their secret Illuminati agenda entails, but I think that the silence works strongly in Orlok's favor. There's a scene where the Count's shadow claws its way up the wall of his intended victim, and if you watch it without any soundtrack it claws its way in complete, absolute silence. This is exactly what you lie awake in bed thinking of: the shadow of a monster coming closer, closer, closer to your door without so much as a breath of warning. Orlok becomes a nightmare creature you bring home with you, something that translates from the screen to your dark corner. The quiet of the movie and the quiet of your nighttime room helps to make that transition. If we are separated from fictional horror by degrees, then the absence of suspenseful music, the presence of silence, is one less degree of separation.

There are other factors in the film's favor. Orlok is no suave Romantic and inexplicably sexy gentleman of the night. In the age of a genre that keeps trying to clone Lestat de Lioncourt it's quite the difference to see the vampire as a creature of plague and infection. Our resident Not-Dracula (at the time the rights to Dracula had been withheld, so the movie went with alternative names) is associated with rats in practically all he is and does, from his rodent-like teeth and claws to the plague-bearing reputation. Vampirism is no Dark Gift, but a terrible illness.

I don't really know how we ended up with this:

When we started out with this:

But I'm sure that it's a long and fascinating transition, possibly tied to changing views on sexuality and monstrosity as well as public comfort with illness and death. I appreciate both expressions, the old gaunt corpse wandering around Eastern Europe and Lestat playing "Sympathy For The Devil" while he speeds away at the end of Interview With The Vampire.

It will be neat, though, to see another adaptation of Nosferatu as the unspeakable evil of plague. I suffered through four Twilight Saga films. I feel like the universe owes me Orlok 2015 to achieve cosmic balance once again.

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