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Screen vampires just won’t die. Some of the sensibilities of FW Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu feel dated, even comical, but there's no escaping just abidingly creepy and downright freaky Count Orlok, the film's renamed Dracula, is. He's a grotesque, chimerical creature, a ghoul, replete with rat-like pointed incisors. As such he's closer to the eastern European folkloric version of the vampire, which was drawn on by the western European writers who first popularised the vampire in fiction, but who very much transformed him. John Polidori's 1819 story, The Vampyre, written in the same story contest that gave rise to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, was influenced by his association with Byron – the vampire in his story was cast in an aristocratic guise. Then in the more influential tale by Bram Stoker, published 78 years later, this interpretation of the suave, upper-class vampire was consolidated.  Murnau’s Nosferatu, A Symphony Of Horror was the first screen adaptation of Dracula, "freely adapted" in an attempt to bypass the slight issue of rights. The driving force behind the project wasn't so much the director as producer and production designer Alin Grau, who, while a soldier billeted in Serbia, had heard first-hand a story of vampirism. This may well show itself in the film's hybridisation between Stoker's novel and the more brutish, earthy eastern European tradition of the vampire. Orlok is a count, sure, but he's a grubby, feral creature, a plague-bringer. He's no suave dandy. The suave vampire archetype, personified most memorably by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, has arguably been worn out by a century of fictional interpretations. Occasionally, we get more interesting takes on vampire lore (such as in Kathryn Bigelow's Western-inspired Near Dark) but the suave type keeps on raising his well-lacquered head. It's rewarding to now have access to a newly restored version of Nosferatu (with the original score and intertitles), the film that was almost lost shortly after its release when the Stoker estate set the law on its makers. It's also timely that it turns up around the same time as the cinematic re-release of Terence Fisher’s 1958 classic Dracula, starring Christopher Lee, and the film adaptation of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith's acclaimed comic book 30 Days Of Night. Niles has said, "I had gotten really bored with vampires; they just weren’t scary any more. We’ve turned Dracula into Count Chocula, and we’ve got teenage girls dating vampires on TV.” In his book, and the film, a pack (or "kiss") of vampires preys on a town in the Alaskan arctic that has no daylight for a month. They don't breeze in clad in velvet-lined cloaks (that said, they are kinda goth), they arrive like an ill wind, or hungry wolves.  They're a long way from charismatic aristocrats. Like Nosferatu (a term Niles uses in his books) they're grim predators, bringers of doom. Director David Slade has them bloodily scoffing their way through the town's residents, leaving gorily picturesque bloodstains in the snow. And even though this Sam Raimi production can't maintain the intensity of its premise, it's refreshing to see vampires portrayed as so profoundly bestial.
Daniel Etherington
Nosferatu (1922) is out now on Eureka Video. Dracula (1958) and 30 Days Of Night will be in cinemas from 02 November 07.
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