Nosferatu: The Ultimate DVD Edition
Kino Video, $29.95Before F.W. Murnau sunk his teeth into Count Orlok, he tackled another phantom: Satan. The most ambitious of seven supernatural (and since lost) Murnau movies was a time-traveling triptych concerning Old Scratch himself – or so we learn in “The Language of Shadows,” an exhaustive documentary attached to Kino Video’s new two-disc Nosferatu: The Ultimate DVD Edition.
Restored by an international team using footage from prints the world over, Nosferatu stands at a robust 93 minutes, in contrast to dozens of cheap, incomplete, public domain copies. And with the print close to pristine, Murnau’s deliberate, painterly compositions and pervasive shadows fill each frame. Gorgeous, historically accurate tints bathe the happier domestic scenes in a hearth-side yellow and cast Orlok’s castle in shocking, asphyxiated blues and greens. The largest departure from the 1922 original – aside from a newly recorded version of the original score, belying the film’s oft-neglected subhead, A Symphony of Horror – is the re-creation of the original inter-titles in English on disc one. (For purists, the original German cards, with subtitles, are preserved on disc two.)
One of the most influential films of all time, it’s almost superfluous to discuss the film itself and its considerable merits. But if anything, this crystalline edition imprints Murnau’s fascination with nature’s grotesqueries – carnivorous plants, plague rats, and tentacled polyps, not to mention the titular bloodsucker – even deeper on the psyche. The same goes for vampirism’s considerable psychosexual head-fucks – the emasculating power of Orlok’s bite transforming ostensible hero Hutter from confident husband into emasculated hysteric, his wife’s slaying the beast in an early reversal of gender roles, or the transparent homoerotic subtexts foregrounded by definitive translations from the original German. (Asks Count Orlok, “Can we not stay together a little longer, my lovely man?”)
In crafting their “ultimate edition,” Kino’s bridged the frights onscreen to the dark history of the film itself: “The Language of Shadows” imparts that Nosferatu was the only film from the Prana production company – an unabashedly Masonic and occult concern founded by a man known to pal around with Aleister Crowley. Scared yet?
This article appears in December 28 • 2007.