A Film Canon

One of the greatest horror films ever made, Nosferatu is the first to fully equate the genre with the uncanny; that is, the systematic defamiliarisation of the everyday. To this end, Murnau radically reshapes Stoker's Dracula, placing a disproportionate emphasis upon real estate agent Hutter's journey to the Transylvanian castle of the vampiric Nosferatu (Max Schreck) and their parallel journeys back to his home town - a trajectory that forms the pretext for a subtle diffusion of the distinctions between the animate and inanimate. Most explicitly, this involves the elaboration of a series of enlivened objects, culminating with the vampire himself, whose movement is relatively minimal and, when it does occur, creaky and artificial, particularly when reinforced by the use of reverse footage. More subtly, Murnau stresses the invisible components of the natural world, both in a supernatural and scientific register, respectively encapsulated in the reactions of the animal kingdom to the tainted air around Nosferatu's castle, and a delineation of the various hidden, and even microscopic, 'vampires' that inhabit it (spiders, Venus flytraps, polyps). This produces the sense of some great evil suffusing and defamiliarising the physical universe, reified in the form of the waterfall that is poetically intercut with Hutter's first realisation of the true nature of the castle in which he is accomodated, expanded into the river, ocean and harbour that Nosferatu traverses to get to his home town and, finally, progressively generalised into wind, the mildest breeze, and air itself, such that every space, however placid or uneventful, seems to ripple with the presence of some looming threat. In this way, Murnau stresses the continuity of space to an unprecedented extent, until the conventional parameters of the frame are dissolved in its watery medium, producing a series of exquisitely oblique montage sequences, most notably in the depictions of Nosferatu's ship, as well as providing one of the most poetic efforts to fully aestheticise silent cinema, insofar as this diffuse horror is presumably as unspeakable is it is invisible.