Once a movie is by and large accepted as a classic, there is not much that it can do to reverse that decision. Sure, some movies don’t age as well as others, they lose their relevance or they make references to parts of an era that are long gone and forgotten. Keep in mind, though, that the film industry’s really only been around for about a hundred years, but in that time we’ve amassed quite a library of films that would be considered historically or aesthetically important. But there becomes a point where, no matter how groundbreaking a film is, no matter how revolutionary or insightful or heart-stoppingly wonderful a piece of cinema it is, it just becomes so dated that it affects how you watch it. You pop in The Godfather and it’s always going to have that strong message of the mixing of corruption and family and whatever else that movie’s about, but when you watch a “classic” that is clearly past its prime, the mere quality of its oldness becomes a noticeable factor in and of itself.
Enter “Nosferatu,” directed by a man named F.W. Murnau (the F.W. stands for Friedrich Wilhelm, but apparently even he thought it was too German to keep calling himself by his full name). You’ve probably never heard of F.W. because he’s been dead for quite some time. In fact, everyone involved with this movie is dead, many of them were dead by the time World War II broke out, and all of them were dead by the 70’s. Many of their children are probably dead as well. I know I’m painting a grim portrait, but it’s just to show you how absolutely old this movie is.
“Nosferatu” is consistently ranked among the top 100 films ever made by any magazine or institution who claims to give a damn about cinema, and to say the movie was a revolution for its time is completely true. F.W. Murnau not only wanted to show action, he wanted to show where it was happening. Setting plays a huge part in “Nosferatu” where it rarely did in films preceding it. Murnau sets up some artistically beautiful shots in his film, a method which at the time, really was groundbreaking.
So it was ahead of its time, but remember, its time was 1922. It’s gotten to the point where the technology available to make it (or lack thereof) is so prominent, it takes away from the experience. The film is so grainy and skippy and jumpy, it’s like a first date on the beach. And the actors! Oh the actors with their overacting! These are people who began their careers without the medium of film, so they learned the craft of stage acting and only stage acting. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great way to perform when you have audience members half a mile away, but on film every action comes off as grandiose and every emotion is so overwrought. It’s not so much a Charlie Chaplin type of exaggeration, it’s more of a starved for attention exaggeration. Granted, these actors had to convey the language through their actions, because hey, silent film’s a bitch like that.
Still, none of this explains why when the film does cut to a block of text (a narration by an unseen character, or a page from a book, for example), it stays there for a full minute. It’s three sentences, honestly, I know the illiteracy rate was higher back then, but the people who could read should have been able to do so at more than a word a lifetime. It seems like we’re staring at these short, short pages of text for well longer than is required. And at one point it repeats! A second character reads from a book that had already been read, and yet the page comes up again, for the same amount of time as before. It’s the definition of redundant. I mean that the action demonstrates redundancy in its purest form, the page that was read twice didn’t actually have the definition of redundancy on it.
I can also appreciate the fact that this was made in a time where they must have still been experimenting with the concept of a film having a soundtrack. There is what I think can technically be called music playing, but it’s like someone let a toddler loose in a room with a piano and a one-string bass. There’s almost no point where the music adds to the scene at hand, nor does it correlate to the actions that are taking place on screen. It’s all just wandering notes. I like that there’s some sound, I just wish it wasn’t random sound. For a film that has the word "Symphony" in its subtitle, you'd expect the music not to suck so much.
Ok… ok deep breath. I’m getting too worked up about stuff that was really out of the foresight of the creators, it was no fault of their’s that the film wouldn’t live up to future standards. What’s important to remember is that for its time this was as good as it got. I need to focus on the positive. And boy oh boy is there one giant nose nugget of positive yet to pick.
Despite what I said about the acting, it does not apply to the antagonist of the film, Count Orlok (it’s actually supposed to be Dracula, but they couldn’t get the rights to that so shhhhh) played by a gentleman named Max Schreck (different spelling from the Christopher Walken character in Batman Returns, but allegedly the inspiration for it). Now, I know nothing about Max Schreck or his other work, but I can assume that he is either the greatest actor to have ever lived, or completely and utterly psychotic. If Bela Lugosi romanticized the vampire, that’s only because Max Schreck first presented the notion of a vampire as being creepy as Satan’s grundle. And really, when you’re perceived as being as creepy as Lucifer’s taint, you can really only go up from there. I’m confident that the image of Max Schreck as Orlok will haunt me for a good ten months, and even after it’s done haunting me, it’ll still be there, oh yes, he’ll be lurking down there in my mind with his wide, bulgy eyes with dark circles and his inhuman thinness and his… his long fingernails and weird turban thing he sometimes wears and his crooked, pointy teeth, and the way he walks without bending a single joint in his body and the way he always turns around to look behind him, with the eyes looking first, and then the rest of his head… so slooooowwwwly.
What I’m trying to say is that, despite its age, “Nosferatu” will still give you a good scare, or at least creep you out, and you should definitely give it a chance, but prepare to have the image of Orlok tattooed in your dreams for a while afterwards, probably accompanied by some shitty music.
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