Nosferatu

by Jim Shepard

  The shooting begins and the wolfhound that was Galeen’s idea refuses to film. He takes his place properly, but leaves as soon as the cameras begin to roll and returns when they’re finished. We attempt the simple scene of Wangenheim in his room in the castle, a tiny whitewashed room with sharp angles and a huge, criblike bed in the period style. He is to read from The Book of Vampires (“THE NOSFERATU. From the bloody sins of mankind a creature will be born …”) and go to the window, throwing it open to look into the starless night, while beyond his door in the depths of the castle the horror gathers. He swaggers through the motions, ruining everything. Multiple takes, two or three quiet conversations with him. The film is nearly always finished before one’s had time to get the actors to forget the bad habit of “giving a performance.”

  Then, through the viewfinder, everything was too washed out. I begged Wagner to bring more contrast into the shot, so we set about dramatizing the light, hanging screens to define the space and throw shadows on the far walls. Then Wangenheim began botching the simple actions, dropping the book, catching his foot in the bedclothes. I hid myself, thinking him more likely to manage without me around. At last he made it without disaster to the window, but then it was Wagner’s turn: the camera caught on its cable and didn’t pan. Grau could stand it no longer, and left. We broke for five minutes and did it once more, with only an hour of time left, and miraculously, everything worked. Everyone relaxed. The scene fell together and even a cat wandered through as if it were at home.

  At the end of each day, everything but the sets themselves is stowed away out of sight. The rights to Dracula have not been purchased and Grau has begun receiving inquisitive letters from solicitors representing Bram Stoker’s wife.

  Talked to Grau about Wangenheim’s costume. Colors offer different sensibilities to light even in black-and-white photography. For the scenes in the castle, Wangenheim should have a blue waistcoat. This is not superstitious or fetishistic; it has to do with the value of gray that blue will provide.

  Also: first day for Ruth Landshoff, who plays Ellen’s sister. The daughter of the shipowner, not even a professional actress, but someone I noticed months ago in the Grunewald, on her way to school. Beautiful and refined, she reminded me of a picture by Kaulbach, and I went to great lengths to meet her mother and ask permission for her to take part in the filming during her holidays. I’m irresistibly drawn to the idea of this woman in my film, in this infernal vision of swarming rats, of pestilential boats, of men who suck blood, of dark vaults, of black carriages pulled by phantom horses.…

  During a half day’s shooting, she stands beside me, not sure where else to go. Wangenheim flirts with her. Wagner and I are filming Ellen’s sleep-connection to the vampire. The only sounds are the turning of the camera and Wangenheim’s whispering. It’s customary to build additional sets while shooting’s going on, a crowd of people standing nearby giving orders at the tops of their voices. But I work in silence, the silence of the film itself. A journalist from my parents’ hometown compared work on my set to a memorial service, presided over by “a tall thin gentleman in his white work coat, standing a bit out of the way, issuing directions in a very low voice.”

  I don’t understand how it is that this generation has not seen the rise of a true poet of film. For all the arts, one is able to cite great masters born to understand them exceptionally. There should come geniuses of the screen who know instinctively what it alone has the power to do. At the moment, we found our stories on novels, stage plays, etc. In the future, we’ll think film and dream film.

  More telephone calls to Leo Spiess. He’s taken to hanging up on me.

  Wagner took me aside with doubts about Wangenheim’s performance. Wangenheim’s aggressive terror, he said, inhibited his own. The hero, presented to us as bold/hardy/audacious/daring/venturesome and plucky, suddenly passes from all that to convulsive terror? I thanked him and reminded him it was too late to replace Wangenheim. His was not a comment timed to fill me with confidence.

  For the vampire’s arrival: lack of movement makes the eye impatient. Use such impatience.

  Filmed Granach, as Knock, the house agent under the sway of the Nosferatu. A relief working with an old friend. During breaks he told the crew how as students of Reinhardt’s we’d lie on the floor of the stage-box to hear and see him work with actors (he allowed no one to view his rehearsals). The scene came off perfectly. Reading the cabalistic letter sent by the vampire, Granach seems dropped in from another world, his spindly hunchback shifting and jerking, his ugly smile making sense of the strange symbols. A last touch was all his: raising his head upon finishing, as if greeting the evil. Wonderfully disturbing sense of the diabolism closer to home.

  The happy accidents of art. As the Austrians say, Es ist passiert—It just happened like that.

  Reminder to the labs: the lettering of the titles should be lanky and tortuous, like that of Caligari. The background, a poisonous green. A tooth is giving me great pain.

  In Czechoslovakia, Spiess related to me a dream that he was Ellen in the film. He went up to the bedroom before his husband. At the side of the bed he heard the fluttering of a bird. The air was disturbed. He didn’t light the lamp or draw the curtain. The streetlight provided the only light. He couldn’t keep awake. In a park nearby, the wind moved the trees. It was as if he’d been chloroformed.

  Even after his departure, he continues to provide information on the lore of the vampire. Alone in my room, unable to sleep, I go over, in his handwriting, the last three stages of the etymological history of the word: the Old Church Slavonic for “fugitive,” the early Common Slavic for “the one who drinks in,” and the later Slavic for “neighbor.”

  First interior shooting of Schreck as the Nosferatu. Made up, he wanders the dining hall set in preparation, and the stonework, windows, and doors come to life. It’s we, ridiculous ghosts, in our modern clothes, who look like intruders. The scene of his dinner with Hutter: the hall through the camera appearing to have gigantic dimensions. In the center a massive Renaissance table. In the distance the huge fireplace. The Nosferatu reading Hutter’s letter of introduction: sharp ratlike teeth over the lower lip. His eyes, over the top margin of the letter, as he hears the clock strike midnight. A snake hypnotizing its victim. Wangenheim smart enough to stop acting as the drama reaches its height, understanding the audience will have already reached the required degree of tension. Afterwards some “executives” from Prana, friends of Grau’s, in for lunch. A strange meal. Schreck, still made up as the Nosferatu, set his teeth on the table like part of the place-setting while he ate his soup.

  The pace picks up. It must. One set is struck and another built in its place while Grau and Galeen and I confer with the actors for the day’s next scene. More kidney trouble has thrown us a week behind. Grau called me at the Bühlershöh sanatorium to remind me that shooting had to be finished in four weeks, by 1 November. Some sets I’d asked him to save had been struck, he added, and I had to work more sensibly and avoid unnecessary takes. Film stock already cost thirty marks a meter, and no more would be forthcoming. Even with the help of the big banks, inflation was making it impossible to raise money. Agnuzzo, apparently, was tapped out.

  Twelve-hour days. Many of us are fighting sunstroke caused by the arcs. Crew members rub raw grated potato on their faces to combat the burn. The Nosferatu greeting Hutter as it emerges from the darkness of the castle archway. Wagner suggests we use magnesium flares with the arcs to increase the effect of moonlight. Take after take. Schreck sweats and suffers under his makeup, and his forehead looks as if it’s been varnished.

  Everyone thinking about future commitments: Granach going back to the stage; Grau soon to begin scouting exteriors for Prana’s next film. Wagner working with Lang. Galeen to direct his own Stadt in Sicht. We’re all progressively losing the sense that we’re held within the same dream—each of us beginning to wake up.

  My trouble is naïveté. What I should do is overnumber the shots so the s
cript girl could note increasing numbers accomplished each day, and Grau and Dieckmann would be steadily mollified.

  Tensions continue with Grau over the schedule, our plans for the film, everything. As we get closer to the end, more and more of his energy goes into promotion and distribution, which is necessary but seems premature. After he’s interviewed by Der Film, I have to read: “Each scene is given over to the director only when ready to be filmed; beforehand the artistic director has prepared it down to the smallest details, according to psychological and pictorial principles, and has sketched it out on paper. Each gesture, each costume (the era of 1840, approximately) and movement has been laid out with scientific rigor and calculated to produce a specific effect upon the spectator.”

  The publicity material is modeled on that old Expressionist hysteria. One of the handouts:

  Nosferatu was there. In the streets. Mongrels howled it. Babies cried it. Crooked branches traced its letters in the earth. The wind swept the word and carried it away, and dead leaves from the trees read “Nosferatu.” It invaded everything. One could see it along walls, above streetlamps, in the eyes of those late to bed. It fastened to ganglia and sounded in bones. It clamored. It uttered cries like rats in a coffin. Maidens whispered it in their sleep. Above them in the darkness it formed, livid and ghastly pale, leaden and yellow, full of sulphur and fatal breath. And you? Do you still feel nothing? Nos-fer-a-tu—Nosferatu—beware.

  Shot by shot I know my way through. I will not give in until I have what I want. But every morning there we are, still on the set, with its dismal fraudulence, its flapping wall, and plaster gargoyles. Again I’ll get worked up, pull my hair, go back to my room, start over.

  Determined to do ten shots today, despite Wagner’s pace, Grau’s complaints, and the arcs, which keep fusing. Horrible quarrel. Wagner’s taken to calling me the Schoolmaster.

  Fruitless check of steamship offices about Spiess. Found a gift he’d brought me at a dinner I’d arranged in my room in Czechoslovakia. An erotic drawing of two boys and a man. We’d been tense and awkward. Wangenheim had wandered by while I was examining the drawing. The whole thing a Feydeau farce. Spiess had become distracted and impatient; in return, I was exhausted and short-tempered. He left before dessert.

  A telegram back from Meidner. No help about Hans. His response was full of questions.

  The first stalking of Hutter. Discussions with Wangenheim beforehand. What matters is not what the actors show me but what they hide. Above all, what they don’t suspect is in them. I cite for him the Baroness in Schloss Vogelöd, who after her husband fends off her kiss and announces his renunciation of everything worldly, whispers distractedly to herself, “I’m longing for evil—seeing evil—wanting evil.”

  We begin. The set deathly quiet. Hutter in his room in the castle, huddled behind the door. He opens it a crack. View deep into dining hall. By the fireplace the Nosferatu, motionless, arms down, confrontationally stark against the background. Horrible lack of movement. Hutter supports himself on the doorpost. Terrible realizations dawning. Shut the door, shut it quickly! No bolt. No lock. He rushes to the window. (View of the forest at night: undergrowth; wolves raising their heads, howling.) The contrast between Hutter’s movements and the Nosferatu’s: frenzied panic vs. the terrible evenness of the advance. Hutter on his knees by the side of the bed. Stares at the door, which opens to half its width; then fully. Superimpositions of progressively closer shots of the vampire produce movement without movement, the figure swelling within the frame, the mechanism of nightmare. Wagner has the genius idea of having the figure penetrate a powerful light emanating from the side just as he enters the doorway. Four days of work.

  Two weeks left. Hardly eating. The same woman journalist from Der Film who interviewed Grau told me today that my face was like two profiles stuck together. Ellen’s room, her decision to sacrifice herself, the final approach of the vampire are all still left to do. Two days of work on Ellen reading The Book of Vampires, until my temples are throbbing, my cheeks burning, my whole frame shivering. A few hours in my room drinking hot soup, contemplating the mistakes I made by plunging on at such a pace; but besides the lack of time, I feel myself fighting to prevent any kind of indecision at this point from demoralizing the unit.

  My headaches worse. My kidneys breaking down. Berliners are tactless and cruel. On a bus yesterday a young lieutenant seated me with a flourish. The spectacle of this disintegrating thirty-three-year-old seems to make people laugh.

  Take after take of Ellen at the window, seeing the Nosferatu. She is at once pure (and therefore appalled by what she has to do) and impure (since she makes her bed available to the vampire). Greta not up to it. Wagner works with the inhumanity of all cameramen; he calibrates the lights at his own pace without noticing that Greta all that time is swaying on her feet. Grau looks on, his arms folded. The nerve storm finally breaks and she collapses. Wangenheim comforts her while we wait. The shooting goes far into the night.

  This fear of coming to a standstill, of not being able to go on, of having to break off—it’s connected to all of my other undertakings: loving, observing, participating. Everything, in short, that has called for perseverance.

  Little sleep; endless, crushing headaches. Granite pieces breaking behind my eyes. Cold sweat, palpitations, exhaustion. A full day without working at all. Grau in a frenzy of rage and despair over this preview, in a Marxist rag: “This occultism, which has victimized thousands of shaken minds since the war, is a strategy mounted by the industrial world to deflect the worker from his own political interests. Today the occult takes the place of religions that no longer attract clients. Workers! On your guard! Don’t give your pennies to a spectacle designed to stupefy! Let the phantom ‘Nosferatu’ be devoured by his own rats!”

  Grau’s response? Ever more publicity. Prana has now spent more on publicity than on the film itself. It seems clearer and clearer to me that the whole enterprise is an enormous bluff. Where is the publicity money to come from? The Otto Riede Bank, according to Grau, but Wagner tells me this bank doesn’t exist, and that Otto Riede is a simple employee. Yet the madness goes on. Grau plans a party on the release date: Saturday, March 4, “Prana’s Day.” He’s secured the marble entry hall of the zoo, and commissioned a prologue by Kurt Alexander inspired by the introduction from Goethe’s Faust. He’s hired Elisabeth Grube of the national opera to perform with the ballet troupe. For musical accompaniment there will be the great harmonium “Dominator,” transported to the site at massive cost. And all of this, he announces, will be filmed!

  Hobbled back to the set this morning accompanied by a nurse. Disoriented by the medication and exhaustion and worried all day by an oppressive sense that I’m out of touch with the world. Stagehands stood around in groups as if at union meetings, eyeing me. The whole film seemed moribund. Woke that night from dreams which moved like dirty water forming monstrous waves. Neck hurt.

  And then a late-afternoon wait in a pub across the street from the studio. Another problem with the arc lights. Wagner and I share wine, bread and butter, minced pork. I confess my fears, my inability to understand what I’m doing, to go on. Wagner tells me that I alone can do this. Seeing my face, he puts his hand to my cheek, in full view of the entire pub. That easily, his palm brings me a temporary peace. He’s been viewing the footage, he tells me, and it’s everything I’ve hoped for. He is such a mysterious figure, finally: cheerless and sober and intent on something outside my view.

  A few hours’ sleep. A breathing spell. The final sequence to be done, the Nosferatu’s approach to Ellen.

  The horror coming slowly, tensed like a predatory animal. A new idea of Grau’s, necessitating a new set at this late date: nothing but the shadow of Nosferatu on the wall of the stairs, mounting with dreadful slowness, then more quickly, an awful quick-footed walk, fingernails dripping, until it pauses beside the door. The hand and fingers extending elastically along the wall. In the room Ellen shrinks before the monster we still don’t
see, except for the black shadow of his hand spreading across her white body like ink. She jerks her head down in anticipation of his touch, as her husband had. The shadow fist seizes her heart. And then in the darkness, on the very side of the frame, obscenely unobtrusive, the Nosferatu feeding.

  The shooting done. A week’s rest. The unit comes back together one last time to view the rough projection before the final cutting begins. Grau, Wagner, Galeen, Wangenheim, Greta—all of this is now a memory to them, like a party they found puzzling and absorbing but not pleasant.

  Galeen torments me with an article in the Berliner Tageblatt, reading for the group: “Of all the film directors, Murnau is the most German. A Westphalian, reserved, severe on himself, severe on others, severe for the cause. Outwardly grim, never envious, always alone, his successes and failures arising from the same source, each of his works complete, authentic, direct, logical, cold, harsh, and absolute, like Gothic art.” Much hooting. Grau suggests it sounds like an obituary.

  We view what we have. Some pleasures—the opportunity to render fluid human time, so painful in its rigidity, to arrange and rearrange it, our small triumph over the inexorable. Again struck by how often the camera could see what I couldn’t feel. In that negative footage of the vampire’s carriage driving through a white forest, ground mist that we barely noticed during the shooting has photographed black. Drifting along before the horses’ onrushing hooves, a ghost smoke or dream-vapor, like pestilence itself.

  Long stretches of footage so bad no one will comment. Enduring them, I begin to tell myself I can still do what I set out to achieve; yet the faults in the work are mine alone.