Still Gives Me Chills, Even After 80 Years

F.W. Murnau, director of the beautiful Sunrise (1927) and the infamous Nosferatu (1922), was born 117 years ago today in Westphalia. He became one of the émigré film directors from Europe who dominated Hollywood in the late twenties onward, but he never managed to top the art or success of his silent pictures. However, if all he’d ever made was Nosferatu, he would still have been one of the greatest film artists of all time.

One of the major directors of Germany’s ethereal and phenomenal silent film industry of the 1920’s, his Nosferatu still ranks amongst the best films ever made. Audiences today might mistake the sped-up sequences and stop-action filming as “funny”, trained by the Keystone antics that solidified the axiom “Action + Speed = Comedy.” Not in any world is this film devoid of shivers, though, and I’d place it against any of the bikini-thrillers of recent decades for sheer horror. Imagine what those scenes must have looked like at the time? Just picture that great Max Schreck face in your mind’s eye, even now. That is the stuff of nightmares.

Eerie and menacing, the film will be as scary in a hundred years as it was when it was made. So celebrate the birth of a master of atmosphere and settle in for a night of thrills to chase away those post-Christmas schmaltz-filled blues.

All it will cost you is an evening. Or some sweat and tears, and perhaps... a little blood.