"NOSFERATU" INFECTIOUS

          F.W. Murnau's 1922 German Expressionist vision of Dracula casts an indelible portrait of the vampire.
          Featuring the enigmatic Max Schreck as Count Orlok, Nosferatu excels in spite of Murnau's inability to secure the rights to Bram Stoker's novel.
          Murnau's "Symphony of Horror," with a screenplay freely adapted by Henrik Galeen, concerns the Great Plague of Wisborg in 1838--or rather, its cause: Nosferatu, a pestilential Son of Belial with "a name like the sound of the death bird at midnight."
          Industrious young real estate agent Hutter believes he stands to make a healthy commission delivering in person papers drawn up for the Transylvanian Count's purchase of a "handsome, deserted house" in Wisborg. Hutter's boss, Knock--who acts like the character Renfield in the novel--pointedly neglects to mention that he's sending Hutter on an errand to a highly unusual client with long claws, rat-like teeth, and an appetite for human blood obtained directly from the source. Like a juice-box.
          Hutter has a wife, Ellen, whose neck the Count immediately covets. She, meanwhile, has a mystical connection through sleep and dream with Hutter and the Count far away in the Carpathians.
          In 1922, black and white was not exactly black and white. It was actually common practice to use a colored filter over the camera lens. A blue filter, for example, indicates outdoor nighttime shots. Particularly in the restored Kino edition, astoundingly clean and clear frames repeatedly please the eye.
          This is because it's Expressionist. Due to WWI, German filmmakers were cut off from the world in terms of the still-emerging art and the business associated with it. The striking visuals--stylized sets, unconventional camera angles, and exceptional use of shadows--plus extreme subject matter (such as vampires) speaking to the present and the eternal in the higher language of the figurative, still provide the stock for the cinematic soup of the world.
          Werner Herzog re-made the classic in 1979 with Klaus Kinski as Orlok, and in most ways it's the better version. That same year, Stephen King's made-for-TV 'Salem's Lot was filmed in Ferndale, California, with a non-vocal vampire looking like a dead-ringer for Orlok. (For that matter, so does Freddy Kruger in silhouette, who also operates in the dream realm.)
          Another goodie is Shadow of the Vampire (2000), which stars John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as, not the actor Max Schreck, but as an actual vampire that Murnau was somehow able to procure.
          The first vampire movie got it right. The Count is supposed to be repellent. That's in keeping with the novel, and that's what works best. Not a suave dude, but a repugnant figure. Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman all bring their own fantastic interpretation, but it is Max Schreck who casts the longest vampire shadow.
          Seek Nosferatu wherever fine films are found--and preferably do so by train.