Mystery Film Revealed: Nosferatu

F.W. Murnau, Germany, Black & White w/tinting, Silent w/ English Subtitles, 95 mins, Certificate: PG

This month we are screening the mystery film we promised you in September but had to reschedule.

And it’s an absolute MUST SEE!

Not only will you have a very rare opportunity to experience Murnau’s legendary and extremely influential masterpiece on the big screen, you will also watch a very special, award winning edition of it.

We’ll leave the -still spellbinding– film to do the “talking” but here are the answers to the clues we gave you back in September:

– It hit a huge milestone on March 4 2022. It celebrated its 100 years birthday, as 04/03/1922 was its release date

– “Real art is simple, but simplicity requires the greatest art” its director, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, has said.

– All known prints and negatives were destroyed under the terms of settlement of a lawsuit by Dracula‘s author Bram Stoker’s widow, but it  would subsequently resurface through second-generation reels in other countries.

– Willem Dafoe played its notorious star, Max Schreck in 2002 film Shadow of the Vampire that told an imaginative, fictionilised tale of the events and urban legends (that Max Schreck was in actuality a vampire among them) that surrounded its production.

– It was banned in Sweden for more than half of its “life” due to “excessive violence”. The ban was finally lifted in 1972.

– Acclaimed director and documentarian Werner Herzog believes it to be his home country’s, Germany’s, greatest film ever made. It is no surprising then, that he directed the brilliant remake Nosferatu the Vampyre in 1979.

– It is considered an archetype of its cinematic genre, loosely based on a book, Dracula, which is also an archetype of its literary genre: Fantasy Horror in both cases.

– It is included in the Vatican’s celebratory list of “45 Best Films”, included in the Arts category (Religion and Values being the other two).

– Both it and its 1979 remake are included in the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die” book edited by Steven Schneider. No other original and remake have ever achieved the same.

Reviews:

“It would take almost 75 years later, and a teenage vampire slayer, before ideas [Murnau] in one of the most iconic horror films of all-time, made in the early years of the art form, would become a common fixture in genre… In that way, “Nosferatu” feels like as much of a smuggler of bold themes and subtext… It long earned its place among the most terrifying films of all-time; maybe it’s time it took its place as one of the most progressive on a thematic level.” Brian Skutle, In Their Own League

★★★★★“A visual and emotional treat.” Kim Newman, Empire

“French film critic Jean-André Fieschi argued that “ Nosferatu marks the advent of a total cinema in which the plastic, rhythmic and narrative elements are no longer graduated in importance, but in strict interdependence upon each other. With this film the modern cinema was born, and all developments to come,… became possible.” Joanne Laurier, WSWS

★★★★★ “They don’t write movie sell-lines like that any more, and they certainly don’t make movies like this haunting masterpiece any more either.” Simon Braund, Empire