The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid

by Butler, Charles E.

  1 Helmsman, 1 mate and 5 sailors with a departure from the Dardanelles.

  The notes for the tenth day inform the worried salvage team that one crewman has contracted the fever while two more have been stricken with hallucinations.

  A drumming town crier brings in the ordnance that plague suspects are forbidden to be admitted to the hospital. Streets are featured with residents closing their doors and barring their windows. White crosses are drawn on the doors of the afflicted, while pallbearers carry the coffins of the dead.

  Ellen is reading from Hutter's book that states

  a woman without sin should cause the vampire to forget the first cock crow.

  Hutter throws himself on her bed in panic as she points to Orlock's neighbouring house. More scenes follow showing the ravaged city. More coffins are carried. People sit around despairingly pondering their fate.

  Another passage of the book relates that:

  The sinless woman should give the vampire her blood of her own free will.

  Her face registers what she must do.

  Knock is identified as the murderer of the asylum guard and the villagers chase their scapegoat through the town, pelting him with stones as he laughs off their persecution. He escapes into a field losing his attackers who vent their fury on a scarecrow, tearing it to pieces and carrying the remains like a flag.

  Orlock appears at his window staring intently. Ellen wakes in her bed. Hutter sleeps in a nearby chair.

  Orlock stares willing Ellen to open the windows to her bedroom. Hutter continues to sleep. Back to Orlock. Ellen reluctantly flinging the double windows wide. Orlock moving out of camera shot. Ellen gasps as she sees the front doors open opposite revealing the vampire. She wakes Hutter and instructs him to bring Professor Bulwer.

  Orlock's shadow scuttles up the stairs. It pushes the bedroom door open.

  Ellen backs toward her bed and the shadowed hand of Orlock reaches out. Ellen flinches as it seemingly grabs her heart. The next scene shows Nosferatu feeding on the prone Ellen. Doctor Sievers is told of Knocks capture. Nosferatu is still feeding. A cockerel crows. Orlock looks up, turning his head towards the window, startled. Knock in his cell screams out,

  "The Master!"

  Orlock stands and clutches at his heart as the sun’s rays fall over the rooftops. Orlock vanishes.Knock, hog-tied, announces his Master is dead, lowering his head in despair. Hutter races to Ellen's bed, too late as she dies. A thoughtful Bulwer moves into camera masking the two.

  A note informs us that,

  "At that very hour, the pestilence ceased."

  The battlements of Orlock's castle stand out in stark relief against the rays of the rising sun.

  Review

  The above synopsis is taken from the version supervised at the Muncher film museum and La Cineteca Del Comune di Bologna with support by The Lumiere project. With titles added by Frameline graphics, we receive a firsthand account of the great plague of Wisborg. I found it irritating, however, that these titles place Orlock's castle in Transylvania, as opposed to Germany, in keeping with convention. More coherence in the narrative is achieved with the inclusion of colour tints that show night and day - sepia for the sun and a cold blue for the moonlight. Sunrise is a stark pink.

  Prana Films was looking for more material after their successful Der Januskopf (1920) - an unofficial take on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) - and came across Stoker's novel. Scriptwriter Henrik Galeen moved the action of the source novel to Germany and Bremen as opposed to Transylvania and London.

  Hiding their tracks even further, they changed the names of all the principal characters, concentrating their ideas on the invasion of Bremen from an unbeatable German force and mirroring the country's plight at the time, which was in the grip of the impending threat of Nazism.

  Only four characters are worthy of any real scrutiny in Nosferatu. Murnau focuses his narrative on the invasion on the lives of Hutter (Gustav Von Wangenheiem) and his wife, Ellen (Greta Schröeder), by the vampire, Count Orlock (Max Schreck). The remaining cast become as anonymous as the dying peasants and the pallbearers who solemnly shoulder the burdens of the town. The Captain of the Empuza, Dr Sievers, Harding and Bulwer are just seemingly employed to carry the running of the story.

  Knock, is the fourth participant, the Renfield character and the author's favourite of the film, played with an intense maniacal edge by Alexander Granach, in ridiculously overdone make-up. He becomes a frightening correlative to the eventual invasion by the Count himself. Picking out the over-enthusiastic Hutter to travel to Transylvania to close the deal on the purchase of his neighbouring house across the road, it is Knock who suggests the building, his face betraying a kind of unseen command. He makes a violent patient as he continuously attacks both the doctor and the guards at the asylum, disregarding their importance just as quickly to lovingly gaze on spiders in their web while catching and eating flies.

  He is as swift as Mr Hyde, as he clambers over rooftops to escape an angry mob, and seems impervious to the stones that pelt him as he waits for his Messiah. Glorious expectation takes over his whole body as he clambers around his cell when the Empuza is captured by Orlock. We don't need any intimate scenes of Orlock visiting the cell: it is obvious that Knock has a pretty good idea of what awaits him when the Master hits town.

  The audience is never let in on the joke and Knock is eventually resigned to moping in his cell as the rays of the sun destroy the vampire and dampen his own spirits.

  Alexander Granach (real name Jessaja Granach) is the most prolific actor in Nosferatu. Born to Jewish parents he fled to the Soviet Union when Hitler came to power. He later abandoned this haven for Hollywood as the Fuhrer’s influence spread further. Nosferatu was his first film and the most exhibited of his silent movies. His first American film was Ninotchka (1932) and he went on to portray Nazis and anti-fascists in a string of propagandist films during the war years. His final film was The Seventh Cross (1944).

  He died in 1945, the same year as his autobiography, There goes an Actor, was published. It is to be re-published in 2010 under the new title, From the Shtetl to the Stage: The Odyssey of a Wandering Actor.

  We see Hutter's urge to please his employers by happily agreeing to travel to the land of ghosts and robbers. He is the Jonathan Harker clone who thoughtlessly informs Ellen of the possible dangers of his trek and seems disinterested in her impending fears for him. Taking to the road we find his hyperactive nature just that little bit grating But this seems to be Murnau's intention. When the imposing dread wipes the smile off the young estate agent’s face, we feel our own nerves begin to jangle. We are drawn in, like Hutter, to the nightmares of the dark.

  Hutter is bitten by the vampire very early in the proceedings: once, off-camera and he blames the incident on mosquitoes. The second time he is trapped in his guest room as Orlock appears in full vampire dress. But Hutter, like Frederick William's Jonathon Harker in Bram Stoker's Count Dracula (1970), doesn't become a vampire. It does however give him the impetus to try and escape from the nightmare that he has bungled into. He finds his host lying prone in a coffin and witnesses him packing more coffins to leave for England.

  Using more common sense than his literary cousin, he ties bed sheets together to climb down the side of the castle wall. His motive for escape being to reach his wife, Ellen, and to stop the coffins that he knows will bring horror to his homeland. After a peripheral glimpse in a convent home, the race is on as he tries to reach home before the vampire.

  As powerless as he is in the castle, Hutter becomes even more so back home. He races swiftly across the mountains to be with his wife and finds himself pushed out of the final battle altogether as Ellen orders him to fetch the equally useless Professor Bulwer. He is left at the end cradling her corpse while Bulwer stands in the foreground, thoughtfully stroking his chin.

  Gustav Von Wangenheiem followed in both his parent’s footsteps, becoming an actor and making his screen
debut in 1914.

  As well as Murnau, he is credited with starring in films by Fritz Lang and Karl Heinz Martin. A Nazi sympathiser, he became a member of The Communist party of Germany in 1921 and founded the Communist theatre company Die Truppe ‘31 in 1931. He produced, wrote and directed three plays before Die Truppe ‘31 was closed by order of the Nazi regime in 1933. Fleeing Nazi Germany, he found refuge in the Soviet Union and continued writing and directing plays and was a founding member of the National Committee for a Free Germany.

  He was married to Inge Franke in 1931 producing one son Friedel. The marriage was annulled in 1954. Wangenheiem died in East Berlin August 5, 1975. The role of Hutter in Nosferatu being his most enduring screen credit.

  Ellen carries the fears of Mina Harker into overdrive. Her orderly life is suddenly turned upside down when Hutter announces his proposed journey. More than hinting at extrasensory perception, she feels everything that happens to her husband. Being a dutiful wife, she leaves it to the peasants at the inn to implore Hutter not to go any further, as if believing, like Bulwer, that no man can escape his destiny.

  At Harding's residence, she begins acting a lot like Lucy Westenra, her fears driving her to sleepwalking on the terrace at all hours of the night. As the vampire and her husband draw nearer the town, she cries that: 'He is coming!', though it is never made clear who she waits for. Murnau makes her the true heroine of the film, when, sacrificing herself to the vampire, her actions send her into the realms of martyrdom. She becomes the saviour of, not only her husband, but the entire city, her death halting the invasion of an incredible force.

  Greta Schroeder had starred in Paul Wegener’s Der Golem (1920) and Mr Wegener became her second husband. Ellen is the only role that she is remembered for.

  Quoted as the most memorable vampire in cinematic history, Count Orlock does indeed cut a terrifying figure: a skeletal, sexual metaphor with rat-like ears, staring, poached-egg eyes and pointed teeth.

  He has no human history, but Henrik Galleen prepares his audience for the forthcoming horrors by listing them in the innocuous Book of the Vampire: Of vampires, monstrous ghosts, sorcery and the seven deadly sins,

  naming the vampire as being spawned from the seed of Belial: a publication that is passed from each individual like a frightening pamphlet of Nazi propaganda.

  Turning convention on its head, he casts a nightmarish shadow that lurches around committing the acts of the vampire. Utilised by Murnau with purpose and effect, it is the shadow that we see descending and actually disappearing into the body of Hutter, as if entering to absorb his very soul. When Ellen encounters the vampire in her bedroom, the shadow of his hand reaches out and grasps her heart, rendering her powerless. Orlock is very much like a venereal disease; not understanding, nor wanting to understand, the emotions of the sexual act, but instead using it as the vehicle to move silently and deadly from one body to the other, invading and blackening everything in its wake. Not stopping until everyone is dead.

  When Hutter arrives, Orlock, unlike Dracula, seems resigned to letting him wander anywhere he likes in the castle, knowing that there is really no place he can hide. The vampire has access everywhere as all the doors open automatically at his command to allow him entry. But, he must first be invited into a willing victim's life, and spreads his hypnotic power literally across great oceans to gain access.

  Hutter's letters are posted by the passing gypsy and arrive at their destination as a warning to the city of the terror that is coming. Orlock is announcing that he cannot be stopped. He moves confidently and swiftly, carrying his coffin under his arm, through a town that falls apart as he touches it.

  The ship he captures becomes a living thing as it cuts a swathe through the waters of the Baltic. He even stops to laugh at the neighbours who have inadvertently invited him into their lives, knowing the evil that he represents. At times, he seems oddly unaware of the height of his own influence. He doesn't acknowledge the army of rats that scuttle onto dry land in his wake. Nor does he seem to actively control them. An interesting point is the fact that we don't see any rats in his castle; it is as if he is the whole embodiment of the pestilence, bound up in one deadly, disgusting package. Murnau's vampire has no interest in making new acolytes and his film states quite clearly that Count Orlock is, simply, Death.

  The religious aspects of Stoker's tale are dropped altogether, the only crucifixes on show being the ones drawn in white chalk on the doors of the dead. There are no wooden stakes or the mention of prayers. These omissions leave no place for the theories of the learned Professor Bulwer, no matter how much his suspicions are realised.

  One also suspects that it will take more than a length of wood through one man’s heart to halt the threat that Orlock represents, no matter how God-fearing the hunter is.

  Only a woman who is without sin can halt the invasion, even at the cost of her own life.

  The film itself carries the notoriety of being subject to the charge of plagiarism. Florence Stoker, protecting her major source of income since Bram‘s death, recognised the influence of her husband’s work and sued the film’s makers, ordering that every copy be burned.

  The courtroom battle lasted eight years and the ruling made in Mrs Stoker’s favour, forcing Prana Films to file for bankruptcy. Inevitably, copies of Nosferatu were hidden and, in the last eighty plus years, historians have painstakingly tried to piece together the pirated remnants to restore it to its original glory. Ironically, today, there are probably as many different versions of this film in existence, as there are straight adaptations of Dracula!

  The making of Nosferatu has been shrouded in mystery for many years. As late as the mid 1970s, researchers were still speculating as to whether or not Max Schreck was a real actor or an amalgamation of different character actors whom Murnau had persuaded to take part in his film.

  The actor himself did actually exist and his name was his own and not a pseudonym. Born in Berlin-Friedenau on 6th September 1879, Maximillian Schreck made his stage debut in Meseritz and Speyer and he toured Germany for the next two years in a variety of plays. He became a member of the celebrated Max Rheinhardt Troupe. After his service in the First World War, he appeared for the next three years at the Munich Kammerspiele. He starred in Bertolt Brecht's debut play, Drums in the Night as freakshow landlord Glubb.

  Nosferatu, was his second film and he worked regularly on German stage and screen until his death. In 1924, he collaborated with Murnau for a second time in Die Finanzen des Grossherzogs with little success. His final role on stage was as The Grand Inquisitor in the play, Don Carlos. He was married to the actress Fanny Normann. His performance as Graf Orlock was publicly applauded by Lon Chaney, 'the man of a thousand faces', and his impact on the story of Dracula, indeed, on the whole horror genre, is undeniable.

  The image of Count Orlock has been revived twice by moviemakers: in Werner Herzog's remake Nosferatu, the Vampyre with Klaus Kinski irritatingly named Count Dracula, and Salem's Lot with Reggie Nalder as Kurt Barlow, both 1979.

  Over the years, the name, Schreck (“terror” in German), has been used to add an oddness to many a screen villain. Peter Cushing posed as Tarot-reading devil Dr Schreck in Amicus' creepy debut anthology horror, Dr Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and Christopher Walken's Maximillian Schreck would cause no end of trouble for Michael Keaton's caped crusader in Batman Returns (1992).

  In 1969, the surname Orlock would be allocated to Boris Karloff as an ageing horror star in Peter Bogdanovich's disturbing take on the Charles Whitman killings, Targets. In 2000, Max Schreck himself became the star of Shadow of the Vampire. This inventive black comedy follows a hypothetical storyline of the actual filming of Nosferatu, with John Malkovitch as an obsessed Murnau, promising his leading lady to the vampire if he will act in his movie. Schreck turns out to be a real vampire, played by Willem Dafoe, in a performance that has to be seen to be believed.

  Though a little creaky at times, Nosferatu is the only film that plays on Stoker's
original theme of invasion and delivers in all areas. It Is still very watchable and is well deserving of the term classic.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Bela Lugosi

  DRACULA (1931: Universal Pictures, USA)

  Director: Tod Browning