Week 2: Nosferatu 1922 film (extra credit: 1)

 This movie is basically a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, just under a different name. That, is more than I can say for the 1931 Frankenstein movie. The acting is at times melodramatic and silly, and the film lacks a good set-up and pay-off system that takes Orlok for 'unnerving and weird ' to 'horrifying and evil,' but the last scene, where he's trying to hypnotize Ellen and the camera cuts between her fighting his control and him staring out the window are genuinely scary. And then the sun rises and he just, dies without the characters being actually responsible.

Otherwise, my problem with Nosferatu are the same that I had with Dracula; it drags on through the plot at a glacial pace as all the information neatly falls into place. In Dracula though, Mina's investigative compiling of information that is the novel itself makes that interesting. On the topic of Mina, Nosferatu completely ruined all that Mina does for the story of Dracula by making her a swooning woman in white fair-maiden like? No thanks. Also there were some pretty xenophobic vibes from parts of the film, specifically standing out was the moment the carriage driver for Hutter refused to drive forward, citing 'over there is where strange and unnatural things happen.' Also, how, for some reason, a plague arrived along with Orlok, and then vanished from the population when he died. The titular vampire has also undergone a large cosmetic change from the book to the movie, in that Orlok has none of the beauty or grace or charisma Dracula is described as having, and looks like an anti-semitic caricature, to be frank. Anti-semitism and xenophobia, in a 1920s German film? More likely than you think.

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