Review: 'The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors, and Its Enduring Legacy'

Nosferatu may be the first horror feature that really feels like one. Based on one of horror’s top-three essential texts, featuring an iconic portrayal of one of the top-three essential monsters, and brought to life with dank, Gothic atmosphere, F.W. Murnau’s Dracula adaptation is historically significant and still very scary after nearly a century. The film’s making is also well worth deep discussion and very deserving of a book with a title like The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors, and Its Enduring Legacy.

Unfortunately, that title ended up on book that is disjointed and flimsy. The Nosferatu Story feels like excerpts from essays about early German cinema sutured together in a way more reminiscent of Mary Shelley than Bram Stoker. Author Rolf Giesen fails to tie together his various discussions in a way that tells a satisfying, linear story. He dwells on odd things and skims over essentials. There are thirty pages of discussion of films such as The Golem and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari before Giesen gets to Nosferatu. Then there are another thirty pages of pointless plot description, which is a major issue in a book that is only 210 pages long (and 75 of those pages are devoted to filmographies and appendices). Perhaps the most well known detail of the Nosferatu story is Stoker’s widow Florence’s accusations of copyright violations against the film and the subsequent court decision that demanded every copy of Murnau’s film be destroyed. Instead of unearthing interesting new details about this key part of his story, Giesen darts through it in three brief paragraphs. He does, however, set aside an entire paragraph of his slim book to relay every person director Tony Watt thanks in the credits of some movie called Nosferatu vs. Father Pipecock & Sister Funk.

There are interesting chunks of The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors, and Its Enduring Legacy —particularly a brief but fascinating biography of star Max Schreck, who applied his own makeup for his portrayal of the rat-like Count Orlock and enjoyed a rich stage career, and everything pertaining to the film's occultist producer, Albin Grau— but the overall telling of that story is much too unfocused to earn its enticing title.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 218

The Date: May 5

The Movie: Dracula (1958)

What Is It?: It’s probably a cliché to say that Dracula is Hammer’s best horror, but some clichés are true. It’s the best, from Christopher Lee’s imposing turn as the count, to Peter Cushing’s endearing and high-action one as Van Helsing, to Jack Asher’s sumptuous cinematography and Terence Fisher and Jimmy Sangster’s economical storytelling.

Why Today?: In Bram Stoker’s novel, Jonathan Harker arrives at Castle Dracula on May 5.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 39

The Date: November 8

The Movie: Lair of the White Worm (1988)

What Is It?: Ken Russell’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s mess is also a mess. Unlike the novel, the film is a hilarious, sexy, free-spirited, imaginative, hallucinatory, delightfully offensive (as opposed to Stoker’s just plain offensive) mess. All hail Amanda Donohoe!

Why Today?: On this day in 1847, Bram Stoker is born.

Dracula A - Z

Dracula. Is he literature’s most terrifying, most deathless villain? Is he the fanged heavy in countless international motion pictures? Or is he a star of the stage or perhaps radio or TV? Could he be a figure of ridicule? A cartoon? A toy? A puppet? A breakfast cereal spokesman? Surely he is all these, otherwise, how could there be a thing of such unspeakable horror as…

 Our story begins—as all discussions of our topic should—with Abraham “Bram” Stoker. Although Stoker would achieve his most enduring renown as the Author of Dracula, he was invested deeper in the theater than the printed page during his lifetime. He managed London’s prestigious Lyceum Theatre and saw to the personal requirements of the theater’s temperamental star, Henry Irving (see H below). He was known to hobnob with such major figures of his time as Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and by the speculation of writer Jim Steinmeyer, Jack the Ripper. Stoker’s writing was essentially a sideline gig. His first book was the decidedly non-Gothic, though not totally unterrifying, The Duties of the Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a government handbook published in 1879. Two years later he released Under the Sunset, a somewhat tedious collection of children’s fairy tales with a heavy Christian bent. Despite its title, his first novel, The Snake’s Pass (1890), was not a horror story but a romance. Following several other books, Stoker drew on the folklore he learned from “Transylvanian Superstitions,” an essay by Emily Gerard, to pen his epistolary masterpiece. Published in 1897, Dracula was well received by critics, but it was not a major seller. Adaptations on stage and screen boosted its reputation considerably over the years.

Stoker’s subsequent works never enjoyed a fraction of Dracula’s lasting appeal, though such books as The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lair of the White Worm would be adapted into motion pictures as well, the former inspiring Seth Holt’s Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb in 1971 and the latter being improved infinitely by Ken Russell in 1988. Published in 1911, White Worm was Stoker’s final novel. He died the following year on April 20 with “Locomotor Ataxy” being given as the primary cause of death. There has been much speculation over the precise cause, particularly since Locomotor ataxia, the loss of control over one’s limbs, is a symptom of tertiary syphilis. This theory has never been proven definitively. What has been proven is Stoker’s incredible influence on vampire fiction, not only conjuring its most famous creature—a literary character rivaled only by Sherlock Holmes in terms of cultural influence—but introducing numerous new twists to the folklore, including the vampire’s need to slumber in its native soil and its aversion to mirrors and crucifixes.

Only Bram Stoker had a more significant influence on Dracula’s place in our culture than Béla Ferenc Dezsö Blaskó. More succinctly known as Bela Lugosi, the Hungarian actor began embodying the count in 1927 after theater director Jean Williams discovered him at the Harvard Club. While Williams was most impressed with Lugosi’s presence and charisma at their initial meeting, Horace Liveright was less enamored with Lugosi’s audition after taking over for Jean Williams. A main issue was that Lugosi had learned his lines phonetically. Little did Liveright know that this stilted, heavily accented delivery would come to be one of Drac’s key calling cards. Lugosi also had little leading man experience. When Liveright voiced his concerns to the six-foot-plus actor, Bela Lugosi glared at him with the menace and intensity that would make him our most memorable Dracula. Another element the actor brought to the character was his hitherto untapped sexiness. Lugosi’s dark good looks were a far cry from the odious character Stoker described.

While Liveright’s Broadway production was a major success, Lugosi was not Universal Pictures’ first choice to play Dracula in his official screen debut. Lon Chaney was a natural choice to vamp it up for Tod Browning, but his death in August 1930 put a sad end to that dream. Ian Keith, William Courtney, Joseph Schildkraut, Chester Morris, and Paul Muni were also under consideration. Lugosi remained determined to snare the part, lobbying so relentlessly—even stating his plea in a letter to Florence Stoker— that Universal’s cash-strapped Laemmle family (they’d lost $2.2 million in revenues in 1930) sussed the actor might take the role for a considerable pay cut. Lugosi ended up earning a piffling $500 a week for the film’s seven-week shoot.

Dracula revived the flagging Universal, sparking the cycle of monster movies that would bring it amazing success throughout the thirties. Lugosi was less lucky, finding himself type-cast as a monster. Though there would be a couple more leading roles in classic horror films such as White Zombie, The Black Cat, and Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lugosi would soon find himself in numerous diminished roles and a lot of less fondly remembered pictures. Some, such as Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda and Bride of the Monster, would be fondly remembered for reasons no actor would wish. Despite his association with Dracula, Bela Lugosi would only play him on screen one more time in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. His two screen portrayals of the count are so utterly iconic that every other performance by the myriad actors who followed him into the cape would feel lacking in comparison.

Review: 'Who Was Dracula?: Bram Stoker’s Trail of Blood'

The primary purpose of Jim Steinmeyer’s Who Was Dracula?: Bram Stoker’s Trail of Blood is to settle the source of fiction’s most sinister count. While agreeing that Voivoide and serial-impaler Vlad Dracula didn't inspire anything more than the vampire’s name, Steinmeyer focuses on four figures he believes impelled Bram Stoker to conjure his most enduring story: decadent writer Oscar Wilde, enthralling yet overbearing actor Henry Irving, passionate poet Walt Whitman, and misogynistic murderer Jack the Ripper.

Steinmeyer only manages to make a convincing case for Irving, who after Vlad, is most often cited as the inspiration for Dracula. The writer’s other arguments are pretty thin, especially when making straw-grasping notes about how, like Dracula, Whitman had a moustache (let’s not fixate on his great, big beard) or how the alleged Ripper, Francis Tumblety, may have attended a social club at which Stoker regularly held court. There’s a lot of “may have” in Who Was Dracula?

So Steinmeyer isn’t wholly successful in accomplishing his central goal, and Criticism 101 teaches us that this should be the main deciding factor in whether a work is good or bad. The thing is, Who Was Dracula? is pretty impossible to call bad. In fact, it’s pretty fantastic. Steinmeyer’s recreations of historical scenes are beautifully written and utterly transporting. Whether or not Walt Whitman or Oscar Wilde really had significant influences on Count Dracula, they are fascinating artists, and Stoker did, indeed, know them, apparently harboring a sexual attraction to the former and hypocritically shunning the latter amidst Wilde’s “indecency” trial. Steinmeyer recounts these relationships with the same vividness he brings to all aspects of his book, including his riveting study of the Ripper murders. As a portrait of a few years in the life of Bram Stoker, and a few years in London’s rich theater and art scene, Who Was Dracula? is grand. So what if the title question is never satisfactorily answered?

Monsterology: The Assistant

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

The mark of a truly imposing villain is the ability to bend the wills of others to do his or her bidding. Like some malevolent dictator or string-pulling cult leader, the arch-villain hovers in the shadows while some hunched minion carries out the grunt work. By nature, the assistant is never the most important stock horror character. He or she is often eliminated early in the story, sacrificed as symbol of a monster so evil that it is willing to decimate its own team. The assistant provides black-comic relief when any such bumbling might cast the main monster in a less than threatening light. Essential? Perhaps not. Quirky? When the assistant is at his, her, or its best, absolutely, resulting in some of the most memorable second-stringers in horror cinema.

Unlike so many horror movie archetypes, the assistant does not have a strong predecessor on the page. In Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein worked solo. In both literary and film incarnations, Dr. Jekyll never hung a “For Hire” sign outside his lab. Our closest literary forerunner of the assistant is R.M. Renfield. In Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the zoophagous maniac is much more limited than he would be on screen. In a novel sprawling with characters, Renfield is a relatively minor one, only mentioned on twelve dates of its epistolary pages. As an inmate in Dr. Seward’s asylum, Renfield’s main plot function is to invite Count Dracula into the building so he can get his fangs on Mina (as film adaptations sometimes forget, Dracula can’t just go anywhere he pleases). Thematically, he mostly serves as a comic reflection of the dead-somber Count, eating the small lives of bugs and spiders while his master sups on more substantial fare. His naked escapes into the night parody Dracula’s less absurd nocturnal, erotically tinged escapades. Mina’s visit in Renfield’s cell inverts Dracula’s intrusions into her bedroom. Dracula enters Mina’s room to impose his evil on her, to possess her. When Mina enters Renfield’s, she has the opposite effect, seemingly making him saner, more coherent, a better person more concerned with her safety than worshipping his master. By imploring her to free herself from Dracula’s thrall, Renfield earns himself a fatal thrashing from the vampire.

Renfield underwent significant alterations in the first feature adaptation of Dracula. In F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, he has been renamed Knock in keeping with other such attempts to wriggle around Florence Stoker’s copyright claims. Instead of beginning the story as an asylum inmate, he is Thomas Hutter’s (our Jonathan Harker stand-in) boss, who deploys him to Count Orlok’s (Dracula’s) castle.

Garrett Fort put his own spin on this revised Renfield in his screenplay for Universal’s 1931 film, changing the character forever. Harker’s visit to Castle Dracula is handed over to Renfield completely, leaving our protagonist with a drastically reduced role and our secondary antagonist with a vastly expanded one. Played by David Manners, Harker is a bland, background figure in Tod Browning’s film. Dwight Frye’s Renfield commands the screen every time he appears. He exudes personality even before Dracula impels him toward madness (Stoker’s Renfield was already mad and institutionalized when the Count took him into his employ). Frye plays the sane Renfield with a magnetic blend of terror (how his eyes widen when he sees that rubber bat flapping over the carriage!) and amiability (his joyful declaration that the “very old wine” is “delicious!” is delightfully sincere when set against the Count’s weirdness). Considering how vacant most of the cast is, Renfield is the character we’d most like to know in Dracula. That also means he is the most tragic figure. Dracula’s treatment of Renfield is painful to watch, from his mesmerized madness to his murder.

Monsterology: Brides

In this new feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

“Here come the brides”…

As they have in so much of our male dominated cultural, women have always taken a backseat in the horrifying side of horror literature and film. While there is no shortage of women playing the victim or the damsel in need of rescuing, far, far fewer have been the agents of terror. The most common—and ancient— she-monster is the witch. But another lady killer has also been a fixture of horror, and she’s been in the game a lot longer than 1935 when Boris Karloff’s Monster first demanded a mate.

Logically, it was a woman who first saw fit to touch upon the monstrous bride. In her genre-defining Gothic horror novel Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley dwelled on a disturbing plot thread in which the creature does, indeed, demand a mate. He presents his creator with a grotesque ultimatum: build me a bride and I’ll stop killing and otherwise making your life less than pleasant. The plotline had any number of unsavory implications. The Monster had more in mind than handholding (“…one as deformed as myself would not deny herself to me”), essentially inventing a new strain of necrophilia in which both parties are deceased. There is Frankenstein’s equally demented destruction of the bride that bears traces of sexual violence (“trembling with passion, [I] tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged”). The doctor destroys the bride before she has a chance to animate and reject her nefarious fiancé, as she would in the film this plotline would inspire 117 years later. Rather than a havoc-raising monster in her own right, she is just another of the numerous female pawns destroyed during Frankenstein and his creation’s macabre chess match. Victor’s destruction of the Monster’s potential mate is payback for the Monster’s murder of Victor’s brother William, as well as the ostensible destruction of the boy’s nanny Justine Moritz, who is executed after being accused of the murder. His own mate obliterated, the Monster kills Victor’s fiancé Elizabeth on the day they are to be married.

Mary Shelley at Work
In Frankenstein, Shelley angrily, unflinchingly comments on the roles women so often played in reality and maps out the roles they would often play in horror fiction for centuries to come. As such, Frankenstein can be read as an anti-patriarchal diatribe, a criticism of a society in which women are built, controlled, and ruined according to the whims of men. Mary knew well of such things firsthand. Percy Bysshe Shelley left his bride’s name off the book when he submitted Frankenstein for publication, knowing that her gender might hinder its acceptance. Upon its first printing, she received no credit for her extraordinarily imaginative and influential work. Not surprisingly, Percy was generally believed to be its true creator, and even after his wife finally received her due credit upon the book’s 1822 second printing, her authorship was often questioned and continues to be to present times (see John Lauritsen’s The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein, published in 2007).

The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the pioneering feminist commentary A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, must have felt the sting of such sexist skepticism keenly. Even those who accepted that Frankenstein was written by a woman often used that fact against the novel. As related in Susan Tyler Hitchcock’s essential Frankenstein: A Cultural History, a writer for British Critic grunted, “If our authoress can forget the gentleness of her sex, it is no reason why we should, and we shall therefore dismiss the novel without further comment.”

Contrary to that critic’s command, Frankenstein was not forgotten. Its brand of Gothic horror persisted similarly. So did the bride, and toward the end of the decade, Bram Stoker supplied not one but three monstrous brides in Dracula. And this time, they would not be destroyed before getting the opportunity to terrify. However, Stoker was no feminist. Quite the opposite, and his trio of brides are both fiendish abominations of female sexuality, hungrily draining the essence from poor Jonathan Harker, and embodiments of female subservience, cowering before their master like Mormon sister wives at the feet of their priesthood-holding husband. Shelley wanted us to sympathize with her women. Stoker wants us to be repelled by his. If Dracula’s brides are not the most flattering representations of women, they at least get the chance to do some damage, keeping Harker prisoner and Van Helsing and Mina at bay. They also eat a baby.

October 7, 2009: ‘Dracula the Un-Dead’

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the publication of Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s Dracula the Un-Dead, the first sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula to be officially sanctioned by the Stoker estate. Having just finished the book it’s pretty obvious that the only reason this is so is because Dacre is Bram’s great grandnephew. The most interesting part of Dracula the Un-Dead is the afterward in which Stoker and Holt explain the research that went into the book: how they referred to Bram’s original notes to create new characters, how they culled historical details from Stoker’s age (although the co-writers often toy with history for the sake of fiction). The story that precedes the afterward is less interesting.

In brief, Mina and Jonathan Harker’s son Quincey (whose birth is mentioned in the epilogue of Dracula) has grown up to become an amateur actor awed by renowned thespian Basarab. Jonathan is an obnoxious drunk who wants his son to follow in his legal-eagle footsteps, and Mina is not-so secretly pining away for the creepy count twenty five years after her husband and his merry band of vampire hunters put him to rest. Or did they? Obviously, they didn’t, or there wouldn’t be a Dracula the Un-Dead. There are references to Elizabeth Bathory and Jack the Ripper; minor characters named after Dracula-portrayers Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Louis Jordan; and appearances by Hamilton Deane (the writer and producer of the stage play that inspired Tod Browning’s Dracula film) and Bram Stoker, himself. Such touches may suggest that Dracula the Un-Dead will develop into a freewheeling, imaginative, post-modern cartoon along the lines of Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula, but Stoker and Holt’s book is played with the general lack of humor that makes most vampire fiction a Gothic bore.

As I started reading Dracula the Un-Dead, I was distracted by the cliché-heavy, trite writing. There is none of Bram’s spooky ambiguity or the cache that comes with the epistolary format he used to compose Dracula. Then for a nice chunk of the book, I set such quibbles aside and allowed myself to get caught up in the plot, which is admittedly much clearer than that of Newman’s book, as well as the well-defined characters and the compelling central mystery (basically, which member of the substantial cast of characters is actually Dracula). Unfortunately, once this central mystery is solved, the story takes a quick turn back to the grave. I particularly hated the way the writers re-imagined Dracula’s motives and personality, robbing the character of his menace and mystique.

All this being said, a good three-quarters of Dracula the Un-Dead is a fleet-footed, entertaining read, and Dracula completists will probably want to give it a look. But they will most likely want to purge the liberties it takes with Bram Stoker’s original novel from their memories as soon as they finish reading this middling sequel for fear they’ll start thinking of Dracula in a new and less terrifying light.