Part of Music City Mondays
Belcourt Members: $14 | General Admission: $18
An encore screening of F.W. Murnau’s vampiric classic featuring a live synth score by Eve Maret, Dream Chambers and Belly Full of Stars.
Thomas Hutter is tasked by his employer to visit the mysterious Count Orlok at his castle about a potential property purchase. The eerie Orlok seeks to buy a house in Hutter’s town of Wisborg. Hutter bids his wife, Ellen, farewell and makes way to the castle as a series of strange events occur. After meeting the strange Count Orlok, Hutter discovers to his horror that the count is a vampire and seeks to use Wisborg as his new hunting grounds.
This prototypical vampire film from German expressionist director F.W. Murnau –– an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s genre-defining Dracula –– is one of the earliest depictions of “The Prince of Darkness.” And Max Schreck’s nightmarish depiction of the undead count continues to haunt audiences a century after its release.
“Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires…. It knows none of the later tricks of the trade, like sudden threats that pop in from the side of the screen. But NOSFERATU remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us. It shows not that vampires can jump out of shadows, but that evil can grow there, nourished on death.” —Roger Ebert (1997)
“Like standing in the same room as death itself. It’s a brooding chamber piece of gothic ruminations and occult imagery, of the flickering light of the world waging a losing battle against the overwhelming darkness…. NOSFERATU strikes primarily through the unrestrained potency of its now-iconic imagery, the result of a filmmaker who recognized the singularly visual nature of his medium and used it to the fullest extent.” —Rob Humanick, Slant