With Robert Eggers’ much-anticipated (by me, anyway) remake of Nosferatu around the corner, Nosferatu: The Real Story arrives to explore the original film, its origins and cultural impact. This strategy – tying in to a big upcoming movie adaptation by exploring its source material – is the same as that used for this year’s Wicked: The Real Story and last year’s The Exorcist Untold. Nosferatu: The Real Story is the best of the three (though there are plenty of others I haven’t seen), with cogent analysis and a strong focus on its source material throughout. It is, perhaps, aided here in that the original Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens is so old, so foreign and therefore so mysterious that the film is never overwhelmed by different facets of its subject matter to explore.
The number of interviewees here is small, and all of them are academics, so don’t expect to hear from Robert Eggars, Willem Dafoe or any other big name associated with the forthcoming film. But this is to The Real Story‘s advantage. Cristina Massaccessi, Nicolas Barber, Sarah Crowther, Stacey Abbott and Tobias Churton are all thoughtful, articulate people and a true pleasure to spend time with. While the historical aspects of the film are covered – the novel Dracula, the German Expressionist movement, the occult in Weimar Germany and the legal action from Stoker’s estate that nearly saw the film destroyed are the main ones – the bulk of the film is spent analysing Nosferatu itself, its themes, techniques and masterful effects work that have made it a fascinating and genuinely scary film to this day, one hundred years on. Stock footage is deployed, mostly from the (happily) now-public-domain Nosferatu itself, though other sources range from Der Golem to Buffy, to great effect; talking-heads docs all too often fail to illustrate the speaker’s point effectively, which is never the case here.
And, while the film is brisk at just seventy minutes, it manages a perfect balance in terms of its subject matter. Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht and the new Nosferatu are given some attention at the end, but the focus on the original and its enduring legacy means that the documentary’s thread is never lost. And if this doc, especially paired with the new remake, succeeds in pointing more audiences toward the extraordinary original film, so much the better.
★★★★☆