BEFORE: Today is load-in day for the New York Comic-Con. So I feel like I just got back after my break, and it's almost time to shut down again for a few more days. There's no way I can stay up late to watch movies if I have to be at the booth every morning by 9. OK, 9:15. But I have been catching up on TV lately, during my time off I binged the final season of "Mad Men" on Netflix, since waiting for AMC to post the episodes On Demand was taking way too long. What a disappointing final episode, but I guess maybe there was no satisfying way to end such a long-running, complicated show. Since I finished that I've been focused on clearing my tapes of July shows, and then the other night I started watching "Stranger Things". Appropriate for Halloween month, plus the 2nd season is starting at the end of the month, so I might as well get Season 1 watched. It's too much a part of pop culture for me to avoid it any longer - when the MAD Magazine parody comes out, I feel I should probably watch the damn show. But I feel like maybe I've read too much about it to fully enjoy it.
Today I'm finishing up my three-film exploration of early horror films that were part of the German Expressionist Movement - hey, it's high time we had some class around here, right? I admit, TCM ran these three films together about 2 years ago, as part of their "From Caligari to Hitler" programming, based off the 1947 book by Siegfried Kracauer that was a psychological history of pre-World War II Germany. Apparently the films of the Wiemar Republic provided insight to the unconscious motivations of the German people, so really, anyone who watched these last three films should have seen Hitler coming, right?
Ah, if only it were that easy. That's a bit like saying that anyone who watched "Zoolander", "The Associate" and "Home Alone 2" should have known that Donald Trump would be elected President and screw up the whole country. It's just too pat of an answer.
THE PLOT: Vampire Count Orlok expresses interest in a new residence and real estate agent Hutter's wife.
AFTER: If this plot seems very familiar to you, there's a very good reason - it's basically Bram Stoker's "Dracula", with all the character names changed. But it got filmed first in Germany, so when Universal made the famous 1931 film "Dracula", there might have been a few people who thought the plot was too derivative of "Nosferatu". Now I'm not sure what the copyright laws were like back in 1922, but this represents typical German behavior, taking another person's story and changing the title - they basically pulled the same sort of thing in World War II, taking over Poland and Austria and changing those countries' names to "Germany".
But I digress. Enough about Hitler, and for that matter, enough about Twitler, aka Orange Hitler, aka Donald Drumpf. He's got nothing to do with Nosferatu/Dracula, right? I mean, one of them is a parasite that drains people of their resources, lives in a castle and seduces young, beautiful women - and the other one, of course, is Nosferatu. Seriously, though, in this film Nosferatu wants to buy some real estate (uh oh...) in Germany and contacts an agent named Knock about some depressed properties across the street. Presumably he wants to tear them down and build a casino (seriously, like THE BEST casino, it's going to be yuuuuge.) So Knock sends his man Hutter to Trumpsylvania to meet with Count Orlov.
Hutter is warned by the townspeople not to travel the countryside at night, because of the "werewolf", but that's a different film, right? They really should have warned him about Orlov, who welcomes Hutter to his castle and then feeds him dinner and gives him a really sharp knife to cut his meat. Hutter manages to cut himself with the dinner knife (Seriously? Who does that? I've been cutting my food with knives for at least 45 years and I've never drawn blood...) and Orlov offers to clean up the blood with his tongue, which for some reason is not any kind of red flag. Later on, Hutter wonders why he's got two giant mosquito bites on his neck, since he doesn't recall being bitten. NITPICK POINT: Hutter says these two puncture marks are on "both sides" of his neck, but given the placement of most vampires' fangs, that's darn near impossible.
Some strange behavior is acceptable on Hutter's part, because Orlov/Nosferatu probably has him under his sway at this point. But to see a bunch of coffins loading themselves on to a coach and NOT say anything? Way to not take a stand, Hutter. Even when Hutter sees that Nosferatu sleeps in a coffin, and we all know now that's the time that a vampire is most vulnerable, he does nothing but run back to his room and hide. Germans, am I right? They just can't stand up to authority...
Nosferatu also seems able to entrance Hutter's lady, Ellen, from a distance, even though he's never met her and has no idea where she lives. I think in other versions of the "Dracula" story, Mina Harker comes to Dracula's castle with her husband, and this seems more believable when she gets entranced. Most hypnosis, even vampire hypnosis, probably requires that the subject be in the same room at some point.
Nosferatu's coffins are then shipped by boat to Germany (NITPICK POINT: Why so many coffins? Does he sleep in several of them, or is he bringing along some vampire pals?) and Nosferatu manages to find something to eat along the way by drinking the blood of the ship's crew, so by the time the ship lands in port at Wisborg, he's the sole passenger - because that's not suspicious at all. He enjoys the German food in town (Germans, of course) and the citizens start to believe that a plague has hit town. Turns out that when the Transylvanians come to town, they're not sending their best people - they're sending vampires, rapists - and some, I assume, are good people. But you can't build a wall to keep out vampires if they're going to come to town by boat. Anyway, I think a vampire could probably just turn into a bat and fly over a wall, right?
There are some differences between "Nosferatu" and Bram Stoker's novel, most notably the ending, and the fact that Nosferatu drinks blood but does not turn other people into vampires - what is a vampire without his cult following? Still, Bram Stoker's widow ended up suing the company that made this film, and as a result all known prints and negatives were destroyed. However, there were unknown prints in other countries, so the film survived. And then in a display of karmic irony, "Nosferatu" itself fell out of copyright protection and into the public domain. So Werner Herzog was able to direct a remake in 1979. Just like vampires themselves, this film was notoriously hard to kill.
Starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Georg H. Schnell, Ruth Landshoff, Gustav Botz, Alexander Granach (last seen in "For Whom the Bell Tolls"), John Gottowt, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz, Guido Herzfeld.
RATING: 4 out of 10 swarming rats
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