There are two types of vampire: one is the vulpine, Bela Lugosi-esque seducer, while the other is the “verminous” kind pioneered by Count Orlok in the 1922 German silent horror classic Nosferatu. That’s one of the sharper observations in this reasonably interesting but shakily organised documentary timed to coincide with the Robert Eggers remake; a comeback, after decades of hot vampire dominance, for the hideous original progenitor in our atavistic, post-pandemic times.
FW Murnau’s Nosferatu, a first but unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was almost lost when the author’s widow succeeded in having most copies of it destroyed. What a loss that would have been: a sui generis masterpiece that was instigated by producer Albin Grau meeting a Serbian soldier on the western front who claimed his father was a vampire, and which compressed mass anxieties about war and disease into an oppressively deathly fable. It would surely have taken the emerging horror genre years to reconstitute Nosferatu’s visual vocabulary of eerie dissolves and other uncanny effects. Not to mention a key piece of the vampire legendarium, also invented by the film: that they are killed by sunlight.
