Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens. In Kooperation mit dem Lektüreseminar zu Monster und Monströses

With his silent-film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s epoch-making novel *Dracula*, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau created a milestone that has had no less of an influence on cinema: *Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror* is not only one of the most important films of the Weimar Republic—it is one of the first vampire films of all time and continues to shape the entire horror genre to this day.

In the film’s narrative, told through vivid imagery, the bloodsucking, sun-shy Count Orlok—driven by an erotic and demonic desire for the equally beautiful and young Ellen—travels to the fictional German town of Wisborg (Wismar), where he wreaks havoc.

A calamity that also befell the film itself: *Nosferatu* remained the only film produced by the Prana production company—it was a catastrophic financial failure, and Prana went bankrupt in the same year it was released. Furthermore, since the producer and occultist Albin Grau had not secured any film rights to Stoker’s novel, a court ruled in 1925 that all copies of the film must be destroyed.

Yet Nosferatu survived thanks to various edited versions circulating underground and, shortly after its release, sparked great fascination, particularly among the French Surrealists. For them, Count Orlok was not merely a vulgar bloodsucker, but a symbolic bridge between seemingly opposing worlds: between dream and reality, between reason and unreason, between darkness and light. Nosferatu blends these worlds and creates the vampire as their border-crosser—one who, in the words of Blaise Pascal, asks the audience: “Do you hear them sing, the children of the night?”

A film from the collection of the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation in Wiesbaden. The 2006version ,restored by Luciano Berriatúa , will be screened . 

In cooperation with the reading seminar on monsters and the monstrous