SUNDAY MUSINGS - Dead Is Love
As always, the idea behind a Sunday Musings is that Adam takes a concept and times an hour and a half to write it in. This week, we get once bitten, twice dead.
The Vampire is a a creation with a long shadow throughout the centuries of storytelling, and within that particular genre, the tale of Dracula is easily the most famous and most told. In fact, it's only been a short time since the misfiring Renfield and actually fairly fantastic Last Voyage Of The Demeter slid across screens. Through the last century and a half, few characters have adapted have been interpreted as many times as The Count since Bram Stoker unleashed his novel in 1897. Dracula is synonymous with the medium of Cinema itself, reborn in perpetual celluloid reanimation. However, the latest attempt may be the most fascinating attempt at the Vampyre legend.
I adore this film. I need to do a double bill at some point
Robert Eggers took on the task of adapting Nosferatu and dug deep in to Stoker's legend in a manner few films have ever truly done. Gone are such later inventions as sunlight turning the Vampire into dust, and the deeper, older concepts remerge in into play. The 1922 Nosferatu, illegally adapted by F.W. Murnau, cast Count Orlock as a living plague, a sickly goblin-like creature of Grim's Fables, whilst Dracula in film is the fear of sexuality, of the foreigner (unless it's the 1970s Hammer Horror films, and then it's Satanists all way down). The 1931 adaption was based as it was on a play commissioned by Florence Balcombe, Bram Stokers Widow, in order to fight the popularity of Nosferatu before the film was ordered destroyed by German Courts. Sadly, Bela Lugosi was never able to escape the shadow of the Hollywood Dracula throughout his career, which brought forth a lot of the tropes we expect to see in any Vampire fiction. In this American take, the suave Count is once more the fear of the other, a clean shaven swarthy individual here to ravage the good natured womenfolk and take them as his own. Whilst Stoker absolutely wrote these themes into Dracula, what has always been missing is the unearthly quality of the Count, the unclean sensation of the the Other.
The majority of Dracula films are a bright, gaudy affair. Gothic melodramas that ooze wealth and sexuality, with few dirt level takes outside of the 2020 BBC miniseries (that to be fair, was a love letter to the range of Hammer Horror releases). Nosferatu is a tale of pestilence, of misfortune. A dank, dark experience, though Werner Herzog's 1979 remake attempts to add some eroticism into the darkness. E.E. Merhige's 2020 film Shadow Of The Vampire (also starring Willam Defoe as Max Shreck / Count Orlock) mines the darkness for a whole other take on the Ur-Vampire tale. However, once more there is a desperation, a desolation even, that simply isn't in any adaptions of Stoker's work. The far too overly-named Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula is more a play than a film, lurid and overwrought in the very best ways that returns to the erotic, the sexuality of Stoker's text, filling in the gaps wonderfully and being my personal favourite take on The Count. This take captured a lot of the nuance and foreboding of Stoker's work, which a powerhouse, sympathetic performance by Gary Oldman. Also, he has facial hair. I don't know why this is important to me but it is.
The 2024 Nosferatu oddly takes more from Dracula than either of it's predecessors did. The heavily moustached Boyar shape that plods his rotting carcass through each scene, heavily contrasted in pure black and white, hiding himself in the desaturated shadows that extend beyond the screen. Long strangler's hands that move in unnatural slowness, black, dead eyes filled with malice and greed. A thick moustache. Long gone is the decrepit elf-bat form, replaced with something bestial and genuinely unsettling on all points. Orlock is no high born blood hiding from the world but a caged beast looking for escape, and new hunting grounds. Orlock in Eggers' film may have some elements of Shrek's performance, but he owes as much to Stokers's descriptions that have never once been put to film whilst still honouring the unofficial release from 1922. He is both a presence and a form, a spirit and a body. There is much of the demonic possession in the text of the movie as well as full body gulping of blood. Which of course is no sensual biting of the neck but a violent chest bite with upsettingly animalistic sound of feeding. It's worth noting that there is the fear of sexual in Nosferatu, but it comes from the supressed desires of Ellen, not Orlock.
Nosferatu is that rare thing, a remake that holds it's original as untouchable and a genuine incredible experience in it's own right. Eggers understands the text, the myth and the design perfectly and refuses to let later adaptions of either colour what he is attempting to create. Orlock has no weakness to Holy Water or the wooden stake, with iron being the preferred weapon as a hint to Germanic fairy tales. It is the day he fears, but not more than death of his prey so he may return to slumber. This, in itself, is one of the more fascinating elements to Orlock, as he is not filled with a need to kill constantly, but was awoken by the burgeoning darkness in Ellen, and whilst he cannot love her, and in fact has no interest in loving her as a person, he cannot be apart from her and wishes for them to be together in death. He sets plans within plans to be invited into Ellen's soul, not her property.
The F.W. Murnau movie and the Stoker novel are the bones as well they should be, with a hint of a larger, darker supernatural world behind the gaslights. It's a viewing experience of allusions and visual innovation. Dracula may be entrenched in the history of film, but Orlock is cinema.