I'm on the mood of watching a lot of films recently. And last week was a very nice one, beginning with Pulp Fiction, and finishing with a very nice season around one of the most creepy and amazing icons of history of cinema: Nosferatu, the vampire.

First one, of course, was the original 1922 movie, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (you can find the complete movie in Youtube). Making some review, for those of you who don't know about it, Nosferatu was the unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, cause his studio couldn't achieve to buy the rights to the novel. He just changed some names and locations in order to not paying for those rights (for example, Dracula became the Count of Orlock, and the main characters didn't came from London, but in a fictional German city called Wisborg), though he couldn't prevent Stoker's widow to demand him and the studio. She won that demand, so pushed the studio to bankrupt, and demanded all the film copies to be destroyed. Fortunately, some of them could be saved, so the movie was preserved to our generations. Sometimes, it seems heirs are the true vampires (something similar happens with Picasso's hairs, but that's another story).

Well, returning to the movie, I must say is obvious, as most of the German Expressionist cinema, the true power of the film lies in the images. Orlock is maybe the first most creepy character in the story of horror films (Nosferatu was the first horror film, in fact). Each scene where he appears has a powerful magnetism. The vampire just catch everyone, characters and public, with each appearance of him. He's nothing to do with the theatrical vision we'd say ten years later from Bela Lugosi; Max Schreck made a great performance as a true blood thirsty demon, a death machine who brings plague and destruction everywere he goes. Maybe the main problem is about the rest of characters; under Nosferatu himself, there's no other emphasizing in the whole movie. Even the character of Dr. Van Helsing, the famous nemesis of Dracula, is just an anonymous doctor who speaks about vampire properties of some carnivore plants. Of course, we must be fair with the movie, bearing in mind Murnau should had some several problems to adapt the novel and avoiding rights at the same time. And no speaking about the terrible condition of the copies saved from Stoker's widow hunt, which means there's some scenes unfortunately missed forever (something very similar with Fritz Lang's Metropolis) and so unavoidable script holes.

The second one was the 1979's remake, directed by Werner Herzog. As I heard, it was acclaimed by both critics and public as a great tribut to the original Nosferatu, being able to make something original and not just a simple copy of the Murnau film. By my own opinion, is a nice film, though maybe a bit slow sometimes. It has the merit of being as a nice adaptation of Dracula (recovering the original character's names) as a tribute to Nosferatu, again locating the story in Germany (this time in the city of Wismar). The characters are better developed as well, specially Jonathan Harker, and there's a different vision of the vampire as a creature tortured by his own condition of a son of the night, eternal and unable to feel human warm again (something that maybe made an influence to Francis Ford Coppola to his own version of Dracula).

And, for finishing, I should recommend all of you one of the most interesting movies I've ever seen: Shadow of the Vampire. Is a fictional tale around the filming of Nosferatu, about what could happened in there if Max Schreck, the original actor who performed Count of Orlock, was a true vampire. The film is a very nice lesson about how films production were in 20s, and some scenes are just identical to the original movie, even in the same B&W granulated texture of old celluloid. But the best, for me, are dialogues. Murnau (performed by John Malkovich) shows himself as a true artist, a man obssessed with his proyect, and fighting against any obstacle in his way, even the dark nature of his special star. And Willen Dafoe makes a GREAT performance as the vampire, who shows his only reason to work in the movie as a way to reach the real eternity, beyond the lethal sunshine he's unable to feel anymore. Some of his reflections about the character of Dracula and how he reminds him so many sad moments of his own un-life are one of the best lines I've ever heard in a fantastic movie. Of course, I must assume not everything in the movie about Murnau's troubles in Nosferatu filming were true. It's a fictional biofilm, after all (the same with Tim Burton's Ed Wood).

So, OK people, I'm just in the Nosferatu mood actually xD. I should make a pic of him soon.