Nosferatu: The Real Story review – insightful probe into a vampire classic

There are two types of vampire: one is the vulpine, Bela Lugosi-esque seducer, while the other is the “verminous” kind pioneered by Count Orlok in the 1922 German silent horror classic Nosferatu. That’s one of the sharper observations in this reasonably interesting but shakily organised documentary timed to coincide with the Robert Eggers remake; a comeback, after decades of hot vampire dominance, for the hideous original progenitor in our atavistic, post-pandemic times.

FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, a first but unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was almost lost when the author’s widow succeeded in having most copies of it destroyed. What a loss that would have been: a sui generis masterpiece that was instigated by producer Albin Grau meeting a Serbian soldier on the western front who claimed his father was a vampire, and which compressed mass anxieties about war and disease into an oppressively deathly fable. It would surely have taken the emerging horror genre years to reconstitute Nosferatu’s visual vocabulary of eerie dissolves and other uncanny effects. Not to mention a key piece of the vampire legendarium, also invented by the film: that they are killed by sunlight.

Helped by a handful of critics and academics, director Robin Bextor draws ample sustenance from the film’s aesthetic and thematic veins. Unfortunately, the haphazard structuring leaves noticeable holes: great play is made of the film’s occult influences through Grau and his relationship with Aleister Crowley, but the actual evidence from the film presented here amounts to less than on its Wikipedia page. A section devoted to the supernatural is really about Max Schreck’s performance. The documentary claims Orlok is the first great movie monster – but what about Der Golem from two years earlier?

One commentator points out the shade thrown at Murnau by the droll 2000 biopic Shadow of the Vampire, which suggested he was the true monster of the Nosferatu shoot. Possibly the image of the ruthless director was inspired by Werner Herzog, who of course made his own, woeful Nosferatu in 1979, once Stoker’s novel was out of copyright. There’s no mention of last year’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter, which expands on the sea voyage made so memorable by Murnau. But the consensus is that Eggers’ elemental style makes him a worthy inheritor. If this analysis is somewhat scattershot, luckily Nosferatu’s longevity speaks for itself through its successors.