Review of Nosferatu (1922) by Emily H — 18 Jan 2012

It's friday night at the cinema, you've just paid £7 for a ticket to see some god awful sequel to some god awful series of horror movies that burst out with the guts and the gore in order to get the underage audience shitting their chinos, as I sit watching, unamused and disheartened by what this generation has to offer, it begs me to the question, how can such a powerful genre fall subject to such undignified defilement? Where is the art in these movies? Grindhouse got away with it, your taking the piss. Whatever happened to Baby Jane? Christopher Lee? George A. Romero? or more importantly, how the fuck does 90 year old film manage to make every single film made after it look like shit? When I watch upon the horrible acting, shitty FX and more mistakes than a George Bush speech, I can only fantasise about this movie.

As the successor to the expressionistic masterpiece Des Cabinet Das Caligari, Nosferatu took the 19th century vampire milestone Dracula, took the romantic elements of the tale and defiled it with demonic folklore and thus turned a gothic romantic into a dark, depressive world of blasphemy, satanic treachery, sadism and sodomy thus making arguably the greatest movie ever made. In my opinion anyway. There is a proto-Lynch vibe to the movie, from the early moments in the film, there are various folklore references, "Nosferatu? Was it he who brought the plague to Bremen in 1838?" And from the moment that there is a slight look of worry on someones face, there is an overwhelming feeling of intensity and terror that grips the viewer, an unsettling atmosphere that would go even as far to make the viewer want to switch it off, but its stranglehold is persistent. The set decoration of the film is somewhat second hand to the likes of Caligari, but what it lacks in what they were to work with, they more than made up for in improvisation. The use of shadows, sudden close ups, that unnerving way that people move around in silent movies (you all know what I mean) Nosferatu has some of the best shots frankly I've ever seen, that one image of Orlock's shadow creeping up the stair case, in that dark old house, that would send shivers down a brick wall. Tis the greatest film of all, nuff said.