Episode Eighty Rats, Rats, Rats, Part One
Episode Eighty Rats, Rats, Rats, Part One
00:00 Intro, podcast planning, and stats
Welcome to Celebrate Poe. Celebrate Poe was launched exactly one year ago this week. Being a largely educational podcast with no advertising or publicity, I didn’t expect much - like most podcasters, I started with some basic equipment and some ideas. In the case of Poe, one thing I did to prepare was do a long outline about his short life, and how the many influences and events of his tortured existence came together. I wanted to be sure the podcast had a direction - that we were going somewhere - especially when I got off topic. For much of the first year, Celebrate Poe used interactions with the imaginary character of the ghost of Poe to reflect on his early life and later some of the influences on his writing - although when he was a child it is doubtful that he knew he wanted to be a writer - except in the vaguest sense. This episode, and the next continue this podcast’s look at vampire lore, culminating in a special 2001 Halloween episode - Poe’s Vampires.
Oh, by the way, according to my podcast hosting stats, a few minutes ago Celebrate Poe has had over 3,000 downloads in over 500 locations in 51 countries - probably not on the scale of a Oprah Winfrey or Joe Rogan - but more than I could have possibly imagined - and Celebrate Poe hasn’t really gotten started yet! So thank you so much for your support!
The opening melody for this episode is Edgar Allan Poe’s favorite song - Come Rest in This Bosom. This is episode Eighty - Rats, Rats, Rats - Part One, and deals with the 1922 German movie Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, as well as its 1979 remake. Nosferatu means vampire and the original silent version is felt by many to be one of the greatest horror movies ever filmed.
02:37 Differences between Dracula and Nosferatu
The biggest difference in plot between Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the ending of Nosferatu - how the creature is destroyed. In Nosferatu, Cound Orlok is burned up by the rising of the sun. In contrast, in Bram Stoker’s version, sunlight was harmless to vampires - it just weakened them to an extent - but did not destroy them.
Of course, the most obvious difference overall is that Dracula is a very English story, and the movie Nosferatu reflects German culture.
And - as mentioned in episode seventy nine - Stoker’s Dracula and the vampire from the 1931 movie - as well as most of the English speaking vampires in films since then - came across as almost suave and aristocratic womanizers - and that attractive cover for an evil nature has its OWN horror - the idea of the evil among us that is considered normal and even attractive - at least at first.
In contrast to a womanizing monster, the character of Count Orlok could never be considered attractive. He is a repulsive creature, and his ratlke appearance points to a real life atrocity that became all too real.
MUSICAL TRANSITION
04:08 Plot of Nosferatu
First I would like to go though the plot of the 1922 silent version of Nosferatu.
Nosferatu begins with the journey of Thomas Hutter - Hutter’s name has been changed from Jonathan Harker from Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This is a journey to the castle of not Count Dracula, but Count Orlock. So you have basically the same characters, but different names. The names of the main characters have been changed to German names to appeal to the German audience that Nosferatu was made for. The names might have also been changed for copyright reasons. This Thomas Hutter character was sent by his employer - the estate agent Herr Knock - and I like that name Knock - to sell a building to Count Orlok. Count Orlok is looking for an appropriate structure to buy, and this building seems to be exactly what wants - tho remember Count Orlock and Thomas Hutter have not met yet. So Hutter begins his journey into the Carpathian Mountains to Count Orlock’s castle. When he stops at an inn along the way, the locals become frightened when he just mentions the name of Count Orlock. Thomas Hutter rides on to the castle in a coach where the driver that doesn’t seem too eager to have him as a passenger. Hutter has to walk the final distance to the castle and there he meets Count Orlok. Soon there is a great scene when Hutter is eating dinner and accidently cuts his thumb. Orlok looks longingly at the blood on Hutter’s hand. And the audience gets this collective chill because (unlike Hutter) they know that the vampire figure wants to sink his teeth into Hutter. As the audience, you know what Count Orlock is yearning to do if Hutter would only let him. But Hutter must somehow really feel grossed out, and pulls his hand away.
Dracula scholars say that Universal actually stole this scene from Nosferatu - which was not in the Bram Stoker’s book - and included it in their 1931 version of Dracula. This makes it more ironic that Universal later sued the creators of Nosferatu for copyright infringement - even when Universal had stolen from Nosferatu.
But back to the plot of Nosferatu -
When Hutter wakes up the next morning, he finds puncture wounds on his neck, and he tries to pass it off as nothing important. He even writes his wife, Ellen, that the wounds on his neck must be the result of mosquitoes. That night, Count Orlok signs the documents to purchase the home situated near Thomas Hutter. The Count begins acting especially creepy when he notices a photo of Hutter’s wife, Ellen. He remarks that she has a “lovely neck.” Later Hutter reads a book about vampires from the local inn, and begins to suspect that Count Orlock is a vampire. Hutter hides behind a blanket in his room as the night approaches, the door seems to open by itself, Count Orlock enters, and Hutter collapses unconscious. At the same time, Hutter’s wife awakens from HER sleep and enters a trance where she walks onto her balcony’s railing. Thomas Hutter’s friend, Harding, sees that Ellen is in a trance and calls the doctor. When the doctor arrives, Ellen apparently shouts Hutter’s name. The audience gets the idea that she can somehow see - or at least has a sense - that Count Orlock is threatening her husband.
The next day, Hutter explores the castle. In a really powerful scene that slips up on you, he finds Count Orlock resting in a coffin. The director of Nosferatu uses stop motion very effectively to later show Count Orlock piling up coffins on a coach. Then Count Orlock climbs into the last coffin, the lid appears to magically slide on top of Count Orlock’s coffin, and the coach takes off. This seems to cause Hutter to rush home. Then - in what is like an Act II in the movie - the coffins are taken to a schooner to begin a voyage to the fictional German town of Wisburg. This is the town in which Hutter and Ellen live, and Count Orlock has just purchased a home. During the voyage, the ship’s sailors and captain die, and Orlock takes control. This is shown in a great way - not with lots of guts and gore - but with the silhouette or shadow of a body draped visibly across the controls of the ship. This is a great way of communicating that all the individuals on board have died. That scene tells you all you need to know. Your imagination fills in the rest - probably more effectively than any attempt to graphically show the death of the crew.
And when the ship arrives in the fictional town of Wisborg, Germany, Count Orlock leaves the ship without anyone seeing him. He carries a coffin and quickly moves into the house he bought.
Citizens of the town start dying, and the city’s doctors blame it on a plague.
Ellen runs across a book that Hutter had found, and reads that a vampire can be defeated if a pure-hearted woman distracts the vampire with her beauty - that a vampire is unable to face with the morning sunlight. She decides to sacrifice her life for Hutter to be safe, and opens her window to invite Count Orlok in. However, she faints, and Hutter revives her. Hutter then fetches Professor Bulwer, a doctor. When the doctor leaves, Count Orlok enters and starts drinking Ellen’sblood. Sure enough - accoring to legend - when the sun rises, Orlock vanishes in a puff of smoke forever. Ellen lives just long enough to be embraced by her husband. The movie’s last scene is one of Count Orlock’s ruined castle in the Carpathian Mountains.
While the 1922 Nosferatu basically tells the same story as the 1931 Dracula, the names of the characters are largely changed - this would certainly make sense for a German audience. The character of Jonathan Hutter in Dracula becomes Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu. And when it comes to the vampire character - well - where Count Dracula is somewhat attractive and even alluring, the German version of Count Orlock is clearly repulsive. One major difference is that the vampire of Nosferatu vanishes in a puff of smoke when exposed to sunlight. Sunlight might weaken Stoker’s Dracuka but it certainly doesn’t kill him.
12:06 Nosferatu sued for copyright infringement
Now the story behind the copyright suit surrounding Nosferatu is almost as dramatic as the movie inself.
You see, in 1916 the film producer Albin Grau got the idea to shoot a vampire movie. Grau had served in Serbia in World War I, and was inspired to make a movie about the undead after speaking with local famers regarding various vampire stories of the area.
He founded the company Prana Film to create the movie, and hired the great German director F.W. Murnau and some incredible talent to make his dreams come true. Unfortunately, Nosferatu was to serve as the studio’s first AND last film. You see, Grau had wanted to do a retelling of Dracula, but it is said that Stoker’s widow, Florence, refused to sell him the rights. Actually, the book was already in the public domain in the United States because of an error in copyright notice. This is similar to the one that caused The Night of the Living Dead to lapse 45 years later. But getting back to the 1922 Nosferatu - Grau’s native Germany had signed the Berne Convention, and rights to Bram Stoker’s Dracula would not be available until 1962. So it appears that although Dracula was in the public doman in the United States, it was still owned by Stoker’s estate in other areas - and Florence Stoker was determined to make money from her late husbands literary masterpiece and (unlike her husband) - profit from his creativity.
Copywright laws can be complicated - I am doing a video project that involves lengthy sections of the Bible, and planned to use the King James Version of the Bible - reasoning that a work from Shakespeare’s time would certainly be in the public domain - but it turns out that Cambridge University has some complicated rights to the King James Version if it is used in England - so I had to find another translation - but I digress.
Nevertheless, Grau pressed ahead with the film, and it started production in 1921. The argument has been made that several changes were made in the movie to hopefully avoid a copyright lawsuit. The name of the movie was changed to Nosferatu, the main character’s name was changed to Count Orlok, most of the other character’s got radical name changes, and the plot itself received many tweaks and modifications.
Unfortunately for Grau, those changes were not enough to avoid a lawsuit. Some scholars have said that the attempts to avoid a lawsuit were not really serious. On the title cards to the movie, one reads “based on the movie by Bram Stoker.” Therefore it was not difficult to prove the derivitive nature of the work.
Grau was forced to both declare bankruptcy and close Prana Film. The judge ordered that all prints be destroyed. It seemed like this motion picture classic was destined to die a quiet and very final death. Worst of all for film lovers was that the judge ordered that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. It seemed that the movie was destined to die a very quiet death and it almost certainly would have, if not for one piece of amazing fortune.
Fortunately one print found its way to the United States, and it seems that that print reached Universal Studios. This is where Universal saw the print, and later copied the scene where Count Orlock becomes fascinated by the incident where Hutter’s hand bleeds when he accidently cuts his finger.
It is from that print that every copy of the film existing today was made.
Since Dracula was already in the public domain here, there was no way to have a U.S. court order its destruction. The film slowly began to become extremely popular in the United States, and developed a reputation as a horror classic.
Nosferatu is powerfully structured - from building suspense (such as wondering what will the vampire do when he sees a victim) - to the introduction of the monster - gradually revealing more of his monstrous nature through his actions - to the conclusion when the elements of the plot come together.
Nosferatu is the first vampire film that is known to have survived into the modern age. As such, it set many of the templates and rules for the vampire films that would follow, including changing some of vampire lore forever.
As mentioned before, the biggest change was the ending of the movie. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok is burned up by the sunlight. However, in Bram Stoker’s version, sunlight was harmless to vampires, it just weakened them slightly.
However, this idea of vampires being killed by sunlight has been used over and over again in various movies, including many carrying the Dracula name. The theme has become so common that, in the more-accurate 1992 movie retelling of the book, a narrator has to explain why Dracula can walk in the daylight during one of the scenes.
Another difference is that a bite from Orlok does not create a new vampire. Rather, Orlock merely kills his victims. This theme too would be adopted by later films, which focused less on the “curse” element of vampirism and often gave vampires a choice as to whether or not a victim would live as a vampire or perish. An example of this approach is Interview with a Vampire.
Other changes, however, just didn’t catch on. For example, Count Orlock is a misshapen monster with fangs in the side of his mouth, making him almost animal-like. I plan to take a detailed look at that horrifying aspect of his appearance and possible real-world consequences during the next episode - Rats, rats, rats - part two. Again, remember that Nosferatu’s appearance is in stark contrast to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, who is a suave and aristocratic womanizer and comes across as almost sexy.
But when the movie was being filmed, it is said that Max Shreck always remained in makeup as Nosferatu all the time on set. I am sure the cast was really creeped out by his appearance and apparent desire to take his role so seriously.
And many of Nosferatu’s changes went on to become “rules’ for future vampire movies, even though they went against the story it was based upon.
In the end, it’s amazing how many elements of modern vampire lore came not from an attempt to write a better vampire tale, but rather were a failed attempt at avoiding a copyright infringement lawsuit.
Over the years Nosferatu has gained quite a reputatation. Rotten Tomatoes has written that Nosferatu is one of the silent era's most influential masterpieces. Nosferatu’s eerie, gothic feel—and a chilling performance from Max Schreck as the vampire—set the template for the horror films that followed. And in 2010, Nosferatu was ranked twenty-first in Empire magazine's "The 100 Best Films of World Cinema.”
MUSICAL TRANSITION
21:10 Werner Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu
German director Werner Herzog is often considered one of the greatest directors in the world. He strongly felt that Murnau’s Nosferatu was the greatest of all German films. Not surprisingly, Herzog became eager to make his own version of the film, and wanted German actor Klaus Kinski to play the monster. We might call it a remake - but I think Herzog preferred the term “homage.”
Now a little side bar - the German actor Klaus Kinski was quite a controversial figure - he had a towering ego and you could say frequently “exhibited deranged behavior” - in other words - he was bat dip crazy.
To say he had anger management issues is putting it mildly. At one time, Kinski and Herzog were roomates - and Herzog made a documentary about their rocky friendship called not “My best friend” but “My best fiend.” During one argument, Kinski completely destroyed the bathroom - he was the roomate from hell. It was from out of this chaos that a great creative partnership was born, with Herzog casting Kinski in five of Herzog’s greatest movies. So somehow, it doesn’t come as a surprise that Werner Herzog cast Klaus Klinski as the evil vampire monster in his own version of Nosferatu.
So on the very day in 1979 that the copyright for Dracula entered the public domain in Germany, Werner Herzog began filming Nosferatu the Vampyre. By the way, he used the older spelling for vampire - V A M P Y R E. Herzog viewed his film as a parable about what he called the fragility of order. Herzog also said about the movie, “It is more than a horror film, Nosferatu is an ambivalent, masterful force of change. When the plague threatens, people throw their property into the streets; they discard their bourgeois trappings. A re‐evaluation of life and its meaning takes place.”
Of course it seems that any actor in a role will search out interesting dimensions of the character, and Klaus Kinski said of the vampire Nosferatu that “We see Dracula sympathetically in this film. He is a man without free will. He cannot choose, and he cannot cease to be. He is a kind of incarnation of evil, but he is also a man who is suffering, suffering for love. This makes it so much more dramatic, more double‐edged”
The incredibly beautiful French actress Isabelle Adjani plays the heroine Lucy, and has been quoted as saying about her scenes with Nosferatu - “Yes, There's a sexual element. She is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination — as we all would think. First, she hopes to save the people of the town by sacrificing herself. But then, there is a moment of transition. There is a scene when he isn't sucking her blood — sucking and sucking like an animal—and suddenly, her face takes on a new expression, a sexual one, and she will not let him go away anymore. There is a desire that has been born.”
24:59 Evaluation of Nosferatu
One extremely impressive aspect of the move is its sheer beauty. Herzog obviously has an eye for what looks good on screen, and some of the outdoor countryside scenes are especially breathtaking.
I have even seen reviews that describe the 1979 remake of Nosferatu as a “contemplative” Dracula. At first, I thought that was a really strange way of referring to a vampire movie. But now I can see that such a view makes a certain amount of sense, especially in post-War II Germany. All-in-all, the 1979 Nosferatu is an excellent remake and well worth your time.
25:46 Summary
In conclusion, let me end with Roger Ebert’s opinion of the original Nosferatu - he added Nosferatu to his list of The Great Movies, and has written “Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires. ... Is Murnau's Nosferatu scary in the modern sense? Not for me. I admire it more for its artistry and ideas, its atmosphere and images, than for its ability to manipulate my emotions like a skilful modern horror film. It knows none of the later tricks of the trade, like sudden threats that pop in from the side of the screen. But Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn't scare us, but it haunts us.”
And I would add: that the basic subject of this podcast - Edgar Allan Poe - was not only a master not only of stories that scare us, but when we approach his works with respect, he also is a writer of works that haunt us.
27:02 Future episodes
The next episode - episode 81 - deals with what some have said is the most terrifying aspect on Nosferatu, and its real-world effects. Becoming immersed in Nosferatu’s side effects this week has taken me to some very dark places - areas of deep despair regarding man’s inhuamity to man, as well as our incredible potential as human beings. So join Celebrate Poe for Rats rats, rats - part two - and a podcast that just might change the way you look at the world.
27:44 Sources
Sources for this episode include the films - the 1921 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and the 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre: Phantom of the Night, and the books Devil’s Advocates: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror by Cristina Massaccesi, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe by Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson, and Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others by David Livingstone Smith.
28:26 Outro
And why not visit my podcast web site at celebratepoe.buzzsprout.com - click on the episode you want to learn more about to see its show notes and a transcript.
Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.