THE CINEMATIC (UN)LIFE OF COUNT DRACULA
1922-1979
Part I: “A Symphony of Shudders”

July 13 1929
The Film Society has finally caved in to reason and handed the copy of that blasted film to me.
Just when I begin to think that everything Abraham worked so hard for is safe and out of the hands of profiteering criminals, yet another copy surfaces. Irritable piece of filth.
Blast Murnau and his colleagues!
I have consigned this particular copy to the furnace and even now am watching it burn. Seeing the tiny sparks floating up from the flames is doing me a world of good. The smoke though, reminds me of how that cadaverous thing met its demise.
I still recall how that monster looked. A repulsive, man-sized rodent! Revolting.
And the Society had the gall… the unabashed audacity, to invite me to its screening, even after all the fuss and bother of my legal entanglements with Prana-Film.
The film isn’t even any good at all. They changed the ending, for pity’s sake!
Sunlight, indeed.
What would have been so difficult about a Bowie knife?
Ridiculous.


1922.
Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s classic silent film, Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens, is released.
For the purposes of this article, three important points to take note of.

One: the film is a thinly-veiled (and unauthorized) reworking of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, merely changing character names (Dracula becomes Graf Orlock; Lucy Westenra becomes Annie Harding; Van Helsing becomes Bulwar), locales (London becomes Bremen), and time periods (1893 winds back to 1838).
Florence Stoker’s campaign to have every single copy of the film destroyed is legendary.
Several times, beginning in July 1925, when all the copies owned by the Deutsch-Amerikansch Film Union were reportedly destroyed, Stoker’s widow came close to her goal.
But always, when it seemed that the film had finally been obliterated, the existence of another copy would come to her attention, and her protests would begin anew. This crusade was to continue till her death in 1937.
In the end though, what managed to escape her attention was a talkie that surfaced in 1930. Entitled Die Zwolfte Stunde (The Twelfth Hour), it was later discovered to be none other than Murnau’s Nosferatu, with a music-and-effects track added onto it.
Of this particular turn of events, writer Denis Gifford has said, “Nosferatu is the classic example of art saved from destruction by piracy.”


Two: visually, Graf Orlock’s bald, rat-like countenance has served as inspiration for everything from Tobe Hooper’s TV adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, to a whole clan of vampires in White Wolf’s role playing game, Vampire: The Masquerade, to the Reapers in Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II.

Three: Orlock’s death—disintegrated by the rays of the rising sun—appears nowhere in Stoker’s novel; neither does traditional folklore say that a vampire is affected by the sun in this manner.
Death by sunlight is a purely cinematic invention that has since filtered into vampiric lore, becoming an invaluable (and to some, indispensable) addition to the body of myth that has accreted around the nocturnal creature.
Think how different vampires would be today, if Florence Stoker had succeeded in her campaign.
No “death by disco” climax in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk Till Dawn; no FX-laden Chris Sarandon death scene in Tom Holland’s Fright Night; no fiery ends for the down-and-dirty deadheads of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark; and the entire premise of David Slade’s 30 Days of Night would be meaningless.
Which just goes to prove that film is a powerful medium, rearranging the public’s perception of facts, fallacies, and fables.


Nosferatu was to be merely the first of a whole slew of films that would be based on Stoker’s novel, the stage adaptation, or simply feature a character named Dracula, whether or not he resembled Stoker’s character.
And just to illustrate the depths that crass exploitation can go, there have also been films that have had “Dracula” in their titles, but did not even have a character with that name appearing in the film itself.
Case in point: Blood of Dracula, which was about a hypnotized girl developing a taste for blood. No Count whatsoever.

Parting shot: Reviews of Blade II, 30 Days of Night, and Shadow of the Vampire (which presents a fictionalized look at the filming of Nosferatu) can be found in the Archive.

In Part II of “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” (also to be found elsewhere in the Archive), we take a look at the stage adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula, to get a better understanding of the film adaptations from 1931 onwards.
The article above is a slightly altered portion of the second part of the previously published Blood, Love and Rhetoric series of articles written in 1997, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
The opening diary entry is of course, a fiction of mine.
Much love and thanx to Karen, for inviting me into the sandbox where this piece of writing (and so many others) first got to play.

(Nosferatu OS’s courtesy of impawards.com; image courtesy of greencine.com; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)

reVIEW (43)
SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE

“Our battle, our struggle, is to create art. Our weapon is the moving picture.
“Because we have the moving picture, our paintings will grow and recede. Our poetry will be shadows that lengthen and conceal. Our light will play across living faces that laugh and agonize. And our music will linger and finally overwhelm because it will have a context as certain as the grave.
“We are scientists engaged in the creation of memory. But our memory will neither blur, nor fade.”
-- F.W. Murnau

Nicolas Cage certainly has an interesting view of vampires.
In 1989, he starred in Robert Bierman‘s Vampire’s Kiss, a black comedy in which he played poor, befuddled Peter Loew, who believes—perhaps mistakenly—that he’s been bitten by a vampire.
11 years later, Cage chose as his feature producing debut, E. Elias Merhige’s brilliant take on Nosferatu, Shadow of the Vampire.

Here, noted German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (John Malkovich) sets off to film (without the widow Stoker’s permission) Dracula, and in the interests of authenticity, has a real vampire (Willem Dafoe) pretend to be an actor named Max Schreck, to play Nosferatu’s Count Dracula stand-in, Count Orlock.
As early as that singular premise—with its funhouse mirroring of truth masquerading as fiction, to play a fiction which is both truth (as Schreck/Orlock really is a vampire) and a double fiction (Orlock is merely Dracula, under a different name); all of this, of course, a fiction of a truth, as we see a behind-the-scenes-look-that-never-was of the making of Nosferatu—it should be plainly evident that Shadow of the Vampire is so much more than your average cinematic blood-sucking experience.
With a script by Steven Katz, Shadow of the Vampire asks the central question, How far is an artist willing to go for his art? And in asking that question, Shadow also explores the double-headed metaphor of art as vampire, and art as a means to immortality.
It also takes the film industry to task. Humourously, by poking fun at how a star’s ego can hijack a production, and darkly, by presenting the camera (in the film, merely an extension of the director) as cold, apathetic observer and recorder, as leecher of vitality and life, an idea which reaches its apex in a chilling sequence that touches on the ultimate disposability of actresses in the grand old Boy’s Club of movie-making.

Merhige takes all of this weighty material and crafts a tantalizing portrait of the high cost of art and the dangers of obsessively brilliant artists.
And who else to play the narrative’s obsessively brilliant artist, but John Malkovich?
Malkovich’s Murnau is calculating and exacting, a cinema despot who asks his extras not to “act,” but rather, to “be.” In his white lab coat and goggles, he is the mad scientist only too willing to go to extreme lengths to complete his celluloid Monster.
But he meets his nemesis in Schreck, a role that Dafoe clearly dives into with relish. As part of the ruse, his Schreck is apparently the ultimate method actor, appearing to the cast and crew always in costume, and constantly in character.
And if you’ve seen Murnau’s Nosferatu, you’ll note that Dafoe nails the oddly disturbing mannerisms actor Max Schreck displayed in that classic of German Expressionism.
But it isn’t just that peculiar physicality that Dafoe brings to his performance. He also brings a humour, curiously both self-effacing and cunningly self-aware, as when, in one scene, he is at first coached as to his character’s motivation, before taking his first stab at ad lib.
Dafoe also brings a strange air of pathos to his character that serves to inform a role that could easily have been all melodramatic pantomime gesture and Vaudevillian tics, with some genuine longing and emotion.
What gives Shadow even more of a kick is how awesome and effective the rest of its cast is: genre stalwart Udo Kier, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, Catherine McCormack, who all go about recreating scenes and sequences from Nosferatu like skilled and particularly respectful grave robbers, making the film, aside from everything else, a wonderful homage to a masterpiece of black-and-white cinema.

Shadow of the Vampire also has much in common with films like John Madden‘s Shakespeare In Love and Ken Russell’s Gothic, films which use actual historical figures to propose a fictional scenario that ultimately informs an artist’s work and creative sensibilities.
Or, as I put it earlier, films that show a behind-the-scenes-look-that-never-was of a film, or play, or novel.
So at this point, I think it should be stated in so many words: Shadow of the Vampire may have fangs, but it really isn’t about neck-biting and blood. It’s a fascinating and complex entry in the vaults of vampire cinema, one that is only willing and eager to be discussed and debated over.
After all, with so many funhouse mirrors around, it makes it that much harder to determine, where is the real Monster of the piece?
The ancient, bloodthirsty creature, only seeking to slake its inhuman thirst?
The despotic director, to whom all are merely a means to an end?
Or the film itself, the aforementioned end, for which all else is sacrificed?

Parting shot: A review of Merhige’s follow-up to Shadow of the Vampire, Suspect Zero, can be found in the Archive, where the article series “The Cinematic (Un)Life of Count Dracula” can also be found. Part I (“A Symphony of Shudders”) discusses F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu.

(Shadow of the Vampire OS courtesy of impawards.com [design by Samuels Advertising]; DVD cover art courtesy of amazon.co.uk.)