So this is the 1922 F.W. Murnau joint. I’ve previously seen his 1927 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, which I will always remember for its piglet-based carnival games. This one sadly has no piglets at all, but does have vampires.

So the thing about a vampire movie from this early in cinematic history — and explicitly based on Dracula at that (but, interestingly, unlicensed and so not using any of the names, as Dracula was still in copyright at the time) — is that I figured I knew how it would go: Strangers arrive at a creepy castle in Transylvania, and then a series of increasingly discomfiting events occur, during which they have more and more doubts about their host. Then they find out he’s a dracula, and then the tense scenes where they finally open his coffin and stake him.

But: nope! Almost none of that. It’s nearly thirty minutes into the ninety-minute movie before anyone goes off to Transylvania. The first half hour is just entirely a happy couple having little charming scenes that really tbh aren’t very charming to a modern eye.

When we get to Transylvania and see the Count is when the movie is at its best, because look, special effects have gotten a lot better over the years, right. So usually if you see a monster from an old movie, they’re stupid looking and terrible. But this vampire is great. The fangs as rodent-like front-teeth, the bat-like ears, the bald head, the creepy long clawed fingers… dude’s just fucking scary and creepy-looking in a way that honestly has not been bettered in the subsequent century of filmed vampirism. (Though there’s also the hooked nose, which some critics note has Jewish overtones, which is especially uncomfortable in a pre-WW2 German context; it doesn’t seem like anyone thinks Murnau was personally anti-Semitic, but.)

But so okay, after all this build-up, now we’re ready for the creepy castle adventure, right? Nope! Takes ten minutes for the newly-arrived guy to figure out that the Count is a vamp, and from there we get into the weirdest part of the movie, where it honestly feels like they were just cobbling together some random footage they had lying around, and they show like a nature documentary about Venus flytraps and spiders and it’s kinda just wtf.

After that diversion, though, we get into the “vampirism as plague” portion of it, where Nosferatu first takes over a ship, killing its sailors one by one; and then later is running wild in a city. We really don’t see too much of what’s going on here, but the only thing scarier than a monster is the plague, so it kinda still works at setting up an aura of dread. The movie ends with the woman from the beginning of the movie — the wife of the guy who went to the castle — sacrificing herself to trap the vampire into staying out late and getting burnt up by the sun.

Great character design aside, I think it’s fair to say that this is a movie that’s largely interesting as a historical artifact. Apparently it was notable in its day for intercutting between scenes in the castle and scenes of the wife back home, but that kind of editing is obviously commonplace now, such that I didn’t even notice it as a thing when I was watching it.

Either way, with a hundred years of additional experience, we know how to make horror films a lot better now. But it’s clear that this one was blazing the trail early on, and even now you can see its influence heavy on the vampire movie genre. Recommended for anyone curious about the early origins of the vampire movie.