The Real Nosferatu

I'm sure if you're a real horror fan, you've heard of the 1922 movie Nosferatu. It was one of the first real horror movies, made in Germany just after World War I. It had a large influence on vampire lore, because it made them vurnerable to the sun. Before, vampires were often weakened by sunlight, but exposure would not kill them.

The plot is based on the novel Dracula, but it takes a lot of liberties because the filmmakers didn't have the lincense to make the film. It's about a clerk named Thomas Hutter, who goes to Orlok's (the vampire, or "nosferatu") castle, and, blind as he is to the fact that Orlok's obviously a vampire, even though he just read a book about it. Hutter sells a house to Orlok, who then goes to the city of Wisborg, to go on a killing spree. He dies when he is feeding of the blood of a pretty woman. Distracted as he is, he doesn't notice the rising sun and vanishes in a cloud of smoke.

The movie is known for its haunting atmosphere, and Orlok's presence is always frightening, even if you can only see his shadow. Some of the shots are colored, but only in one color, to add a feel to the scene.

If all of this sounds familiar, you'll also know that the movie was banned for copyright reasons, causing the company that made it, Prana Films to go bankrupt. But just paying the sum of money to Stoker's widow (who, by the way, also dated Oscar Wilde. History is weird, right?). No, EVERY SINGLE COPY of the film had to be destroyed.

Stoker's widow had little to gain from sueing the film, she only needed the money because she was in financial trouble, and she didn't even see the film. There was no real reason for her or the court to banish the film from existence. But apparently, it was not gone forever.

So why can you still watch the film on youtube? Well, in the late twenties, it became clear that some cinemas that had kept copies of the film in secret and started showing it again, because by this time the court apparently no longer cared.

Now this is the part where it gets crazy. I was on universalmonsterarmy.com, a forum for old horror movies. It's the kind of forum where you discuss obscure interests or trade rare collector's items, the kind of forum that's silently active in some corner of the internet without the general public knowing or caring. It was in the silent movie subforum, where usually a topic got posted once a month or so. Usually, those topics are about whether anyone knows where to get a good copy of Nosferatu or, once in a while, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari.

The title of the topic read simply: "Nosferatu". I assumed it was nothing special, so I clicked it, ready to give a link to Ebay. I can remember that it was pretty long, but after the recent events it got deleted. I'll try to recap it while I can.

The poster, whose username was simply "rudolf" (without caps), to my surprise, didn't want a copy at all, he just wanted our opinion on the movie, and had posted a few screenshots just for fun. I was already typing my comment when I noticed something was off about the screenshots. I didn't know what it was, but I figured I would just watch the movie one more time on youtube.

I was busy with my job (I'm a waiter, and it was the start of the holidays), so I couldn't return to the forum until after a few weeks. I was browsing again when I remembered the Nosferatu topic. When I checked the comment section it struck me what was wrong with the screenshots: They were not from the movie at all. I couldn't recall any moment in the film where Orlok was walking like that in the mountains, or staring at the screen from that angle, or Hutter running near the river. The other commenters had noticed as well, and called "rudolf" out on it.

The was a response from Rudolf, saying that these were definitely in the movie, and that their summary of it wasn't correct. I was intrigued, but not interested enough to keep reading, so I moved on to another topic.

A few days later I was browsing again, in the music subforum, when I saw that Rudolf had posted a reply. He said that added music didn't belong in silent horror films and that the silent version was the only true version. I remembered the thread, so I returned to it.

Apparently Rudolf and the admins didn't get along very well anymore. The admins demanded to know where he got the screenshots, and Rudolf insisted that this was the original version, he even posted a picture of the plastic strip. I didn't believe him for a second, and posted a snarky reply, saying that he was just trolling us.

Now I was following the thread. No one really took Rudolf seriously anymore, even though he continued to post more "screenshots" of the film. After a while the debate got so heated that Rudolf said he would record the full movie with his camera, and post a link to the whole movie on friday (at midnight, for good measure).

All of us were interested now, and even though no one really knew what it was going to be. In the weeks that the forum thread was active, nearly all of us had posted repies. Some of us speculated that his copy was really an amateur fan film that he mistook for the real one, or cheap imitator with some added and deleted scenes. Some even believed Rudolf was right. In the following days, the nature of the film he would show us became the main topic to talk about on the forums, with a ton of other theories being submitted.

When the friday night came, there was an unusually high number of online members. After about 10 minutes of waiting and watching the other members complain, he finally posted a link to Megaupload, which I clicked. After I had downloaded the file and opened it with Media Player.

I don't remember the entire movie, but what I do remember still haunts me in my dreams to this day.

The first thing that hit me was that I was seeing the film being projected, so this really was a plastic strip. Didn't see that one coming? Well, just wait, it gets better.

The title cards were in German, so apparently, this was either a really old imitator or just the normal Nosferatu. The movie started normally, with Hutter and his wife, Ellen, being introduced to the audience by being shown at home. A few minutes later Hutter had departed on his journey to the count's castle. Nothing was really out of the ordinary, except for a few camera angles that seemed slightly different and some shots I had never seen before. The first major difference was at the in, where Hutter reads the book on vampires, instead of the normal text, it showed:

"Führen Sie, während Sie noch eine Chance haben, für das, was kommen wird es keine Rückkehr möglich sein"

Which was on the screen for an obnormally long period of time, even for a silent movie. The second page showed:

"Abwenden, für Baphomet kommt".

That's where the real film began.

Hutter reacted to this the same way as in the real version: by simply throwing the book away. Afterwards, he took the carriage like in the real version, but the woods looked much more dense, and it was evening instead of daytime, so everything was a lot harder to see, though there was a large moon in the sky. By this point my eyes were glued to the screen, I had no Idea what was going on. Unlike the normal version, where the coach drivers leave Hutter near the road because of their superstition, here, they brought him all the way through the woods. The scene was much longer, and I thought I could see something move in the woods, maybe or maybe not. What felt like an hour later they reached the castle, and Hutter entered the courtyard, at lot more cautious than in the normal version. That's when Orlok first appears in the regular version, but here, there was no one there, so Hutter just entered the castle and...

That's it. I'm not doing this, my memory is vague and I don't want you to share my nightmares of demonic invocations, and rats, o God, the rats, you wouldn't want to... No! The only thing I can say about this is that I never thought the same way about Nosferatu again, and that I have begun to doubt the history summary on the top of this page a lot... If you really want to know more, you can look at the forum, maybe the admins want to tell you some more, though I doubt that, because the silent films subforum was deleted after these events, and Rudolf's IP was banned from the site. Maybe if I can remember more, maybe, maybe I can tell you the rest, but you wouldn't want to...