31 Days of Halloween

Day Twenty One: The Nosferatu Double Feature

Nosferatu (1922)



I first saw Nosferatu on a pretty crappy transfer and felt I owed the film a rewatch. Sure enough, this is a much better movie than I remembered. The key to the film's success are the visuals, which are clearly amazing and way ahead of their time. F.W. Murnau and his cinematographers capture some of the most striking images you'll ever see. The greatest is most certainly Orlock's shadow and it's slow descent up the stairs. There's also the rats pouring out of the coffin, Knock running through the streets, Orlock in the door way, Orlock's rigid standing up on the ship, Orlock in Ellen's room in the end...basically any scene with Orlock. It's all very striking and helps build a tangibly creepy atmosphere which never lets up. Murnau also makes use of some pretty bold editing for the time.

For anyone who doesn't know, this is an unofficial retelling of Dracula and Max Schreck's Count Orlock (A.K.A Dracula) is one of the best takes on the legendary vampire. He's a horrifying creature (thanks in large part to the art direction and make-up) that silently stalks his prey, showing no mercy. This film is also the best I've seen in regards to treating Dracula as the fearsome threat that he is. One of my favourite scenes is when Orlock is preying on Hutter, and simultaneously a hypnosis is falling over Hutter's wife Ellen in another country. It's a great example of what an otherworldly and horrifying being this is.

This is one of the absolute greatest silent films. It's place in film history is undisputed. This is a wildly important film which took bold risks and did a lot to advance the medium. As a work of storytelling, it's also highly effective. There's something inherently mythical about silent films that makes them akin to fables, and Nosferatu really embodies that. It's a dark and twisted nightmare which explores what we fear at the most basic level.

A+

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)



I used to wonder why Werner Herzog chose to remake Nosferatu instead of just doing his own adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula. But after seeing the film, I get it. Herzog clearly loves F.W. Murnau's original work and he shows that here. But this isn't a shot for shot remake, but a film which uses the iconography established by the original in order to tell it's own version of the story. Herzog's visual style is interesting in that it feels wholly authentic, yet still very stylized. This is a perfect way to tell a vampire story, as it brings legitimacy to the lore while maintaining their mystique. The cinematography is both beautiful and highly haunting. This isn't a film that derives it's scares from big moments, but from a compelling and dreadful atmosphere which eventually overtakes the whole.

The other reason this had to be a remake of Nosferatu (and not just another Dracula story) is because the Murnau visual of Dracula is perfectly suited for Herzog's interpretation of the character. This is not a sophisticated aristocrat or a sexy supernatural being, but a deformed creature destine to be shunned in the dark. Herzog embraces these aspects and turns Dracula into a downright pathetic character. He's still a very threatening and powerful being, but there's a vulnerability to him too. Klaus Kinski is fantastic in the role, and the rest of the cast is great too. Isabelle Adjani is very compelling as Harker's wife Lucy and ends up becoming one of the most interesting characters in the film. On that note, this might be the only Dracula adaptation where I liked Jonathan. He's still a bit vanilla as a character, but Bruno Ganz dedication to his wife feels really sincere. Roland Topor is also a blast to watch as the crazed Renfield.

Perhaps the greatest praise I can give is to say Nosferatu the Vampyre serves as a perfect companion piece to Murnau's masterpiece. It may lack the originality of that film, and it's ending isn't quite as strong, but Herzog's deeper look into the psyche of the characters and the themes of the story more than make up for that.

A+

I must have been 10 or 11 when I was channel flipping on a Saturday AFTERNOON and this movie popped up and that exact scene was playing. I watched for a few seconds and then heard some footsteps and immediately changed the channel. It would be YEARS before I found out what the fuck that movie was.

Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak is Guillermo del Toro’s latest horror(?) story sits pretty well alongside Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a story about a New York woman who is given dire warnings by the ghost of her mother and years later finds herself married to a struggling English entrepreneur who brings her to Allerdale Hall, his family estate in England. While there she is visited by more ghosts who reveal the dark secrets and sinister plot of her husband and his equally creepy sister.

Crimson Peak has its share of scares, startles and jumps. Several times it’s successful in shocking an audience. It’s a very beautiful movie to look at and once again del Toro delivers on giving us stylish and horrific sets and demons. I just couldn’t really get behind the story. It’s a movie that hits the same beats as other del Toro films and borrows heavily from them with many of those beats dragging much longer than they need to. If you were to watch Devil’s Backbone and Crimson Peak back to back you would notice that the themes and even ending are exactly the same. It makes me wonder what del Toro’s motivation was for making the movie. It’s not like it’s a story that he was desperate to tell, he’s already told it. The movie comes off as a ‘Greatest Hits’ mashup of Guillermo del Toro movies and while that isn’t necessarily a bad thing it doesn’t do anything to distinguish itself.

B so says Doomsday

I've been curious about The Abominable Dr. Phibes for a while now.

Film Nineteen: The Nightmare (2015)
Documentarian Rodney Asher first came to prominence when his 2012 film Room 237, which collected a variety of fan theories about Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, debuted and was quickly acknowledged as a great study in obsession and in film analysis. The fact that the film’s subject was a horror movie wasn’t really commented upon but Asher’s later work (including an ABCs of Death segment) has made it clear that Asher is very intently interested in what scares people and his latest film, The Nightmare, confirms that Asher has a very entrenched interest in horror cinema. In fact The Nightmare might be the first documentary that could legitimately and unironicly be called a horror movie. The film concerns a medical condition called Sleep Paralysis, in which people have frightening hallucinations that they can’t wake up from as they’re falling asleep or waking up. There are no doctors or medical experts interviewed here, all the interview subjects here are actual sufferers of the condition and any background information is recanted by those sufferers as they explain how they came to learn about what was going on with them. Much of the film consists of re-enactments of these nightmares that are narrated by the interview subjects. These are not cheap re-enactments , they are fully produced horror scenes and a lot of them are absolutely freaky and the fact that they were actually experienced by real people (albeit in their sleep) gives them an extra chilling lair. Asher also indulges his interest in pop culture by recounting how some of the interview subjects used movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jacob’s Ladder, and Insidious, to contextualize what was happening to them. I watch a pretty good number of documentaries and a lot of them are repetitive and lacking in cinematic flair, this one stands out because it is both unique and really skillfully made.

***1/2 out of Four

Deep Red (1975)



Okay, I'll preface this by saying my only exposure to Dario Argento has been his well known and received Suspiria from 1977. Suspiria is just simply a film that totally works in a late-70s, absurdly fantastical sort of way. The plot is at times completely nonsensical and it's not likely to scare anyone these days, but the cinematography and lavish color palette is strikingly beautiful and the film does have a good amount of chilling sequences. Naturally, I wanted to see more by Argento, who now sadly has become a sort of joke in his own genre for churning out nothing but shit for the last 20 or so years. So Deep Red, his film prior to Suspiria, seemed to be the way to go.

Deep Red is about a concert pianist in Rome who witnesses his psychic neighbor being murdered in her home after she reads the thoughts of a member in an audience. Naturally, the inquisitive musician teams up with a snoopy reporter to track down the killer themselves, because of course the police do nothing in the film at all. Seriously, it's like they don't even try at all. In fact, the protagonist purposely never involves them, which is fine but kind of weird. I've read that if you watch an Argento film for the plot, you're gonna be disappointed and frustrated, and that's definitely the case in Deep Red. When you look back on the film after the killer is revealed at the end, you realize that none of it makes any sense at all and Argento is staging scenes for the sole purpose of being creepy and disturbing and how it all comes together doesn't matter. How does the killer have time to hang creepy dolls in a person's home when they were just in that room two minutes ago? How does the killer get in and out of buildings so quickly? Why the hell is the killer attending a psychic conference in the first place? The more you look back on it, you can really pick on the film for the numerous amounts of plot holes you have to walk over. But to be honest, it doesn't detract from the film too much for me.

The film actually has a coherent plot, and the script is filled with surprisingly witty and humorous dialogue and banter, namely between the protagonist and the female reporter. The characters are a quirky cast of oddballs, and yet somehow it all works pretty well. The music by Goblin, who did the score for Suspiria, was a lot of fun. At times it verges on totally silly and out of place, but it works in an Italian cinema of the 70s sort of way and keeps in tune with Argento's "giallo" film style. Other times though the score is devilishly fun and pulses with creepy energy and tension like you're in a sort of comedic horror opera. Argento's greatest strength is his work behind the camera. There's a lot of POV tracking shots, which won't seem like anything special today but for 1975 are very well executed. His use of color, while not nearly on the level of Suspiria, is really well done and the vivid blues and reds mix well in the dark rooms and shadows.

Overall, you can pick apart this movie entirely if you want to from a plot standpoint. But even then there's not much denying Argento's technique and camerawork is unique and full of fun, gory energy that makes it worth a watch. If you haven't seen Suspiria, absolutely see that first, because if you weren't impressed with that film there's no way you'll enjoy this one. Next week I'll be taking a look at the unofficial Suspiria sequel, 1980's Inferno, which Neverending has already reviewed before.

7/10

Yeah, totally agree. Very disappointing considering who was involved, and the twist is just cheap and obvious. Haven't seen it in years and doesn't sound like I need to revisit it again.

SnoBorderZero PhantomKnight

You guys were too young at the time, but this shit came out the same summer as Hollow Man. You can just imagine which movie was better.

It was a great, dial-up era, teen guy movie.

The dial-up era, haha. A noise and bad connection that defined a generation.

In Hollow Man she did?