silver nitrate notes

Nosferatu and the Light Schreck Walked Into

2 nov 2010

Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is the film he made before the Fox years. The budget was small, the source was a Bram Stoker novel Murnau's producer Albin Grau had not bought the rights to, and Stoker's widow sued. German courts ordered all copies destroyed. A few prints survived outside Germany and are the reason we have the film at all.

What Murnau and his cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner did is work out, on a budget that should have produced nothing, the first serious use of location shooting as a horror aesthetic. Most of the film is shot outdoors. The Carpathian sequences were filmed in Slovakia, the Wisborg scenes in Wismar and Lübeck. These are real places, photographed in daylight. Wagner's contribution was to use this daylight, reshape it with filtering and underexposure, and make something more frightening than any of the painted sets of Caligari.

Look at the sequence where Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) crosses the bridge into the Count's country. Wagner shoots it in natural daylight, at low sun, from a distance. The bridge is real. The hills behind it are real. But the exposure is pushed down so that the whole shot reads as twilight rather than midday, and Wagner has inserted the subtitle "and when he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him." There is no phantom on screen. There is just a man on a bridge in underexposed late afternoon. The viewer does the rest.

The Count himself, played by Max Schreck, appears mostly in shadow. When he does walk into light, Wagner has lit him from below to make the long fingers and the pointed head register as anatomy rather than costume. The shot of his shadow climbing the staircase at the end of the film is, I think, the single most copied shot in all horror cinema; its obvious descendants include the shadow of Powell in The Night of the Hunter thirty-three years later.

Schreck has become a legend of his own, helped by the Willem Dafoe performance in Shadow of the Vampire (2000). The truth is less lurid than the myth. Schreck was a working German actor, father of four, who took the part because Murnau paid him for it. He went on with his career. But the face on screen, lit the way Wagner lit it, is still the face.

[ « prev: Modern Times · next: Greed » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Eisner, Lotte. Murnau. University of California Press, 1973.
[2] Eisner, Lotte. The Haunted Screen. University of California Press, 1969 ed.
[3] Prawer, S.S. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. BFI Film Classics, 2004.
[4] Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler. Princeton UP, 1947.