Nosferatu Review
The film that brought one of German cinema's masters to international attention, F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) is also one of the best screen versions of -Dracula, even if the Bram_Stoker source received no credit. Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz_Arno_Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max_Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson_Welles and Gregg_Toland when they made Citizen_Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred_Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar. Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
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