Bram Stoker – Blood and Porridge

October 31, 2024October 31, 2024

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2024

It’s that time of year again – October 31^st, Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween.

As is customary on this blog, I’ll mark the occasion by displaying ten items of creepy, frightening or unsettling artwork that, during the past year, I’ve stumbled across in my Internet wanderings and taken a shine to. And this time, I’ll feature a few pictures that aren’t just dark in tone but actually relate to Halloween.

So, to set the mood, here’s a picture called Halloween by the Ohio artist Maggie Vandewalle who, her website explains, “has used watercolour or graphite to convey her love of the organic world and that of a really good story.” This has led to her producing many images of animals linked to the occult: cats, bats, crows, hares. She also does a good job of drawing trees, and I find this landscape particularly gorgeous. Few things are more evocative than looking at the colours of an evening sky through a mesh of darkening tree-branches.

© Maggie Vandewalle

Earlier this month – October 7^th – was the 175^th anniversary of the death of America’s premier writer of macabre fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Here’s something Poe-esque, an illustration for his story The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) by the New York-born, New Jersy-raised and Connecticut-dwelling writer and illustrator Robert Lawson. Lawson’s speciality was children’s books – his work adorns such classics as Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper (1881) and T.H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938) – and as this gallery page for the Goldstein Lawson Collection shows, he had a flair for drawing fairy tale and mythological creatures. However, in 1931, he won an award for creating an etching for Poe’s famous tale of familial decline, madness and destruction. As my digital copy of the etching is murky and wouldn’t look good in the cramped confines of this blog, here’s the clearer, preliminary pencil-drawing Lawson made for it. As the late Roger Corman, director of the famous 1960 film version House of Usher, once commented, “The house is the monster.” It certainly looks it in this.

From feuilleton / © Estate of Robert Lawson

From Edgar Allan Poe to Bram Stoker. With yet another Dracula film adaptation, Roger Eggers’ Nosferatu, scheduled for release at the end of this year, I thought it timely to include this illustration featuring Stoker’s legendary vampire count by Spanish painter and illustrator Fernando Vicente. It depicts the scene where Dracula crawls down his castle wall, “face down with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings”, fingers and toes grasping “the corners of the stones”, descending “with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.” In keeping with Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula is still an old man at this point – but Vicente’s version is an old man who looks like he can take care of himself and whom you wouldn’t want to mess with. Indeed, he makes me think of the late silver-haired American character-actor Dennis Farina, who specialised in playing tough mobsters and cops (and who’d been a Chicago police detective before taking up acting). Though it’s Dennis Farina with red eyes and fangs.

From bookpatrol.net / © Fernando Vicente

And from Bram Stoker to H.P. Lovecraft. Just over a year ago, the Scottish actor David McCallum – best known for his TV roles in The Man from UNCLE (1964-68), The Invisible Man (1975), Sapphire and Steel (1979-82) and NCIS (2003-23) – passed away. In the tributes that followed, there wasn’t much mention of the fact that McCallum was also a musician and writer. And nothing was said about his prolific career as an audiobook narrator, a career that extended to the weird, baroque and morbid world of legendary horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Among the Lovecraft stories he narrated was The Rats in the Walls (which can be heard here on YouTube). I like this cover illustration from the original LP of the recording, designed by Brooklyn artists Leo and Diane Dillon, with its giant skull (composed of normal-sized skulls and other bones) and an insane green face, seemingly spewing yellow bile, emerging from the bottom of the wall behind. More on the Dillons can be found here and here – the latter site featuring some cracking cover art they did for the 1972 Ray Bradbury novel The Halloween Tree.

From pinterest.com / © Leo and Diane Dillon

Old bones are also on view in this image, which I’ve seen called The Boy in the Skeleton on social media. It’s by the Dutch engraver and woodcutter Christoffel van Sichem the Younger, who lived from the late 16^th to the mid-17^th century. I presume the panic-stricken lad, inside the larger and rather insouciant-looking skeleton, serves as a metaphor for how the human soul is imprisoned within a cage of flesh and bone, despite that cage being a fragile and ultimately perishable one.

From x.com

Right, back to the theme of Halloween. I love this picture by the Paris-based illustrator Nico Delort. Entitled It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, it’s obviously inspired by the much-loved, animated TV Halloween special of the same name, which was based on the cartoon-strip creations of Charles M. Schultz and first broadcast in 1966. It shows the thumb-sucking, security-blanket-clutching Linus Van Pelt venturing into his local pumpkin patch to await the coming of the alternative Santa Claus, the Great Pumpkin. Linus can be discerned in the middle distance of Delort’s composition, while the Great Pumpkin – possibly – can be glimpsed on the end of a faraway cloud. But it’s the satanically-grinning pumpkins in the foreground that command your attention.

© Nico Delort

Also satanic is this picture by British artist Dave Kendall, who’s worked in collaboration with talents as diverse as Pat Mills (founder of the world’s greatest sci-fi comic, 2000AD), heavy metal titans Metallica and the late Lovecraftian author Brian Lumley. Among Kendall’s dark, brooding and frequently twisted creations, I find this one of the most disturbing. Its image of a bloody-faced nun, with grotesquely elongated fingers, is inspired by a short story called The Hands. This was penned in 1986 by the esteemed Liverpudlian horror writer Ramsey Campbell and can be read here.

© Dave Kendall

More female monstrosities are displayed in this picture. All I can determine about these bat-ladies is that they’re the work of an Austrian artist called Robert Loewe and appeared in the February 11^th, 1913 edition of the weekly satirical magazine Die Muskete.

From thefugitivesaint.tumblir.com

Meanwhile, it’s a female doing the screaming – in impeccable, wide-mouthed and wide-eyed Japanese manga style – on this cover illustration for the appropriately named Halloween Comics. The artist is Kazuo Umezo, known in Japan as ‘the god of horror manga’. For inspiration, Umezo has often drawn on traditional Japanese folklore and legends and he’s made this argument against the many people – parents, editors, educators – who’ve urged him to ‘think of the children’ and tone down the horror content of his work: “Old Japanese folk stories and fairy tales could be unflinchingly brutal. They come from a time when tragedy and carnage was an everyday part of life. Now we have people calling to water them down, which essentially whitewashes history. It’s insulting to the memory of those who suffered to bring us these stories.” More of Umezo’s work, definitely not toned down, can be viewed on this entry dedicated to him on the website Monster Brains.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com / © Kazuo Umezu

Finally, to end things on a gentler note, here’s a picture I appreciate both as a cat-lover and as someone who finds graveyards fascinating – one of a cat (black, of course) exploring a graveyard at night. It’s from the cover of a ‘cozy mystery’ novel entitled Witch Way to Murder (2005) by Shirley Damsgaard and it’s by the New York artist Tristan Elwell. A more recent and better-known cover illustration by Elwell, which also involves a cat, is the one adorning John Scalzi’s bestselling and award-winning satirical novel Starter Villain (2023).

From unquietthings.com / © Tristan Elwell

Enjoy Halloween!

October 31, 2022October 31, 2022

10 scary pictures for Halloween 2022

© Dave Cockburn

Today is Halloween. As usual, I’ll take advantage of the creepy spirit of the occasion and display ten pieces of macabre art that I’ve come across and liked during the past year.

I’ve sometimes heard the work of the great 18^th / 19^th German landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich described as ‘occult’ and, yes, there is something strikingly metaphysical in his depictions of puny-looking humans confronted by the huge, bleak awesomeness of nature. I’ve never found his art particularly disturbing, though, until I encountered his 1814 painting The Chasseur in the Forest. It features the always foreboding image of someone – here a lost dragoon – about to venture into a mass of dark, towering, primordial-seeming trees. What awaits him in there? Something cosmically evil and terrifying? Quite possibly.

From commons.wikimedia.org

From the sublime to the (splendidly) ridiculous. Here’s a very different rendering of a spooky forest, courtesy of Catalan artist Vincenç Badalona Ballestar, who died in 2014. Ballester was responsible for the covers of many of the schlocky John Sinclair stories – Sinclair, according to Wikipedia, is “the name as well as the protagonist of a popular German horror detective fiction series (of the pulp fiction or penny dreadful variety). Sinclair, a Scotland Yard chief inspector, battles all kinds of undead and demonic creatures. The series appears weekly and has been running since 1973.”

From unquietthings.com

And more, sinister woodland appears in this pen-and-ink work by German artist Fritz Schwimbeck, which was inspired by – I don’t know if it actually illustrated an edition of – Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Drawn in 1917, it presumably depicts the bit near the beginning where Jonathan Harker is picked up by the Count’s mysterious coach and coachman. The tiny scale allowed for pictures on this blog doesn’t do justice to the glorious detail of the picture so, to appreciate it properly, please go to this entry on the horror-art website Monster Brains.

From monsterbrains.blogspot.com

Speaking of Dracula, I feel I should show something by Swiss-born, UK-based artist Oliver Frey, who passed away in August this year. As a kid, I was very familiar with Frey’s work, since it adorned the covers of Hamlyn Books’ compendiums – ‘encyclopaedias’ is rather too sensible a word for them – of spooky stuff aimed at juvenile readers: The Hamlyn Book of Horror (1976), Hamlyn Book of Ghosts (1978), Hamlyn Book of Mysteries (1983) and Hamlyn Book of Monsters (1984). These commonly featured monsters and supernatural creatures of popular folklore and popular culture glaring out from their covers and going “Grrrr!”, as frighteningly as was permitted for children at the time. I recall Dracula on the cover of The Hamlyn Book of Monsters having a stake stuck, surprisingly bloodily, in his chest. Here’s a later picture by Frey of the vampirical Count, this time from the cover of issue 32 of Fear magazine in 1991. It’s done with Frey’s impressively melodramatic and sinewy flair.

© Newsfield / Oliver Frey

There’s more biting, and painful-looking clawing, going on in this work by the 19^th / 20^th century Polish painter Boleslaw Biegas, whose output included – I’m quoting Wikipedia again – “mythical, monstrous and female chimeras, which symbolised a battle of the sexes.” That’s a battle that the female chimera in this graphic and muscular picture is definitely winning. It’s entitled Le Baiser du Vampire, but come on – that’s not a vampire, but a harpy, a half-woman, half-bird creature from Greek mythology, who tormented the hapless King Phineus in the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece. You may be able to see this picture for real in the Polish Library in Paris, which contains the Boleslaw Biegas Art Collection.

From oldpaintings.tumblr.com

From Greek mythology to Norse mythology. I like this elegant, anime-style depiction of Hel, the female goddess of death who rules the Norse underworld, which appears in the book Norse Gods (2017) by Swedish illustrator Johan Egerkrans. But who’s the giant, fearsome-looking canine beside her? Is it her brother Fenrir, the monstrous wolf who, it’s prophesised, will gobble up the sun on Ragnarōk, the Norse Day of Judgement? Both Hel and Fenrir were the off-spring of the giantess Angerboda and sneaky trickster god Loki, presumably before Tom Hiddleston started to play him in the Marvel superhero movies.

© Johan Egerkrans

In Christian mythology, Loki’s nearest equivalent is of course Satan, which brings me to my next pick. This is The Devil Skating When Hell Freezes Over, by the 19^th / 20^th century English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Collier – no relation to the writer John Collier, famous for his sardonic short stories, who was born 50 years later. I like this painting not only for its cheekiness – I love how that tail slips out through the split in the back of the overcoat – but also because it seems to be an ironic riposte to the celebrated painting by Henry Raeburn, The Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston Loch (or The Skating Minister), often cited as Scotland’s most iconic painting.

From tumblr.com

Still on the subject of Christian devils, here’s 17^th century Italian painter Salvator Rosa’s take on one of the most popular art-subjects in Christendom – The Temptation of St Anthony, which he painted in 1645. Rather than have the long-suffering saint under attack from a whole army of ghoulish creatures, which has been common in other renderings of the story, Rosa provides him with one main adversary. It’s a hideous-looking thing. Although it’s an amalgamation of different animals, with a bird’s body, horse’s skull-head, rat’s tail, boar’s tusks, plus a tiny set of human genitals, these disparate parts meld together and create something that looks disturbingly whole and unified. Indeed, it resembles something that could have crept out of the hold of the space-cargo-ship Nostromo in Alien (1980), had Ridley Scott decided to enlist an Italian Baroque painter to do the production design rather than H.R. Giger.

From linusfontrodona.com

This next item, which I believe is the work of modern Turkish artist Soner Çakmak, evokes the devil too. In its subtle, strangely melancholic way, it captures the childhood terror of being alone in your bedroom at night, when you’re still too young to figure out what’s real and what’s imaginary in the world around you. You can especially relate to that feeling if, like me, you spent your childhood somewhere like Northern Ireland in the 1970s, where there were plenty of loud-mouthed, red-faced religious idiots around you assuring you that some frightening concepts indeed, like Satan and his demons in hell, were real.

© Soner Çakmak

Finally, straight after Halloween comes Mexico’s delightful, skeleton-crazy Day of the Dead festival. In recognition of that, I usually try to include a picture featuring skeletons, bones and skulls. So, here’s an illustration from the 1901 calendar of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company of St. Louis, Missouri, which supplied doctors and druggists with tablets for combatting fevers and reducing pain. It’s one of many skeleton-themed pictures by artist (and doctor) Louis Crusius that the company used in its marketing materials. It seems bizarre that a company peddling a medical product – meant to fight off ill-health – would use such an obvious symbol of death to promote itself. But then, the story of the Antikamnia Pharmaceutical Company was pretty bizarre. It was prosecuted and shut down after the discovery that its tablets contained a banned substance called acetanilide, which reduced the ability of red blood cells to carry oxygen, which among many other bad effects caused takers of the tablets to turn blue.

From dangerousminds.net

And that’s it for another year. Happy Halloween!

October 29, 2021October 29, 2021

Horror before it got panned

© Pan Books

One more horror-themed reposting just before Halloween…

Michael Gove, well-known cokehead, Aberdonian nightclub boogie-king and England’s Education Minister from 2010 to 2014, would be disappointed in me. When I was a lad, my usual reading material was not the likes of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which in 2013 Gove famously said he wanted to see the nation’s youth reading.

Rather, when I was 11, 12 or 13, I commonly had my nose stuck in works by such authors as Sven Hassel, James Herbert and Guy N. Smith, meaning that I didn’t become conversant in the effects of the Great Reform Act of 1832 or in the gradual diminution of the ideals of Dorothea Brooke, which Eliot wrote about in her 1871-1872 masterpiece. I did, however, end up learning a lot about German Panzer divisions wreaking bloody havoc on the Russian front during World War II, about chemical weapons leaking out of military laboratories in the form of thick swirling fogs and driving all who come in contact with them murderously insane, and about giant mutant crabs going on the rampage and eating people. Knowing such things prepared me a lot for adult life.

I also spent a lot of time reading, in the form of tatty paperbacks that in the school playground and on the school bus were constantly borrowed, read, returned, borrowed again and read again, a series called The Pan Book of Horror Stories. The first of this series had been published in 1959, under the editorship of the strikingly named Herbert Van Thal, a literary agent, publisher and author whom the critic John Agate had once likened to ‘a sleek, well-groomed dormouse’. The first few volumes of horror stories that Van Thal edited for Pan Books consisted largely of classical stories from well-known horror writers and more ‘mainstream’ (whatever that means) writers who’d dabbled in the genre; and their quality was generally held to be high.

By the late 1960s, however, Van Thal was filling each new compilation with more and more stories from new writers, many of whom were taking advantage of a more permissive era to see what they could get away with in terms of violence, gore and general unpleasantness. Serious horror writers and fans became quite sniffy about the books. Ramsey Campbell, Britain’s most acclaimed living horror writer, has said: “I did like the first one when I was 13 years old, but I thought the series became increasingly illiterate and disgusting and meritless.”

When my schoolmates and I started reading them in the 1970s, the latest editions of The Pan Book of Horror Stories were low in literary quality but high in disgusting-ness, which suited our jaded, beastly little minds fine. I’m still psychologically scarred by Colin Graham’s The Best Teacher in the ninth collection, which was about a psychopath who decides to write a manual for aspiring horror writers, instructing them in what dismemberment, disembowelment and various acts of torture really look and sound like. To this end, he kidnaps a horror writer and starts dismembering, disembowelling and torturing him whilst recording everything with a camera and tape recorder. Anyone who thinks that the horror sub-genre of ‘torture-porn’ began with Eli Roth’s movie Hostel in 2005 ought to check out Graham’s grubby epic from a few decades earlier.

© Pan Books

To be fair, the later Pan collections did feature then-up-and-coming, now-well-regarded writers like Tanith Lee, Christopher Fowler and, ahem, Ian McEwan. However, by the 1980s (and after Van Thal’s death), the series was clearly on its last legs. It resorted to ransacking Stephen King’s famous anthology Nightshift (1978) and reprinting stories like The Graveyard Shift, The Mangler and The Lawnmower Man. This was unwise, since anybody inclined to read the Pan horror series had probably read Nightshift already. The final volume, the thirtieth, had a very limited print run and if you ever lay your hands on a copy, it’s probably worth a lot as a collector’s item.

A while ago in a second-hand bookshop I discovered a copy of The First Pan Book of Horror Stories. This, alas, was unlikely to be sought by book collectors, since the copy looked like something had chewed, swallowed, partly-digested and regurgitated it. At least it was still readable, so I got a chance to sample the original instalment in this famous, or infamous, series. I was curious to know if it deserved the praise Ramsey Campbell had given it and also to see how different it was from the more disreputable stuff that came later.

My first impression was that the stories in this collection weren’t how I’d have organised them. I’ve heard writers whose works were printed in the later Pan books grumble about Van Thal’s abilities as an editor, and it’s hard to see why stories as similar as Hester Holland’s The Library and Flavia Richardson’s Behind the Yellow Door (both about hapless young women who are hired as private secretaries by older, plainly-batty women and who meet gruesome fates), or Oscar Cook’s His Beautiful Hands and George Fielding Eliot’s The Copper Bowl (both about exotic, grotesque revenges and tortures inflicted by East Asian people – at least one of them struck me as racist) should end up in the same book. In fact, Eliot’s story follows immediately after Cook’s, thanks to Van Thal’s strange policy of arranging the stories by the alphabetical order of their authors’ surnames.

I also noticed how stories I’d read elsewhere and greatly enjoyed in my youth now, sadly, seem a bit duff. I loved Hazel Heald’s The Horror in the Museum when I read it as a 13-year-old. Heald, incidentally, wrote it under the tutelage of H.P. Lovecraft, whose influence is obvious in the ornate prose-style. However, a modern rereading suggests that Heald (and Lovecraft) could’ve cut the story’s length by about 20 pages without losing any of its plot points.

Meanwhile, Bram Stoker’s The Squaw, another tale I had fond memories of, seems much poorer now thanks to one of its characters being an American tourist called Elias P. Hutchinson. If Hutchinson was what Stoker believed all Americans sounded like, spewing toe-curling things like ‘I du declare’ and ‘I say, ma’am’ and ‘this ole galloot’ and ‘durned critter’, I can only say that Stoker needed to go out and do some research. Still, despite some glaringly obvious failings, both The Horror in the Museum and The Squaw benefit from having cracking denouements.

From wikipedia.org

The Horror in the Museum is one of the few stories in the collection that contains a monster. (And what a monster it is: “globular torso… bubble-like suggestion of a head… three fishy eyes… foot-long proboscis… bulging gills… monstrous capillation of asp-like suckers… six sinuous limbs with their black paws and crab-like claws…”). Apart from The Kill by Colonel Peter Fleming, a werewolf story penned by none other than Ian Fleming’s older brother, the rest of the stories are fairly monster-free, depending on psychological terrors for their impact. Indeed, C.S. Forester’s The Physiology of Fear is a horror story in an unusually literal sense. It deals with a particularly horrific episode in human history, the Nazi concentration camps. It also features a German scientist engaged in research, with the Third Reich’s support and with prisoners from the camps as his guinea pigs, into the emotion of horror as it arises in the human psyche. And the story’s ending isn’t conventionally horrific. Instead, the scientist is ensnared in an ironic and satisfying twist worthy of Roald Dahl.

Also not a horror story in any conventional sense is Muriel Spark’s The Portobello Road. It qualifies as a ghost story, but most of all it’s a mediation on the nature of friendship as it survives, or doesn’t survive, from childhood into adulthood. This being Spark – whose most famous creation, Miss Jean Brodie, was simultaneously a prim middle-class Edinburgh schoolmistress and a fascist – the story has a bitter, vinegary flavour. None of its characters are particularly pleasant and none seem to deserve long-term friendship. In fact, the one character who tries to keep those friendships alive is the one who, ultimately, commits the story’s single, shocking act of violence.

Meanwhile, I reacted to the sight of Jack Finney’s Contents of the Dead Man’s Pocket as if an old friend had suddenly hoven into view. Not that I’d encountered this particular story before, but it conjured up fond memories of American writers like Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Ray Russell and Charles Beaumont, who in the 1950s seemed to keep their rents paid by pumping out short stories for the likes of Playboy magazine and TV scripts for the likes of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) and Boris Karloff’s Thriller (1960-62). In admirably direct and diamond-hard prose, their tales would detail the world turning suddenly and inexplicably weird for citizens of conformist post-war America, for both dutiful suburban wives in nipped-in-at-the-waist housedresses and office-bound men in grey-flannel suits.

From fictionunbound.com

Finney, most famous as the author of the sci-fi horror novel The Body Snatchers (1955), which has been filmed four times and shows conformity taken to a nightmarish extreme, starts his story thus: “At the little living room table Tom Benecke rolled two sheets of flimsy and a heavier top sheet, carbon paper sandwiched between them, into his portable.” A half-dozen pages later, events have lured Benecke away from his portable typewriter and embroiled him in a vertiginous life-or-death struggle just outside his apartment window. It calls to mind the Stephen King short story The Ledge, another one that appeared in his collection Nightshift. I doubt if the similarity between the two stories is a coincidence, King being a big admirer of work from this era of American story-telling.

Also deserving mention are Oh Mirror, Mirror, a claustrophobic item penned by the great Nigel Kneale; Raspberry Jam, Angus Wilson’s poisonous take on the snobbery of old people who no longer have anything to be snobbish about; and Serenade for Baboons, a colonial horror by Noel Langley.

Inevitably, a couple of clunkers find their way into the book too. Anthony Vercoe’s Flies wouldn’t be such a bad story if the writer hadn’t swamped his prose with exclamation marks. I can’t remember encountering so many of the damned things in ten pages of prose before and the result is almost unreadable. Meanwhile, The House of Horror is one of a series of short stories that American pulp writer Seabury Quinn wrote about a psychic investigator called Jules de Grandin. De Grandin is French and seemingly meant to be a supernatural version of Hercule Poirot (who, I know, was actually Belgian). Unfortunately, Quinn gives him a patois that is as cringe-inducing as Elias P. Hutchinson’s Americanisms in The Squaw: “Sang du diable…! Behold what is there, my friend… Parbleu, he was caduo – mad as a hatter, this one, or I am much mistaken!”

On the whole, though, I found The First Pan Book of Horror Stories a rewarding read. I now look forward to tracking down the other, earlier instalments in the series – those ones that came out before Herbert Van Thal decided to crank up the levels of nasty, schlocky stuff, in order to satisfy the blood-crazed savages amongst his reading public.

Blood-crazed savages such as my twelve-year-old self…

© Pan Books

May 30, 2020

The land of thieves and phantoms

My previous blog post was about disgraced spin-doctor Dominic Cummings. This post is also about a bald, sinister and shadowy figure who doesn’t take well to being exposed to the light. I’m talking about Count Orlok, the central character of the classic 1922 German chiller Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was famously the cinema’s first (surviving) adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), although the filmmakers sneakily tried to duck copyright responsibilities by changing the character-names and localities – retitling Dracula as Orlok, for instance. In the event, Stoker’s widow successfully sued them anyway. Nosferatu is one of those films I’ve seen so many clips of over the years that I’d assumed, wrongly, that I’d seen all of it. When I came across a remastered version of it on YouTube the other day, it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen it in its entirety. So I immediately made amends.

Nosferatu is an immensely atmospheric film and the technical aspects of it that have become dated in the century since its making just seem to add to its strange atmospherics today. For one thing, there’s the over-expressive silent movie acting. Gustav von Wangenheim as the estate agent Hutter, who corresponds to Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s novel, grins disconcertingly like a young Brian Blessed – although as the film progresses and he’s dispatched to Transylvania, ‘the land of thieves and phantoms’ as he calls it, to facilitate an unusual property deal, he predictably gets less to smile about. Meanwhile, Alexander Granach as Knock, who stands in for the novel’s lunatic and vampire-minion Milo Renfield, is unnervingly off the scale in his manic-ness.

Then there’s the special effects, which involve Keystone Cop-style speeded-up footage and crude stop-motion animation. Viewed today, they give the film’s events a discomfortingly bizarre quality. Whether it’s the beetling movement of the vampire’s black coach, drawn by black-draped horses, or a coffin lid shifting jerkily of its own volition, such things look like they’re happening in another, spectral world.

One supreme moment of oddness comes while Hutter is journeying through Transylvania and a ‘werewolf’ is glimpsed prowling through a forest. This is presumably meant to be Count Orlok in lupine form though it’s obviously a hyena the filmmakers must have procured from a circus or a zoo. A hyena loose in an Eastern European forest should seem ridiculous in 2020 but, like so much of Nosferatu, it just seems strange. (A werewolf, incidentally, featured in the original first chapter of Stoker’s Dracula, which was excised from the completed novel. In 1914, this missing chapter was published as a self-contained short story Dracula’s Guest.)

If Nosferatu has a glaring technical problem, it’s the preponderance of day-for-night shooting. This means that Orlok greets Hutter in the courtyard of his Transylvanian castle seemingly in broad daylight and thereafter he’s often seen stalking around in what is supposed to be darkness but is obviously sunlight (and even casting a shadow). The sun is commonly supposed to be fatal to vampires, but it doesn’t have to be – in Bram Stoker’s novel, it’s stated that sunlight merely weakens Dracula, depriving him of his supernatural powers but not destroying him. However, Nosferatu ends with Orlok disintegrating as he’s struck by an early-morning sunray, so the day-for-night shooting makes a nonsense of the vampire mythology that the film’s set up for itself. (The remastered version of Nosferatu I saw was very cleaned-up and I’d heard that in the original version the night-set scenes had been ‘tinted’ to make them look darker. But I’ve checked older uploads of Nosferatu on YouTube too and the day-night issue is still problematic.)

While I’m on the subject of illogicality, I should say I don’t understand the mindset of the crew of the schooner tasked with transporting some crates of soil, among which Orlok has concealed himself, to Wisborg, Hutter’s hometown in Germany. They already know that a mysterious ‘plague’ is ravaging the coastal area that they’re sailing from. And before they set off, they notice that the crates are swarming with rats as well as being full of soil. So why do they accept this potentially lethal cargo?

On the plus side, of course, Max Schreck’s performance as Count Orlok is still utterly memorable. Devoid of any of the gentlemanly or aristocratic suaveness that later actors like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman would bring to the role of Dracula, Schreck’s Orlok is a pure creature of the night – bald, pale, sporting rat-like incisors and pointed ears and wielding clawed hands that resemble clumps of albino carrots. He’s not entirely hairless, having some shockingly unruly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. (There are no vampire brides in this version of the story. Orlok, like many a bachelor living alone, obviously neglects his facial grooming.)

When he’s wearing a crumpled hat and trying to act the welcoming host to Hutter, he’s ghoulish enough. When he appears in his full, thirsty, vampire-ish form, for example, on board the schooner, he’s the stuff of nightmares. Also interesting is how he’s much more supernaturally powerful than the average movie vampire – Knock and Ellen (Greta Schröder), who’s Hutter’s wife and the film’s equivalent of the book’s Mina Harker character, sense and react to his presence long before he even sets sail from Transylvania to join them.

Knock is particularly interesting as, unlike other Renfields and other minions of Dracula in other films, he never actually crosses paths with his master. In the plot, his function is really to serve as a scapegoat for the slayings that occur in Wisborg after Orlok arrives. The townspeople believe that Knock, who’s just escaped from the asylum he was incarcerated in, is the real vampire and a mob of them pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside. Indeed, you’d feel sorry for him if he hadn’t throttled an asylum attendant during his breakout. The chase provides Nosferatu with some of its most memorable images – Knock perched gargoyle-like on a vertiginous rooftop, for example, or the mob racing towards a figure they believe is him in the middle of a field, only to discover that it’s a scarecrow (which they tear to pieces in a rage).

To audiences in 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror must have seemed sensational. Jaded, hardened film-watchers a century later won’t find it a symphony of horror, of course. But with its strange images and sequences, the film still has a way of getting unsettlingly under your skin. You’ll feel you’ve at least experienced a symphony of haunting Germanic weirdness.