Strangely enough, Nosferatu reminded me of another silent, black-and-white film I saw about two years ago, called Greed (based on the novel McTeague). I think it’s probably just the fact that both movies are meant to be disturbing, but I can say that my experiences watching them both were dreary and depressing and a little bit boring.
Knowing that Nosferatu is based off of Dracula (even if I hadn’t known, it would’ve been pretty obvious since the characters are only slightly different) made Nosferatu feel similar to one of those low-budget rip-offs of popular Disney and Pixar films, in the sense that the original was much better and richer, and didn’t feel cheap.
Now I know that Nosferatu is considered a classic, but to be honest, I found it tedious and nowhere near as dark or spooky as Dracula. Reading the novel, I actually felt suspense and uncertainty building up, but with Nosferatu, it all kind of just felt silly. Whereas the characters in the novel felt complex and well rounded, the characters in the film seemed like caricatures, especially Nosferatu himself. I know he’s supposed to be a vampire and therefore inhuman, but I feel it was a little bit over the top to make him look the way he did.
I think Bela Lugosi’s Dracula (left) would do a better job of scaring me, or at least creating suspense, because unlike Nosferatu, he could pass for a normal human. A successful trope in monster movies is the idea that the monster can pass itself off as normal, with the plot slowly advancing and the fear building up as more and more inhuman characteristics reveal themselves. But with Nosferatu, the inhumanity was obvious right from the start, and that killed any suspense that might have built itself up for me.
The music in Nosferatu was more grating and irritating than mood-setting. Half the time, I would take my headphones off and listen without sound (which didn’t change much anyway) because the screechiness of the music was giving me a headache.
I think Nosferatu isn’t a completely terrible film, but it’s certainly not my cup of tea. Overall, I kind of felt like I was watching an incredibly melodramatic SNL skit.
I also read the novel and I completely agree that Nosferatu wasn’t nearly as good as Dracula. Dracula is one of the only novels that I have ever read that truly frightened me and the movie version did not scare me at all. It’s almost a fact that ‘the book is better than the movie,’ but in this case it was true to an almost embarrassing degree.
But I also think that much of this is due to our perspective as viewers in the 21st century. We are used to seeing amazingly realistic special effects; movies today don’t need to leave much to our imaginations. But when Nosferatu was produced film was just starting out and effects were basic. In this way movies were still similar to books: it was up to the audience how believable the story-lines were.
As a novel, Dracula had the advantage of utilizing our imaginations- we could re-create the sights and sounds within our own minds. But, as a film, I think most of us took Nosferatu a lot more literally. We expected it to be a scary vampire movie regardless of whether or not we were even capable of believing in vampires. But as we heard in class, the only people who were scared by the movie were those who wanted to be frightened.
I agree in that, supposedly a classic, it definitely underperformed given the expectations that I had set when I first saw the film. I knew that given the time period it wasn’t going to be similar to any of the modern day films we have now but the predictable storyline disappointed me greatly.
I liked your comparison of Nosferatu to low-budget ripoff films though I feel that that is a bit harsh considering the time period we’re talking about. Nosferatu was one of the first vampire-films ever made and given the limited resources directors had to work with that day. With no sound or special effects or color, directors were left with expressions and the utilization of caricature. But I’ll admit, Ellen and Harker gave the film a comedic flair (I’m sure that wasn’t the directors intention) at times.
The appearance of Nosferatu was more frightening than Lugosi’s Dracula in my opinion simply because of how inhuman he looked. To me, it didn’t take away from the suspense of the film-the extensive foreshadowing did that already, but gave it the creep factor it needed to pass for a horror film.