Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror (German: Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens) is a 1922 German expressionist horror film, directed by F.W. Murnau. The movie, shot in 1921 and released in 1922, was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
Synopsis[]
In 1838, young estate agent Thomas Hutter lives with his wife Ellen in Wisborg, Germany. One morning, he picks flowers for her, but rather than being happy, she grows sad and asks him why he killed the lovely flowers. He comforts her before heading to work. On his way there, he is met by Professor Bulwer, who advises him not to be so hasty, for on one can escape his destiny.
Hutter reaches his place of work and is called upon by his employer, Knock. Knock tells Hutter that Count Orlok of Transylvania wishes to buy an attractive house in the town. He offers Hutter the task, telling him that he could earn quite a bit of money, but it will cost him some effort, a little sewat and perhaps a little blood. Once Hutter has examined the map to determine the location of Transylvania, Knock suggests that he offer Orlok the house opposite his own. He advises Hutter to go quickly and travel safely to the land of ghosts.
Hutter returns home and tells Ellen that he is going far away to the land of robbers and ghosts. She is dismayed as he begins to pack enthusiastically. He tries to comfort her with hugs and kisses, but she remains somber. Hutter leaves Ellen in the care of his friends, the rich ship-owner Harding and his sister Ruth. As he is about to leave, he tells her not to worry and she catches up to him and kisses him passionately before he departs. He then mounts his horse and rides off.
Hutter travels many a dusty road before he reaches the dusty peaks of the Carpathian Mountains. Travelling by carriage, he reaches an inn one night and is welcomed by the innkeeper and his wife. He is given a table and a drink, but requests to be served food quickly, for he has to go on the Castle Orlok. Upon hearing this, the locals are shocked and the innkeeper wanrs Hutter that he must go no further, for the werewolf haunts the woods. Outside, the werewolf scares a group of horses away and inspires fear in inn's tenants. As the innkeeper's wife shows Hutter to his room, she leaves a book for him titled Of Vampires, Mounstrous Ghosts, Sorcery and the Seven Deadly Sins. The book states that vampires are created from the seed of Belial, drink the blood of humans and sleep in caves, graves and coffins filled with soil plagued by the Black Death. He goes to sleep after reading this.
The next morning, Hutter awakes and looks out his window to see a group of horses sunning through a nearby field. He throws the book away and takes a bath. He later leaves the inn and boards a carriage which takes him up into the mountains. However, as the sun begins to set and they reach the mountain pass, the coachmen refuse to take him further despite promises of increased payment. Hutter resolves to continue alone on foot and as night falls he beholds sinister sights. He is approached by a carriage that moves at unnaturally fast spped and is operated by a very sinister-looking coachman. Despite his fear, Hutter boards the carriage. Once it comes to a halt, Hutter exists and the coachman points him towards a castle.
As Hutter approaches the castle, he sees the coach disappear back down the path and the double doors of the entrance open as if by magic. Once he enters, they close behind him. As he makes his way forward, Hutter finally meets Count Orlok, a pale and ratlike man. Orlok tells Hutter that he has kept him waiting far too long, for it is nearly midnight and the servants are asleep. At Orlok's instruction, Hutter follows him inside the castle. Hutter dines as his sinister host reads the contract, cutting a piece if bread for himself. Distracted by the count and the toll of the clock when it strikes midnight, he accidentally cuts his thumb with the bread knife. Orlok rises from his chair and approaches Hutter, expressing concern that he is hurt himself. He attempts to suck blood from the wound, causing Hutter to back away from him in terror as he advances on him. Orklok asks Hutter to stay up with him for a while, as it is a long time before sunrise and during the day he sleeps the deepest sleep of all. They sit in chairs before the fireplace until Hutter falls asleep.
Hutter awakes the next morning in the same chair and finds Orlok gone. He discovers two marks on his neck and examines them in his pocket mirror before finding breakfast laid at the table. Once he has dined, Hutter explores the castle and its grounds, finding them deserted apart from himself. He writes a letter for Ellen, swatting away mosquitoes as he does so and concluding that they are the cause of the marks on his neck. Seeing a rider at the edge of the grounds, Hutter calls out to him and asks him to deliver the latter for him, to which the rider agrees.
Night falls and Hutter once again meets with Orlok. As he is showing him the contract, Hutter drops his locket, which has a picture of Ellen inside, on the table. Orlok picks it up and examines it hungily before commenting that Hutter's wife has such a beautiful neck. Once the count hands the locket back, a disturbed Hutter hurriedly stuffs it into his jacket. Orlok agrees to but the house and signs the contract.
Later that night, Hutter examines the locket and happens upon the booking. Reading it, he learns that at night, vampires sink their fangs into their victims' necks and feed on their blood, aa hellish elixir of light for them. As the clock strikes the hour, Hutter looks out the door of his rooms and sees Orlok standing before the fireplace and staring towards him. Terrified, Hutter runs to his window, but sees that he is too high up and thr drop would be fatal. He hides under his bedsheets as Orlok enters his room. Meanwhile in Wisborg, Ellen rises from her bed and sleepwalks out onto the balcony. In his study, Harding hears strange noises coming from Ellen's room and goes to investigate, finding her sleepwalking on the balcony's railing. He calls out to her and catches her as she falls. He is joined by a maid and tells her to fetch a doctor.
In Transylvania, Orlok approaches Hutter and moves in for the kill. In Wisborg, Ellen is examined by Doctor Sievers as Harding and Ruth stand by her side. She suddenly rises up in her bed and calls out for Hutter. Hearing this, orlok backs away and looks around for the source of the sound before leaving the room, the door closing behind him. Ellen falls asleep once again and Sievers advises Harding that she has a harmless congestion of the blood.
At dawn, Hutter wakes and finds himself unharmed. Rushing through the castle, he enters a crypt, where he finds Orlok sleeping in a coffin. Terrified, he returns to his room. Once night falls, he looks out of his window and sees Orlok stacking several coffins on the back of a carriage before climbing into one himself and using magic to levitate the lid onto it. As the carriage leaves, Hutter realizes that Ellen is in danger. Tying several bedsheets together, he climbs out of the window, but injures himself and loses consciousness.
Orlok's coffins travel downriver on a raft, with the raftsmen knowing nothing of the sinister lead they carry. Hutter makes his way down the mountains and is brought to found by a group of peasants, who bring him to a hospital. The next day, he wakes, but can only utter the word "coffins". The coffins reach a harbor where they are to be loaded onto the schooner Empusa. The crew open one of the coffins on the order of the harbormaster and find several live rats inside. A rat bites one crew member on the foot, causing him to try to kill the rats with a shovel.
In Wisborg, Professor Bulwer teaches a class when he shows his students carnivorous plants. They watch a venus flytrap consume a fly and Bulwer compares it to a vampire. He then shows them a polyp consuming its prey, comparing it to a phantom due to its transparancy and weightlessness. Knock, having been taken to Doctor Sievers' asylum, begins to have raving fits of madness. Sievers is taken to Knock's cell by a guard, where the find him catching flies out of midair and eating them, declaring that blood is life. He then attacks Sievers, forcing the guard to restrain him. Knock then points to the spiders high up on the walls and Sievers orders the guard to bind him with ropes.
Overcome with loneliness and her desire to be reunited with Hutter, Ellen often sits by the sea and watches the horizon. As Harding and Ruth play croquet, a man gives a letter to their gardener, who passes it on to them. Seeing that it is from Hutter, they make for the beach and find Ellen. Ruth reads the letter aloud to Ellen, who then takes it and clutches it to her heart before departing. Hutter leaves the hospital, ignoring the warning from the nun who has cared for him that he is unfit for travel.
As Hutter travels with his horse towards Wisborg, the Empusa continues its course. In the asylum, Knock steals a newspaper from an unsuspecting caretaker. Reading it, he learns that the pleague has broken out in Transylvania and at ports in Varna and Galaz, with all victims having the same marks on their throats, which doctors have been unable to explain. The article also states that the Dardanelles are being searched for a plague-infested ship. Knock laughs ecstatically once he has read it.
Onboard the Empusa, the captain is informed that a sailor has fallen ill and delirious below deck. He examines him and orders him to rest. That night, the sailor sees the spectre of Orlok. The crew of the ship die one by one until only the captain and his first mate remain. Taking an axe, the first mate makes his way below deck. He opens once of the coffins and Orlok rises out of it. Consumed by terror, the first mate suns back up to the deck and jumps off the ship and into the ocean. Determined to finish the voyage, the captain ties himseld to the steering wheel, but Orlok kills him and takes control of the ship.
Ellen continues to sleepwalk. Ruth finds her and Ellen states that she must go to him, for he is coming. Knock watches from his cell as the Empusa enter's Wisborg's harbor and excitedly declares that the master is near. Onboard the ship, Orlok emerges from the hold. A member of staff enter's Knock's cell to remove the remnants of his most recent meal and knock incapacitates him and escapes. Orlok hides his coffins in several locations around Wisborg and his army of rats spread forth fromn the ship. Hutter finally reaches Wisborg and he and Ellen are joyously reunited. Orlok enters his new home, passing through the door like a ghost.
Harding examines the Empusa and finds the captain dead. The town officials are informed that they have searched the ship and there is not a living soul onboard. Harding find's the captain's log and learns of the deaths of the crew. The officials meet later and Sievers examines the captain's corpse. Harding reads from the log of a sailor developing fever, claims of a sinister unseen passenger and suspicions of the plague. Sievers orders all present to go home and close their doors and windows. A herald makes a procalmation that all suspected sufferers of the plague must travel to the hospital immediately. A man later walks through the town, drawing the sign of the cross in chalk on each door.
Hutter warns Ellen not to read the book that he so disturbed him, but she finds herself unable to resist it. She reads that the vampire can only be destroyed if a woman within sin should offer him her blood of her own free will and make him forget the crow of the cock. Hutter finds her reading the book and tells her note to, but she tells him that she can see Orlok watching her from the opposite house every night. She leaves and the distressed Hutter collapses on the bed.
Fear spreads through the town as nobody can be sure who does or does not have the plague. Ruth contracts it and Harding goes to fetch Sievers, but she succumbs. Seeing coffins being carried through the streets, Ellen once again reads the passage on how to destroy the vampire. The townspeople, having heard that Knock strangled the warden, comclude that he is the vampire and chase him through the streets. He climbs onto a roof and they throw stones at him. He runs into a field and they chase after him, but attack a scarecrow when they mistake it for him.
That night, Ellen feels Orlok watching her from the opposite house. Rising from her bed. She opens her windows and seeing this, Orlok leaves his home. Ellen frantically wakes Hutter and collapses onto the bed, telling him to fetch Bulwer. Hutter rushes off to get Bulwer and Orlok enters their house, making his way towards the bedroom. Overcome with fear, Ellen sits on her bed and Orlok stretches his hand out, its shadows crossing her heart and clenching into a feast, causing her to collapse. As he feeds on her Hutter wakes Bulwer and tells him Ellen is ill. Knock is captured and returns to his asylum. As the sun rises, Orlok hears a rooster crowing. Knock cries out in fear for his master and is subdued by the guards. Orlok tries to escape, but is destroyed by the sunlight. Sensing his master's death, Knock also dies.
Pleased that she has completed her task and destroyed Orlok forever, Ellen calls out for Hutter. He and Bulwer arrive, but Ellen dies in her husband's arms. The devastated Hutter mourns his wife as Bulwer watches sadly from the hallway. In Transylvania, Castle Orlok collapses into ruin.
Cast[]
- Max Schreck as Count Orlok
- Gustav von Wangenheim as Thomas Hutter
- Greta Schröder as Ellen Hutter
- Alexander Granach as Knock
- Ruth Landshoff as Annie
- Max Nemetz as The Captain of the Empusa
- Wolfgang Heinz as First Mate of the Empusa
- Georg H. Schnell as Harding
- John Gottowt as Professor Bulwer
- Gustav Botz as Professor Sievers
- Heinrich Witte as guard in asylum
- Guido Herzfeld as innkeeper
- Karl Etlinger as student with Bulwer
- Hardy von Francois as hospital doctor
- Fanny Schreck as hospital nurse
Production[]
Gallery[]
Original posters & art[]
Covers from modern releases[]
See also[]
References[]
External link[]
- Your Wife Has A Lovely Neck (music remix)