Cult Cinema –
Original title: Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens
Year: 1922
Officially premiered in Berlin on March 4, 1922.
Duration: 91 min.
Country: Germany
Director: F.W. Murnau
Screenplay: Henrik Galeen. Book: Bram Stoker
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schröder, Alexander Granach, Georg H. Schnell, Ruth Landshoff, John Gottowt, Gustav Botz, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz
Companies: Prana-Film GmbH
License: Public Domain
Curiosities:
Nosferatu, comes from and is a derivation of the Greek term ‘Nosophoros’, which means carrier of plagues.
Nosferatu was not the first of several film versions of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Karóly Lajthay had filmed in 1921 Drakula halála (The Death of Dracula), considered lost.
The studio behind Nosferatu, Prana Film (named after the Buddhist concept of Prana, Sanskrit for cosmic energy.), was a short-lived silent-era German film studio founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and artist and occultist Albin Grau. . His intention was to produce occult and supernatural themed films. Grau was a member of the Berlin Rosicrucian lodge Pansophi and the Fraternitas Saturni lodge, under the magical name of Master Pacitius. It is known that in 1925 Grau participated in the Weida Conference, an international meeting of occult leaders, in which Aleister Crowley, poet and black magician nicknamed ‘The Great Beast’ also participated. Nosferatu was Prana Film’s only production, as it filed for bankruptcy in order to dodge copyright infringement lawsuits by Florence Balcombe, Bram Stoker’s widow.
Grau had the idea of making a vampire movie; the inspiration came from a war experience of Grau’s: in the winter of 1916, a Serbian farmer told him that his father was a vampire and one of the undead.
Occult Symbolism:
The realistic staging of the film gives the impression that supernatural processes are anchored in the real world as something natural. In the depiction of the vampire as a magical, but nonetheless real figure, endowed with secret knowledge of In an elitist-academic way, the influence of Grau in the film, who moved in occult circles, becomes evident. This influence is particularly visible in the design of the card that Knock receives from the Nosferatu at the beginning of the film. In two brief scenes, which together last only a few seconds, a cabalistic-looking encrypted text is seen, the code of which Sylvain Exertier considers indecipherable. In addition to signs such as the Maltese Cross and a swastika, letters of the Hebrew alphabet and astrological symbols can be seen. Sylvain Exertier interprets the text as an announcement of Orlok’s – also spiritual – journey in the field of tension between the masculine principle, represented by Jupiter, the feminine, symbolized by Venus, and death, represented by Saturn. There are also decorative drawings of a skull, a snake and a dragon that Exertier considers “more spectacular than authentic”. It remains unclear whether the letter is a question of “coquetry on the part of the director or a wink from the occultists.
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