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Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
I haven't see the Polanski Nosferatu, but now I think I'll have to see if I can find it online. F.W. Munarau's 1922 version has long been a favorite, and it's hard to imagine a creepier Count Orlok than Max Schreck (whose role went uncredited in the film).
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I for one would be interested to hear what you think. Schrek's version is great, but I think Kinski's amazing in the role. (All due credit to Lugosi for his genre-defining performance, but his version does absolutely zilch for me.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Another one of my favorite vampire films is closely related: Shadow of the Vampire, a film released in 2000 that imagines the filming of the original Nosferatu. In this fictional version, the reason there were no actor credits for the vampire in Nosferatu is because to add realism to the film, the director hired a real vampire to play the role. All went as planned until cast members begin to go missing.
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Ah yes, I was going to ask if you'd seen that one when you mentioned Murnau's version. I love it, and Willem Dafoe is extraordinary (and almost completely unrecognisable) in it, no?
Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
In "reel" life of course, Nosferatu was Dracula by another name, and the heirs of Stoker's estate nearly succeeded in suing the film into oblivion.
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They came within a whisker of wiping it out completely. The court actually ordered that all copies be destroyed. If I'm not wrong, wasn't it simply dumb luck that a copy survived? In fact - do we actually have the whole thing, even now? I know
Metropolis has gone through a long process of being slowly pieced back together by archivists from around the world, and we still don't have a complete print of its original edit, from before the US distributors edited the master copy down so heavily, but am I wrong in thinking something similar had happened with
Nosferatu?