Nosferatu Festival Celebrates Count Orlok's Centennial
The other Batman comes to town
By Marc Savlov, Fri., March 4, 2022
Title Card
Wisborg, Germany, Town Crier Announcement:
The mayor announces that ill or plague-stricken people should not be seen on the streets and cannot be taken to the hospital. They must remain in their homes.
While the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention and World Health Organization scramble to keep up with the multiple whack-a-mole coronavirus variants that have turned modern life downright cattywampus, there's one dark avenue of transmission they haven't, to the best of our knowledge, explored. That's right, we speak, obviously, of vampirism. No, wait, hear us out. Our theory isn't as fantastical as it may at first sound.
March 4, 2022, will mark the 100th anniversary of the release of F.W. Murnau's "Symphony of Horror," Nosferatu. Apart from being the first film to bring Bram Stoker's 1897 classic of bitingly toothsome literature, Dracula, to the screen (much to the dismay of the Stoker estate, which sued, semi-successfully as a court order resulted in nearly all physical copies of the film being destroyed), this unsettling meisterstück of German expressionist cinema long ago reached iconic pop cultural significance.
Honestly, somebody should throw a socially distanced centenary party for this masterpiece of weird cinema. And this being Austin, aka Bat City, somebody has. Mitch Rafter, the man behind Gore Noir Magazine, is feting the occasion with the fourth annual "Nosferatu Festival: A Weekend of Horror," March 4-6. Attendees can expect screenings, vendors, food and drink (in blood bags!), and live/undead music from a raft of midnight-inclined bands, not least among them the reformed L.A. goth rockers 45 Grave. Do you wanna party? It's party time! "It's kinda wild," Rafter admits, "because in the actual movie Count Orlok comes ashore and so does the plague. Everybody gets locked down in their houses, unable to leave, and he becomes this sort of silent killer, stalking around. Here it's the 100-year anniversary of the movie and we're now dealing with pretty much what they were dealing with in Nosferatu. He's the COVID of his time."
Murnau cast the eternally eerie actor Max Schreck not as Stoker's Count but as Count Orlok. (The new appellation fooled no one.) Made up to look less like Bela Lugosi's aristocratic archfiend as seen in Universal's 1931 classic and more like cross between a Rattus norvegicus and an impossibly gaunt, bald-pated Mr. Spock, Schreck's gnawsome, corpselike manifestation has, over the past century, turned out to be possibly even more influential to the horror genre than Lugosi's.
Legions of cinematic and pop cultural bloodsuckers owe Murnau and Schreck a blood debt. From Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's remake to Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement's What We Do in the Shadows, Murnau's movie and Schreck's half-rat-sans-bat performance as a walking contagion remain as potently pestilential as ever.
Asked about Nosferatu's remarkably enduring afterlife, Rafter said, "It's definitely Schreck's performance and the overall mood and atmosphere that Murnau crafted. I saw it as a kid and it gave me nightmares. I think a good horror movie is one that may give you nightmares but also excites something in you. After the nightmares subside you realize that, hey, I really liked the way that made me feel something.
"It's really kind of catching iconic lightning in a bottle, like the original The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in a way. Everything just lines up and you get that spark that conjures up emotions. And pretty much every culture has its own vampire mythology that fulfills that soulful role. It's less What We Do in the Shadows and more, 'What's in the shadows?'"
Nosferatu Festival Fri.-Sun., March 4-6, Come & Take it Live, 2015 E. Riverside Bldg. 4. Kickoff party Fri., March 4, Kick Butt Coffee, 5775 Airport #725. nosferatufestival.com.
