Score: 100/100
Score on a par with: The Seventh Seal 100/100; The Battle of Algiers 100/100; The Science of Sleep 100/100; Deep Water 100/100; Good Night, And Good Luck 96/100; The Constant Gardener 98/100; Corpse Bride 95/100; Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 96/100; I Heart Huckabee 100/100; The Incredibles 98/100; Lost in Translation 100/100; The Breakfast Club 96/100; The Quiet American 98/100; The Royal Tenenbaums 98/100
City Screen in York occasionally shows some very interesting films as a kind of antidote to the mindless blockbusters that the studio production lines churn out. Nosferatu, F W Murnau’s adaptation of Dracula, made in 1922, is just such an interesting film.
This showing of the film was accompanied by a delightfully atmospheric live soundtrack by Darryn Harkness (apparently from a band called Serafin), which was extremely cleverly done (by looping various tracks while he played another himself, I think) and very effective in building up the tension along with the film. I expect that Harkness’s soundtrack is likely to be a good deal better than the original, which in 1922 would have been tinkled out by a man in a dinner suit on an out of tune upright at the front of the auditorium.
Made only twenty-five years after Dracula’s publication – imagine a film made today of a book from 1982 (like Battlefield Earth, to take a terrible example) and you’ve got the time-frame – Nosferatu is one of those films that everyone knows without ever necessarily having seen except in parody (in The Fast Show, for example). The goblin-faced Count Orlok is the Count Dracula figure, and although some of his mannerisms (especially the way he reads and walks) conjure up Spike Milligan or Dick Dastardly more readily than genuine terror, there is still something extremely powerful and sinister about him and it is certainly the most persuasive depiction of Count Dracula that I have seen. The scenes in which Orlok comes to drink blood during the night and in which he rises out of his coffin aboard the Demeter are quite seriously chilling, and we are at sufficient temporal distance now for even the rather prosaic street-scenes to look alien and frightening.
There may have been countless adaptations of Dracula onto film, but this is still the one to see. It’s available on DVD in various versions.
My complication had a little complication.
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