See
the Trailer
The first (and arguably the best) attempt
to film Bram Stoker's novel, Nosferatu is
much more than just the most influential
horror film ever made and one of the great
classics of German cinema. Friedrich
Murnau fused the imagined fears of the
Dracula story with the very real angst of
post-war Europe, where
the returning survivors of the industrial
killing on the battlefields of Belgium
brought with them the Spanish Flu
pandemic, ultimately claiming the lives of
another 100 million people.
Murnau's
Nosferatu is a rat-like, nightmarish
carrier of a new sort of plague for which
science has no cure. The people of the
city of Wismar are taken one by one. Only
a woman willing to sacrifice herself to
distract the vampire at sunrise can stop
the plague.
An innovative
movie, Murnau was probably the first
director to use the technique of montage -
where events happen simultaneously - to
create tension. The location for the
outside of the Vampire's castle was in
Slovakia, but the inside was filmed in a
studio in Berlin where one of
Murnau's greatest admirers, a young man
named Alfred Hitchcock, was
making his first silent movies.
The Parr Project
has edited the original to 45 minutes. Why
edit more than half an hour out of the
movie? Modern audiences are used to faster
paced movies, often with less time spent on
individual shots. Editing makes the movie
more accessible, and hopefully after seeing
the short version, people will be inspired
to go and watch the full movie.
To accompany the
film the Parr Project perform a live
soundtrack composed by Oliver Parr
Bram Stoker
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