Publicity still from Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (F.W. Murnau 1922)
The first chapter of the Vampiric Projections screening program opens with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).
According to art theorist Jalal Toufic, in his (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film, the vampire has the “ability to tunnel (“For the dead travel fast”)”, “to be in different places during the chase without covering the trajectory between them.” The vampire can also tunnel through walls, doors and other solid obstacles.
Nosferatu, the first adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and the first vampire film, is one of the most seminal ones. The film figures many scenes with the vampire characteristically undergoing tunneling/teleporting.
Toufic writes further in the book:
“Cinema phantoms: nine out of the twenty-one films made by Murnau are lost, and some of the remaining ones are incomplete (Bazin writes about the mummifying/embalming and preservative function of film. Film images preserve, but films themselves were for a long time not preserved). Nosferatu was banned because it did not receive the imprimatur of Bram Stoker’s widow, detainer of the copyright of Dracula: news of the film reached her only two months after its release by the Prana Company of Berlin in March 1922. A legal action was directed against it for infringement of copyright. In July of 1925, a German court decreed that all the prints must be destroyed. Most of the prints subsequently disappeared, but the makers managed to steal the negative abroad. Nosferatu was for a time a phantom. The film was shown again, in London, on December 16, 1928, reaching American screens a year later. A bridge had to be created to the directors who had become specters, but also to those of their films that had become, permanently or temporarily, phantoms.”
Suggested reading:
‘Fascinated Motionlessness and Quantum Tunneling’
pages 20-24 from (Vampires): An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film
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