Let’s get the blasphemy out of the way first: Nosferatu is boring. There. I said it. Film students can clutch their pearls, German Expressionists can rise from their minimalist coffins, and cinephiles can hiss like silent movie bats—but Nosferatu, for all its historical importance and gaunt legacy, is one stiff, dusty, two-hour Germanic NyQuil capsule wearing a cape.
Yes, it’s influential. Yes, it predates Universal’s Dracula. Yes, Max Schreck’s Count Orlok is creepy in the same way that hairless cats and your aunt’s old boyfriend from Jersey are creepy. But let’s not pretend this thing doesn’t drag like Nosferatu’s left foot after three centuries of skipping leg day. This is horror made before horror had a pulse.
The story is simple, which is a nice way of saying you could sum it up on a cocktail napkin during a séance: Young real estate simp Hutter travels to the Carpathian Mountains to sell property to a mysterious count with the body of a paper towel roll and the face of a syphilitic sewer rat. Hutter gets creeped out, gets bit, then returns home as the vampire slowly boats his way to a new bachelor pad in Wisborg, dragging along his coffin like it’s a time-share agreement from Hell.
Count Orlok is, admittedly, unsettling—at least in still photos. His elongated fingers, stooped posture, and huge rat teeth all scream “I eat children and drywall.” But in motion, he’s less terrifying and more arthritic. Every time he enters a room, he looks like he just lost a fight with gravity. His movements are slow and exaggerated, not like a predator stalking prey, but more like someone trying to sneak into a bathroom without waking the house.
And the shadow scene? Yes, yes, it’s “iconic.” The extended claw climbing up the staircase is etched into cinema history. But today, it plays like something out of an arthouse parody—ominous jazz hands reaching for your soul. All that’s missing is a spooky tuba riff and maybe a scream from a woman discovering her phone’s been on silent this whole time.
As for the acting—look, it’s a silent film, so everyone’s emoting like they just slammed their fingers in a piano lid. Gustav von Wangenheim, as Hutter, is all exaggerated gasps and cartoon eyebrows, looking like a man constantly on the verge of either diarrhea or divine revelation. Greta Schröder, as his wife Ellen, drifts around with the confused melancholy of someone who just lost a crossword puzzle. It’s less “tragic romance” and more “did I leave the stove on?”
The intertitles, which try desperately to explain what’s happening without saying the word “Dracula” (thanks, lawsuit!), are a study in vague melodrama. “The deathbird has flown.” “The evil is among us.” It’s the cinematic equivalent of an old guy at a bus stop muttering warnings about the moon. Every line feels like it was written by a somber librarian on absinthe.
Now, yes, Murnau’s direction is technically impressive—for 1922. The use of shadow and light, the eerie location shooting, the unsettling makeup, the brisk attempts at narrative pacing—they were all groundbreaking a century ago. But you don’t get points for being the first vampire to bite someone if you’ve since been outpaced by literally every bat-themed media property from Sesame Street’s Count to Nicolas Cage on a bender.
You know what’s scarier than Nosferatu? The 1990s PowerPoint slideshows your high school teacher used to explain it.
The pacing is where this thing really dies—again. Scenes drag. Boats crawl. People stare blankly into the abyss like they’re waiting for someone to invent TikTok. Half the film is just “guy travels slowly, gets scared, then slowly travels back while vampire follows even slower.” It’s like watching a relay race between ghosts in molasses. The horror is less about what Orlok does—he barely shows up—and more about how long you’re willing to keep watching this under the illusion that something might eventually happen.
Let’s talk music—or the fact that Nosferatu has a thousand different scores. Depending on which version you watch, you might get a sweeping classical soundtrack, an eerie ambient synth trip, or something that sounds like a Casio keyboard possessed by a jazz ghost. The result? Every viewing feels like you’re watching a vampire trapped in a different genre. Orlok, now starring in Nosferatu 4: Smooth Jazz Bloodbath.
Even the supposed “climax”—Ellen sacrifices herself to distract Orlok until sunrise—feels about as dramatic as a cat knocking over a lamp. He reaches for her with his slow, sleepy claws, she sighs like she just realized her husband left the toilet seat up again, and then the sun rises, vaporizing him in a puff of bargain-bin fade effects. It’s not so much a showdown as it is a sleepover that ends with a light switch.
And don’t even start with “But it’s a metaphor for the plague!” I don’t care if it’s a metaphor for syphilis, capitalism, or chronic back pain—it still plays like a feature-length Ambien commercial. Yes, rats. Yes, doom. Yes, shadows of disease. But if I wanted to watch a metaphor for death slowly seep across a town, I’d go to my hometown’s HOA meeting.
Final Thoughts:
Nosferatu is a historical landmark, sure. But so is the Berlin Wall, and I wouldn’t want to sit through two hours of that either. This movie is required viewing only for film majors, vampire fetishists, and people who get turned on by black-and-white mildew. Everyone else? You’re better off watching paint dry—with subtitles.
Rating: 1.5 out of 5 bloodsucking rodents.
Watch it once. Then go cleanse your undead palate with What We Do in the Shadows and be grateful that vampires, like cinema, eventually learned how to talk—and bite with style.
