Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition)

Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition)
by F.W. Murnau

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DVD details

Actor: Alexander Granach, Georg H. Schnell, Greta Schr?der, Gustav von Wangenheim, Max Schreck
Director: F.W. Murnau
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); German (Original Language)
Format: AC-3, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Restored, Silent, Special Edition, Surround Sound
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-11-20
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: KINO VIDEO

DVD Reviews of Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition)

DVD Review: The Great Dracula Movie!
Summary: 5 Stars

This is by far my favorite Dracula movie. It was not copyrighted and was ordered to be destroyed in 1923. It didn't happen for many copies. This is a great movie and it would have been a tragedy to lose. Way back in the day when 8mm home movie projectors were in vogue and my mother was a public librarian, my brother and I used to take the 8mm version of the movie and play and play it again. We loved it and I continue that infatuation with the movie to the day. This is great DVD version with tinting, wonderful music and a wonderful print. The extras are terrific too. I'm glad I got this DVD.

DVD Review: Creepy.... Creepy I tell ya
Summary: 4 Stars

Great acting, great scenery and chilling story; Dracula, the master is back

The movie was released in 1922, but in 1994 it was named one of the top five German films of all time.
That just goes to show you that great work goes stronger with time. The greatness of silent movies originates from the difficulty of telling the story and in this silent great work, terror is a mission greatly accomplished.

Just a side note; the music wasn't good, but knowing that it isn't the original music of the movie, that just doesn't count.

DVD Review: The Plague Bearer
Summary: 5 Stars

Nosferatu is one of the few silent movies enjoyable by those who don't like silent movies. The vampire theme lends itself perfectly to grainy black and white and tinted film, atmosphere building organ music and cheep, crude special effects. Nosferatu is easily the best Dracula movie. Bela Lugosi was memorable but Max Schreck is instantly iconic.

Innovative director F.W. Murnaw makes ingenious use of location shooting, clever camera tricks and his star, Max Schreck, to craft a creepy, unconventional gothic horrorshow. Schreck himself was reputed to have been a very strange man who enjoyed playing grotesque characters in a series of horror movies. Here he is perfect as makeup and flappy ears are added to his angular face to give him a disgusting white bat look.

The film's money scenes are the meeting between the naive real estate agent Hutter and the ghoulish Count Orlock and the scenes aboard the boat as the vampire rises from hois mouldy coffin in the belly of the ship and decimates the crew. Murnaw expertly combines his filmmaking instincts with Bram Stoker's expertise in gothic horror and barely repressed homoeroticism. Nosferatu is one of those one-of-a-kind movies that everyone should see at least once in their lives.

DVD Review: Kino raises the bar
Summary: 5 Stars

For sheer technological artistry, it's difficult to see how the Kino remastering of "Nosferatu" could be surpassed. Visual quality is excellent and the original 1922 Hans Erdmann score is (at long last) made available. Supplementing the digitalized film is an hour-long documentary on the making of "Nosferatu," as well as clips from director F.W. Murnau's other films. All in all, Ausgeseichnet!

"Nosferatu" really is an amazing film (and I say this as someone not particularly fond of the vampire genre). Murnau's expressionist cinematography creates an eeriness that's never been matched. The long, lean Count Orlok (Max Schreck), his fingers unnaturally talon-like, arms stiffly at his side like a corpse's, eyes wide open but somehow dead, can frighten even modern audiences who've been trained by special effects artists to demand much from spooky movies. The shipboard scene of Nosferatu rising from his coffin is uncanny. Murnau also speeds up the camera when he films Nosferatu in motion, thereby suggesting that what the viewer is seeing is unnatural, other-worldly.

For the most part, Gustav von Wangenheim's Hutter (parallel to Stoker's Jonathan Harker) is competent, although there are a few of those overdone melodramatic moments one associates with silent film. At one point, for example, Hutter slams a book about vampires on the floor to express his amused contempt for such superstitions. But the scene is so over-acted that it comes across as more funny than anything else. Greta Schroeder's Ellen (Stoker's Lucy) is a flop. Schroeder seems incapable of not overacting in the grand style of silent movie queens satirized in "Sunset Boulevard." Alexander Granach's Knock (Stoker's Renfield) is, in my judgment, the real star of the film. Granach perfectly captures the creepy madness of Knock/Renfield. His performance is stellar.

The libidinal tension implicit in all vampire stories also comes through in "Nosferatu." In one scene in which Nosferatu is preying on Ellen, she cups one of her breasts and Nosferatu's shadow cups the other. A gripping, masterful image, and one that's not been bested by the thousand and one Dracula re-makes since "Nosferatu."

DVD Review: Another Layer Better
Summary: 5 Stars

This is of the double Kino DVD. There are a few improvements in this edition, making it worth getting, particularly as you can find it reasonably priced. First the improvement of the frames per second makes the acting more realistic and modern if still more than touched by Wagnerian over-emoting. Note: there are tiny frame displacements that in this digital computer age could easily be fixed by fabricating the tiny image loss between the two surrounding frames and it is hoped in the future Kino, Criterion and other labels will stop being reticent to do this. Creating the missing frames in such things as Harpo Marx's run across a couch with an ice block in one of their Paramount comedies will benefit from this too. It's no different than removing noise from the soundtrack or dirt from the print.

The images are almost pristine, and the tinting lovely. There are a few sequences that should be tinted and either Murnau neglected to do them or the surviving materials are missing them - for instance Orloc crosses to his house in full daylight carrying his coffin of dirt. Obviously Orloc dies in the morning sunlight later, so this sequence should be tinted blue for night. It would be no crime to fix this. Ditto when Orloc dies, there is no tinting as the sun hits him, yet when the film cuts back to the dying woman the room is tinted gold. It seems obvious this is some kind of technical oversight at the time. Preserving such an error isn't film scholarship, it's stuffy academy-itis, like the insistence that Shakespeare's son's name was Hamnet (not Hamlet) though it's certainly just poor penmanship by the local Stratford official.

The music is by far the best of the many film soundtracks over the years, most of which are too clever, too modern, or contemptuous of the original film, treating it as camp. This is just right, a reconstruction of the original classical score, deeply romantic and gothic, Wagner Lite. "Nosferatu" is a love story, in fact two love stories that intersect tragically. This score completely expresses that. The complaints about it are inexplicable to me. If you want a jagged atonal score, buy Kino's previous issue. This version is what Murnau obviously intended musically.

Murnau and Gance and Cocteau are the great surreal artists of the cinema, and no one has touched them via modern computer work to date; Tim Burton should study Murnau for a couple of years before he tries to make another film, his "Sweeney Todd" was childish compared to this. Given the technical limitations he had to deal with of the period, Murnau may have been the greatest of all, though Gance was more innovative. This is the edition for anyone who hasn't seen this film before, or anyone who has seen it many times and loves it. There will be a better issue in some decade to come, but it will be built on this. The German disk is actually unnecessary, but probably allows Kino to pay for the issue by charging for a double disk; given the results they are entitled.

PS If you want to dig deep enough, there are anti-Semitic and homophobic strains in the depiction of the title character - the anti-Semitic patina remarked upon when the 1922 actor's name was used for the villain in the Tim Burton Batman film - but frankly there are very few horror films then or now that don't in some way. It's certainly less homophobic than "Silence of the Lambs".

Description of Nosferatu (The Ultimate Two-Disc Edition)

A cornerstone of the horror film, F.W. Murnau s NOSFERATU is triumphantly reborn in this breathtaking new restoration by the F.W. Murnau Foundation. Backed by an orchestral performance of Hans Erdmann s 1922 score (recorded in 5.1 stereo surround), Kino International edition presents Murnau s masterpiece in this all-new restored HD transfer with unprecedented clarity and faithfulness to the original release version. This double-disc collection presents the film with the original German intertitles as well as with newly-translated English intertitles. Accompanying the film is a 52-minute documentary by Luciano Berriat?a which provides a detailed account of the production and explores the filmmakers involvement in the occult. Also includes 'Nosferatu: Historic Film Meets Digital Restoration' - a 3-minute documentary - Lengthy excerpts from other films by F.W. Murnau: Journey Into the Night (1920), The Haunted Castle (1921), Phantom (1922), The Finances of the Grand Duke (1924), The Last Laugh (1924), Tartuffe (1925), Faust (1926), and Tabu (1931) - Photo Gallery - Scene Comparison

As noted critic Pauline Kael observed, "... this first important film of the vampire genre has more spectral atmosphere, more ingenuity, and more imaginative ghoulish ghastliness than any of its successors." Some really good vampire movies have been made since Kael wrote those words, but German director F.W. Murnau's 1922 version remains a definitive adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. Created when German silent films were at the forefront of visual technique and experimentation, Murnau's classic is remarkable for its creation of mood and setting, and for the unforgettably creepy performance of Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a.k.a. the blood-sucking predator Nosferatu. With his rodent-like features and long, bony-fingered hands, Schreck's vampire is an icon of screen horror, bringing pestilence and death to the town of Bremen in 1838. (These changes of story detail were made necessary when Murnau could not secure a copyright agreement with Stoker's estate.) Using negative film, double-exposures, and a variety of other in-camera special effects, Murnau created a vampire classic that still holds a powerful influence on the horror genre. (Werner Herzog's 1978 film Nosferatu the Vampyre is both a remake and a tribute, and Francis Coppola adopted many of Murnau's visual techniques for Bram Stoker's Dracula.) Seen today, Murnau's film is more of a fascinating curiosity, but its frightening images remain effectively eerie. --Jeff Shannon

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