With Robert Eggers’s remake out within the month, it is the perfect time for a documentary on the production and legacy of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. At 102 years old, it is one of the oldest monster films, with the iconic Orlok still casting his shadow over the collective human subconscious. Robin Bextor’s Nosferatu: The Real Story sets out to uncover the grip of Nosferatu’s legacy and its influence over cinema has had over cinema.
The documentary charts the lives and influences of its director unit, the libertine culture of post-war Berlin, the state of German Cinema, and the role of German Expressionism. It presents a holistic examination of Nosferatu‘s production. Bextor provides biographies on director F. W. Murnau, cinematographer Fritz Wagner, and scriptwriter Henrik Galeen.
Through these biographies, we see how they took creative approaches to Nosferatu’s technical and narrative production, resulting in a trailblazing film. One of the first films to be shot on location, Murnau and Wagner manipulated the natural environment through optical effects, symmetrical framing, editorial geography, and dissolves. They made the normal seem uncanny and the extraordinary commonplace. While such approaches are routine in cinema today, they were ground-breaking in 1922.
But throughout, Bextor focuses on Prana Film owner and film producer Albin Grau. Grau’s influence hangs over Nosferatu from the beginning, from his experiences serving on the Balkans front and his anecdotal account of learning of vampires to his involvement in occult societies, which he infused the film with throughout its production. The apocalyptic imagery of death and plague is rooted in Grau’s experience of the First World War, his vampire draining the life from Europe and leaving death in its wake.
Bextor charts the film from its earliest concept right through to release, its near destruction after the copyright case by Florence Stoker, wife of Dracula author Bram, to Lottle Eisner and her work rescuing of the film from Paris and New York film archives.
However, one question hangs over Nosferatu: The Real Story. Who is it for? Nosferatu is one of the most studied films in history and has been in the public domain since 2019. For film buffs and historians, the target audience is already well-treaded ground. Where Real Story stands out is incorporating Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre and Robert Eggers’s filmography. The last 10 minutes feel like a promo for the upcoming remake.
Real Story feels like a 2000s-era DVD extra in many ways, down to the use of Old Film effects and Titles. This will be a special feature on the Blu-Ray of Egger’s film come April. But this is a minor criticism given the scope of Real Story. It is a thorough and multi-layered textual and visual analysis of a classic horror that incorporates philosophical, technical, and historical context and background and serves as a study of both the vampire film, which still fascinates us, and Weimar Cinema.
Nosferatu: The Real Story is released on UK digital 16 December from Reel 2 Reel Films
