Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  In the 1914 war, I served in the Air Corps, and came to understand aviation as a new way of seeing. (The air arm itself grew out of the reconnaissance service.) Airborne vision now escaped that Euclidian tyranny so acutely felt by the ground troops in the trenches; in this new, astounding topological field, air pilots already had their own special-effects, with their own names: loops, figure-eights, falling-leaf rolls. My understanding was transformed by the way the airborne observer’s hand seemed to detach itself from the body and stretch out in freedom … the aerial body, looking down from a great height.… Good training for the fledgling film director.

  After the war I bought a battered old view camera and tripod in a Charlottenburg junk shop and began shooting pictures of everything within range. I even attempted to develop and print the footage myself in a converted coat closet. The experiment was not a success.

  Eventually I progressed in the only way possible for me, which was to make every mistake until there were no mistakes left to make, and the right way of proceeding was the only possibility remaining. Like many of the early filmmakers, I thought myself an urbane bohemian and outsider, eager to experiment, one of the sensitive, nervous spirits of the age, a tinkerer and a visionary with what I hoped was a keen business sense.

  Even then the film world, to my dismay, did not fall prostrate before me. The truth was that I would have to become a bit less gangly and awkward, at least enough to overcome the distressing habit of falling over my feet, before I could impress that world with the idea that I was a gifted artist drawing on vast resources of experience and sophistication.

  Dolny’ Kubi’n, Slovakia. Grau wants the names of Stoker’s characters changed, but echoed. Harker has thus become Hutter. On the long trip here I wrote the first title from his diary, which will introduce the story: Nosferatu. Doesn’t the name sound like the midnight call of a death bird? Beware of uttering it, or the pictures of life will turn to pale shadows, nightmares will rise up from the heart and nourish themselves on your blood. [Fade in a long shot of the town.] For a long time I have been meditating on the rise and fall of the Great Death in my father’s town of Wisborg. Here is the story of it: In Wisborg there lived a man named Hutter with his young wife, Ellen.

  Wangenheim was a compromise choice as Hutter. I wanted Veidt, whom Grau proclaimed too old, too sinister-looking, and, he might have added, too intimately associated with me. Neither of us is happy with Wangenheim, but he was available. At the first production meeting, he looks over the room assignments and complains that the rooms have been apportioned hierarchically. The top floor, the one with the view, has been divided between art director Albin Grau, cameraman Fritz Arno Wagner, scenarist Henrik Galeen, and myself. Everyone looks to me to quash this kind of petty revolt. Wangenheim offers his chin and makes a face. He’s a left-winger and an aristocrat and probably feels isolated in this crew.

  There is a hierarchy, I inform him. I congratulate him for having noticed. The arrangement is so our collaboration can continue at any and all hours. Grau, handing out room keys, suggests he spend less time worrying about accommodations and more worrying about his performance. Wangenheim then wants to know why his room is below Spiess’s, and why in fact Spiess has been brought along. One of those film company spats, unpleasantness tinged with subtextual insinuation. Why was there scrimping and saving on one end and splurging on the other? Spiess, I remind everyone, has lived in the east and could prove invaluable. The usual grumbling before the rebel angels retreat, quiescent for now and more trouble later.

  The company, like a class of children, never understands: it’s not a matter of severity or love, but devotion to the work at hand. Behind my back, they poke fun at my unwillingness to show emotion even in disagreements. It is simple, simple, simple: by remaining master of myself, I remain master of the company. This is all I need to remember. Without that first mastery, all other authority is quickly at an end.

  Persistent thoughts of H—. Lasker-Schüler claims to have no more information. Have I tried everyone else? Are there memory-tricks that would release new answers?

  (—Record everything; revise later with Q in mind.)

  The week before we left, Der Film finally announced the founding of the Prana Film company, with a remaining capital of twenty thousand marks, the rest already having been spent. Two managers were named: Enrico Dieckmann, a merchant in Berlin-Lichterfelde, and Albin Grau, an artist/painter in Berlin. The name of the company was explained (the reference was to the Buddhist concept prana, “vital breath”) and attributed to Grau, who, we were informed, “reflects a great deal on the occult aspects of life.” Accompanying the announcement was a list of nine films (!) scheduled for production next year, each illustrated with a drawing of Grau’s. At the very bottom in small print we learned that directing Prana’s first production, Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horrors, would be one F. W Murnau. “Artistic direction”—apparently a separate category—would be handled by Albin Grau. “Together,” the announcement concluded with a wan and affecting flourish, “they propose to construct the film on new principles.”

  We’re filming in Dolny’ Kubín for the scenes involving the inn in the Carpathians. A dismal, crooked little town perched like a tooth on a hill. Father would say, “What kind of work would take you to a place like this?” I imagine him, when people ask, answering only: “He’s in Slovakia.” H—would be pleased to hear me imagining Father’s thoughts, after all this estrangement.

  The castle, Oravsky Zamok, is not far from town. Wagner discovered it months ago, and sent a postcard. It was built on the river Orava in the thirteenth century, high on a curiously hollowed-out rock. The most elevated part is a watchtower that overhangs the Orava by more than one hundred meters. The watchtower, shot against the light, will form the final image of the shadow of the vampire passing from the earth.

  Tomorrow we begin shooting on the dilapidated terrace, with Wangenheim, who so far has had only useless ideas as to his portrayal of Hutter.

  Still awake. This preparation, most of my life since December: how much does it avail me now?

  We start with Hutter discovering the marks on his neck, writing Ellen. It will be in bright sunlight, against a ruined stone wall. We must make certain the vines have been cleared from the battlement. We must counter excess shadow with lamps. We must be ready should the weather not cooperate. If the terrace scene comes off we’ll go on to Hutter’s search for the coffin. After the arch I’ll pass in and do the stairway, to the right of where he sees the bolted door leading down …

  Sleepless, I wander the corridors. Napoleon said he made his battle plans from the fighting spirit of his sleeping soldiers.

  Before the shooting, one must put oneself into a state of intense ignorance and curiosity, and yet see things in advance. My working method is to sketch out everything and then be completely open to impulse and improvisation. Recognize the true by its efficiency and power. The film’s beauty will not be in the images (postcardism) but in the ineffable qualities that those images emanate. To use prodigious, heaven-sent machines merely for belaboring something fraudulent—how would that appear, in fifty years’ time? And yet it’s from those mechanisms that emotion will be born. Think of the great pianists. (Bach, answering an admiring pupil: “It’s only a matter of striking the right notes at exactly the right moment.”) We evoke the preindustrial world of superstition by creating an illusion that allows the viewer to forget the film’s technical base.

  In the darkness and stillness there are murmurs and flickering light under Grau’s door. I knock softly, and enter.

  Grau and Galeen are sitting cross-legged around a guttering candle. When they lean to make a point, shadows bend around the recesses of the room. Still uninvited, I sit. They share a bottle of Hungarian wine. We can hear mice gnawing at the walls’ interior. Grau repeats his story of the old peasant with whom he was billeted in the Army. The peasant was convinced that his father, who died without receiving the sacraments, haunted the village in the form o
f a vampire. He showed Grau an official document about a man named Morowitch, exhumed in Progatza in 1884. The body showed no signs of decomposition, and the teeth were strangely long and sharp, and protruded from the mouth. The man was proclaimed undead, known in Serbia as the Nosferatu. Grau an ardent spiritualist. His next project, he’s informed us, will be something called Höllentriträme: Dreams of Hell.

  Galeen, too, has a vampire story, from a cousin who served in Austria-Hungary. Galeen is slightly off-putting, watchful and disquieting. He has a bulbous face, with lank brown hair, skin like an orange rind, and an odd and pointless smile. He is only twenty-nine, four years younger than Grau and myself, and was born in Berlin. He reacted well to my revision of his treatment. He’s a Rosicrucian; perhaps even one of the adepts. I learned that from others.

  He tells us the following, in his smooth voice: After it had been reported in a nearby village that a vampire had killed three men by sucking their blood, Galeen’s cousin was, by high decree of the local Honorable Supreme Command, sent there to investigate, along with two subordinate medical officers. This is the story they were told: Only days after the funeral of a girl by the name of Stana, eighteen years old, who had died in childbirth two weeks previous, and who had announced in a fever that she had painted herself with the blood of a vampire, the family caught sight of the deceased sitting on the front steps of her house. The dead girl repeatedly appeared afterwards at night in the street, and knocked on doors. Children sickened and died. She had relations with an addled widower. When at night, like a trail of fog, she would leave a farm, she left a dead man in her wake.

  Galeen’s cousin and the other officers were taken to the graveyard to open and examine the grave. When they exhumed her, she was whole and intact with blood flowing from her nose, mouth, and ears. When the girl’s mother saw her, she spat and said, “You are to disappear; don’t get up again and don’t move!” At those words tears flowed from the corpse’s eyes. After seeing that, the villagers pulled her from the grave, cut her into pieces, and tied them with cloth. The cloth they threw on a thornbush which they set on fire. Whereupon a strong wind rose and blew after them, howling, all the way back to the village.

  The first day is overcast. It’s always a question of the intensity of the light. Wagner’s assistants test it with orange filter glasses. We wait. At eleven I announce we’ll set up the close-ups. For those we don’t need sunlight. No sooner are we ready than the sun is out. We go on, but now Wangenheim and Greta are squinting; Wagner and his assistants have to screen with canvas the very sun we’ve been waiting for all day, fake the half-light we’ve suffered through to this point. Flies circle everywhere. The wind shakes a background I want still. The camera develops a tremor. Wangenheim abominable.

  That night, cold sweats while trying to sort out the next day’s tasks. Confronted by the characters, I feel like an official called in to oversee a crowd of immigrants. They stand about, passive, as I regard them with growing dismay.

  Day 2: more camera troubles. Drove off at nine in the morning. Spectacular trip. Stopped at a wine tavern, then continued off the main road to show Spiess the avenue of Caspar David Friedrich trees Grau showed me earlier. Pointed out to him as well the pitched waterfall Hutter will see from his room in the castle the night of the greatest danger. Every time I view the place it’s a revelation. Spiess astounded. The grottoes and clefts and riot of overhanging branches enclosed us within the sound and force of the cataract. We could see movement flitting above in the narrow and overgrown cliff faces. We were in a world where all was wonder, delicate and secret, and beside which all our clutter looked like a farce in bad taste. On the way home by a different route, I was talking to Spiess about the second inn, where Hutter is warned against proceeding to the castle, and round a bend all in one glance I recognized, down to the smallest detail, the exact setting I had resigned myself to having to build. Here were the windows for Hutter’s view of the frightened horses, the old shutters with the carved hex signs, the doors and boxed-in bed, the stone well, the apples piled in an oaken bucket, everything! The interiors as good as the exteriors, with this quality of the luminous strangeness of the ordinary shining through the walls.…

  Spiess, too, is fascinated with the lore of vampires. He reads a number of Slavic languages, and has helped with the forbidding and disintegrating texts Galeen has pulled from the local libraries. We never have enough background material, and what we find always feels too vague. At night, sitting on my bed in my room, Spiess reports, his voice transforming the softest consonants into sounds that make my neck ache with desire. Among the Slavs it’s reported that one may strew ashes or salt around headstones in a cemetery to determine, by looking for footprints later, if any of the bodies are leaving their graves at night. If a grave is sunk in, or if a cross has taken a crooked position, the deceased has transformed himself. Often there is visible a hole in the grave from which the vampire emerges. And the Gypsies believe that if dogs are barking, no vampires are in the village, but if dogs are silent, then the vampires have come.

  With this sort of story, everything, Wegener wrote when he was working on his Golem, depends on a certain flow in which the fantastic world of the past rejoins the world of the present. And yet how does one make judgments about emotional truth in such situations? Authenticity is a problem that remains unresolved in this country. Transylvania, with its evocative meaning (“beyond the forest”) seems appropriate as our setting: that place which can only be imagined. Europe’s unconscious.

  Remember to flag sections to be excised for Querschnitt.

  One of Wagner’s assistants is spending the week filming the light at dawn (real) on the castle gates (constructed). His task is to open on a fade every morning until “morning’s dawn” becomes “morning horror”: Morgengrau becomes Morgengrauen. I have a specific effect in mind, and this stock can capture it. Then he’ll be sent home to film the dilapidated salt storehouses of Lübeck, for the long shots of the Bremen house of the vampire. All those empty window-sockets, with their uncanny anthropomorphic quality.

  Dinners with Spiess and Wagner help us clarify our ideas. The shot is not a painting, dependent only upon the expressive content of its static composition; it’s also a space negotiable in every way, open to intrusion and transformation, inviting the most unpredictable courses. It’s necessary to understand the process by which the mood and tone of such spaces can change. If only the camera could move! If the question becomes not only “what is the image?” but also “how does it change?” we exploit precisely that connection between film and dream; spaces shift with the logic and fluidity of the dream state. The geography of the film must be evocative yet elusive; the vampire’s castle and the wilderness concrete in their tone and unmappable in their contours. Reality, but with fantasy; they must dovetail.

  Spiess agreed. Wagner offered in support the reminder that in Rubens’s engraving of the sheep, which Goethe showed to Eckermann, the shadow is on the same side as the sun.

  If only the camera could move! Imagine if the camera could move! Wagner is every bit as excited about the possibilities. “When and if,” he says dryly, “we have the budget to experiment accordingly.”

  Second full production meeting tonight. All of us—Wagner, Grau, Spiess, Galeen, myself, Max Schreck, who will be playing the Nosferatu—crowded into my room. Some wine and sausage. Talking about the sources of horror. Grau claims our new art has an advantage over literature because the image can be clear and concrete even as it remains inconceivable. This is the paradox that causes the hair on the back of our necks to rise. Wagner adds that what people look for in film is a way to load their imagination with strong images. The fact that these images are silent is a supplementary attraction; they’re silent like dreams. I think he’s right, for as Hofmannsthal points out, only apparently have we forgotten our dreams; in fact there’s not a single dream that, reawakened, does not begin to stir: the dark corner, the breath of air, the face of an animal, the glide of an unfamiliar g
ait, all of it makes the presence of dreams perceptible. The blackness below the stairs to the cellar, the barrel filled with rainwater in the courtyard, the door to the granary, the door to the loft, the neighbor’s door through which the beautiful woman casts into the dark and palpitating depths of the child’s heart an unexpected thrill of desire …

  We fall silent, passing the wine. Spiess says it’s like traveling through the air in the company of Asmodeus, the demon who raised roofs and laid bare all secrets.

  Wagner says he imagines a future film which will be nothing on screen but beautiful creatures and transparent gestures, looks in which the entire soul is read.

  Grau points out that in Mediterranean countries, children born with red hair or unusually pale complexions were watched carefully for other vampiric signs. Everyone looks at me.

  Galeen has been listening to all of this, his elbow on the arm of his chair, his palm cupping his fat face. It’s necessary, he says, to correct the dictionaries. The majority of terms today no longer correspond to the ideas whose image they were intended to provide. Are love, friendship, heart, and soul still the same concepts as when the ancient dictionaries were composed? What do the old “fantastic” worlds of Grimm, Hoffmann, or Poe represent for us today? Let us, he says, consider them with modern eyes: they remain a source of inspiration, nothing more; for what we have daily before us goes beyond even Jules Verne. Douglas Fairbanks’s flying carpet already bores today’s young; they sniff out special-effects and look for the artifice that made it possible. We’re no longer astonished by the technically unheard-of. We’re surprised on those days the newspaper does not trumpet new breakthroughs. So we look for the fantastic within ourselves. We notice the child or the dog who walks to the mirror, caught by the miracle of this doubled face. We wonder: If this second self, the Other, were to come out of the mirror’s frame?.…