_Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror_ is one of the world’s most famous films. Released as a silent movie with a musical soundtrack background, its portrayal of Count Orlok as the rat-faced, hulking vampire who brings death to the fictional village of Wisborg, Germany, is still easily recognized over 100 years later. (In fact, a remake is coming out this December in 2024!) Nosferatu encapsulated the feelings of empty sadness and terror that emerged after the First World War, and is a paramount example of German Expressionist art.
The film’s director, F.W. Marnau, and producer, Albn Grau, both saw action on the eastern front. The Great War gutted Europeans both literally (2 million Germans alone died) and metaphysically. The 19th-century optimism that had come with the wealth of being colonial powers vanished amidst the piles of corpses that no human had ever before experienced. Trench warfare mutilated the bodies of millions of young men, damaged their minds, or killed them. The war’s effects shadowed the culture that came after, and Nosferatu bears this imprint. Grau called World War One “this monstrous event that is unleashed across the earth like a cosmic vampire to drink the blood of millions of men.”
While Bram Stoker’s English novel _Dracula_ inspired the film, Nosferatu was very much its own beast. Albn, the producer, claimed that he was inspired partly by a tale he heard while fighting in the eastern front from a Romanian farmer. The farmer claimed that his father’s corpse had vanished, and believed it had been made into a vampire.
Other connections between WWI and Nosferatu are more interpretive. The male protagonist, Thomas Hutter, is made weak and impotent by the monster in a way that parallels how the war impacted Germany’s young men. Count Orlok, the Nosferatu (with an etymology suggestive of a demon spawned by Belial, associates with pestilence), brings terror to the town of Wisborg. When his ship filled with coffins lands at the port, rats spew forth. The image shown here is poster art for the film sketched by Albn Grau himself. The shadow of Nosferatu looms over the town as people who look like rats themselves scatter.
Source(s): _Wasteland: the Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror_ W. Scott Poole, Counterpoint, 2019.
