F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu

“To watch F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself. Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires.”
—Roger Ebert

“The really good horror films don’t just scare us—they haunt us. Death, disease, contagion, blood, rot, rats, the damp earth of the graveyard and the horrors of the night are all ingredients of the vampire story and still have the power to chill at 3 o’clock in the morning, ‘the soul’s midnight.’ F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is subtitled ‘a symphony of horrors’ and it uses every cinematic instrument to instill a sense of unease and growing dread in the audience.”
—Bryony Dixon, 100 Silent Films

Below is a review by Béla Balázs that ran in the March 1923 issue of the Viennese daily newspaper, Der Tag. Translation by Alex H. Bush and courtesy of WeimarCinema.org, where you can delve into an extensive dossier on Nosferatu.
There was a movie called Nosferatu, which rightly called itself “A Symphony of Horror”. Fever and nightmares, night shadows and premonitions of death, delusions and ghostly hauntings were woven into the images of gloomy mountain landscapes and stormy seas.

There was also a ghostly carriage in the forest, which was neither supernatural nor gruesome. But there was an air of the supernatural over his nature paintings. Storm clouds in front of the moon, a ruin at night, a dark, unrecognizable silhouette in the empty courtyard, a spider on a human face, the ship with black sails sailing into the canal and no living creature visible to steer it, howling wolves in the night, and horses suddenly frightened without us knowing why-these were all possible images in nature. But a frosty breeze from the other world blew into them.

It is certain that no written or spoken poetry can express the ghostly, the demonic, and the supernatural in the way that film can. For man’s language is a product of his rationality, and therefore even the Orphic words of dark magic are at best incomprehensible, but not “supernatural”. This essentially means that it becomes incomprehensible when it is incomprehensible. This is the self-defense of human intelligence. But a glimpse of it can be clear and understandable even if it is incomprehensible. And that is what makes our hair stand on end.