Which Directors Have Matched German Expressionism’s Freak?
German Expressionist films are not exactly popular fodder for the contemporary remake machine. Most are silent and at least a century old, and almost all of them are the product of artists tapped into a tortured national psyche during the unsavory historical moment of interwar Germany. So credit where it is due to Robert Eggers for having a go at Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 vampire classic. Although he isn’t the first to do so — Werner Herzog beat him by 45 years with 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre — Eggers’s is the first Nosferatu not made by a very specific type of German freak.
The difficulty of matching interwar Germany’s freak — or, rather, the difficulty of contextualizing interwar Germany’s freak for a contemporary audience — is partially why these films are rarely remade. With the 1920 release of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, German Expressionist cinema hit its first peak amid a climate of nationwide economic, political, and spiritual despair. Defeat in the First World War and the humiliating terms of the Treaty of Versailles had turned the imperial power into a shambolic constitutional republic ill-equipped to curb rampant inflation or pacify violent uprisings from the right and left. As everyday Germans retreated from reality to cope, the German Expressionists (Wiene, Murnau, and Fritz Lang among them) became, according to film historian Lotte H. Eisner, “concerned solely with images of the mind.”
In the nation’s first serious crop of filmmakers, German art’s long relationship with mysticism collides with a profound rejection of traditional values. The cinematic language Expressionist filmmakers invented was esoteric, literally and figuratively shadowy, cerebral, and heavily symbolic. Visual distortion was a common feature in and out of frequent dream sequences. Its themes and plots were often pitch-dark and inhabited by hypnotists, somnambulists, mediums, spies, the devil himself, serial killers, and crime bosses. German Expressionism is scant on deathless happy endings; it did, however, almost single-handedly birth the horror and crime genres.
Remaking a German Expressionist film presents a formidable task. A remake must negotiate any number of technical and philosophical leaps: from silent to sound, German art film to Hollywood production, outsize gestural performance to naturalistic acting, black and white to color. Many filmmakers, Werner Herzog very much excluded, make a choice to preserve either the stylistic elements or the narrative, but not both. Then again, fidelity is no guarantee of quality. (Herzog, once again, excluded.)
For several decades, German Expressionism’s influence reverberated through Anglophone cinema, not least because witnessing Murnau direct The Last Laugh blew a young Alfred Hitchcock’s mind. But in recent years its stylistic influence and visual references seem to have fallen to Tim Burton alone, meaning Eggers has entered a decidedly uncrowded space. In doing so, he has achieved something once thought impossible: the creation of a Nosferatu worth seeing by someone who isn’t a complete German freak.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)
The original Caligari, in which a mysterious doctor and his fortune-telling somnambulist commit a series of murders and drive two young people to madness, is often regarded as a critique of Germans’ blind obedience to tyrannical authority during the First World War. And while it has been in the public domain for years, someone still needs to be sued for this remake. One potential litigant is director David Lee Fisher, who decided to reuse the beguiling backdrops of the original by way of green screens, then hire actors whose every line reading makes the invention of the talkie seem like a mistake. This Caligari is so completely drained of mystery, horror, a coherent plot, and a unified sense of setting — why is this young German man dressed like he’s auditioning to play tambourine in My Chemical Romance, and where did he get a six-shooter revolver? — that it’s basically unwatchable. By the time the characters are hollering that “it’s all just an illusion,” you’ll find yourself wishing it actually was.
M: A City Hunts A Murderer (2019)
Shortly after its release, M: A City Hunts A Murderer creator David Schalko called the six-hour miniseries a “complete rewrite” as opposed to a remake. Fritz Lang’s original depicted a Berlin driven to paranoia by a string of child murders, the perpetrator pursued by hapless authorities and self-interested criminal vigilantes. Schalko’s rewrite attempts to tease this fairly straightforward conceit into a police procedural while grasping for contemporary relevance, creating an M that’s more cobbled-together collection of subplots than cohesive story. (Fake news! Collapsing marriages! Anti-immigrant sentiment! Stomach-turning violence later played for laughs!) Several of Germany’s most interesting thespians (Udo Kier, Lars Eidinger, and Moritz Bleibtreu) and a sprinkle of full-frontal male nudity can’t keep the whole thing from deflating like one of the original’s iconic clown-shaped balloons. Still, it’s nice to see Lucius Malfoy’s walking stick getting post-Potter work.
The Last Man (1955)
Harald Braun’s 1955 remake of The Last Laugh is a stereotypical postwar German film, full of uncomplicated themes and palatable visuals. It’s a little odd considering how F.W. Murnau’s 1930 original is genuinely, staggeringly ambitious. Murnau’s titular character is a hotel doorman whose entire sense of self collapses upon his demotion to washroom attendant. Shunned by his friends, he inherits the fortune of an eccentric millionaire in the film’s final act and rides off into the proverbial sunset. Braun’s version trades this for a respectable plausibility, recasting the doorman as a head waiter who struggles mightily against his demotion and is eventually rewarded with the role of hotel director. The remake’s emphasis on believability comes with a host of simplistic morals, such as how hard work begets dignity, righteous people will experience setbacks but never go unrewarded, and true love wins in the end. Absent the original’s extraordinary pathos, only Richard Angst’s cinematography and Romy Schneider’s costuming are worth mentioning here.
The Cabinet of Caligari (1962)
Name notwithstanding, The Cabinet of Caligari is more freewheeling stylistic homage than remake. Fresh off Hitchcock’s Psycho, which was released the year prior, cinematographer John L. Russell capably bends the clean lines of mid-century modernism into the jagged and pointed ones of Expressionism. Shadowy and cerebral, the film feels consistently noir, but surprising and full-tilt Expressionist sequences push it beyond an otherwise standard-issue Hitchcock rip-off featuring an emotionally compromised blonde. Glynis Johns plays the blonde in question, who seeks help for a car breakdown at an estate lorded over by the imposing Caligari. Realizing Caligari and the other guests have little intention of letting her leave, she starts hatching escape plans while becoming increasingly detached from reality. It’s a little shamelessly Freudian and heavy on the pop psychoanalysis, but it mostly works, right down the original Caligari-referencing twist.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Shadow of the Vampire is not a remake of Nosferatu, per se, but it is a madcap alt-history of the film with a premise so insane and a cast so stacked — John Malkovich, Eddie Izzard, Cary Elwes, Willem Dafoe — that it could not go unmentioned here. Suppose Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau (Malkovich) cast an actual vampire (Dafoe) to play Count Orlok, and hid this from his cast and crew (who keep getting eaten) by telling them the vampire is just a super-annoying Method actor. What follows is one of the most tonally bizarre and genuinely fun movies-about-movies ever made, touching on themes about the monstrosity of artistic genius while also letting Dafoe’s vampire be a diva who snatches a bat out of the air and drains it like a Capri Sun in front of the producers. Director E. Elias Merhige meticulously recreates all the right shots from Nosferatu and brilliantly humanizes the silent-filmmaking process, which indeed involved just as much bad behavior as the talkies that eventually followed.
M (1951)
The differences between the 1930 German M and the 1951 American M feel borderline anthropological. Under Joseph Losey’s direction, the seedy streets of Berlin become the sunny avenues of Los Angeles, the shambling beggars become roving gangs of coiffed teenage boys, the killer’s drink changes from schnapps to bourbon, and the overall effect is a little less morally ambiguous than the original. In other words, the American M is trimmer, brighter, and full of healthier-looking people than the German one, but otherwise it’s impressively faithful to its source material. As the child killer, David Wayne gives an admirable enough performance, even if he can’t quite conjure the caged-animal look Peter Lorre does so unsettlingly well. Not only is this M pulpy and weighty, it’s also the first to prove a silent Expressionist film can be remade with sound in a way that doesn’t totally torpedo its aura.
Nosferatu (2024)
Unlike Murnau, who had to functionally invent the vampire movie on the cheap, Robert Eggers had a long legacy of Draculas and an eight-digit budget with which to assemble his own duly relevant but necessarily expanded Nosferatu. As such, the newest Nosferatu has the period-drama sumptuousness (if not the color palette) of Coppola’s 1992 Dracula, and Bill Skarsgård’s mustachioed Orlok resembles an actively rotting version of Gary Oldman’s count more than Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski’s cue balls with fangs. Of the three, this Nosferatu is the goriest, the most violent, and the most focused on Orlok’s Satanism. (It is, however, still only tied with the 1979 version for the most rats.) Ultimately this Nosferatu understands that the final eight minutes of the original is one of the most intensely captivating horror sequences ever committed to celluloid, and Eggers puts a century’s worth of technological development to work in making his own encounters with the vampire not just hair-raising but similarly throttling. A surplus of long shadows and shaky boundaries between states of consciousness check off the Expressionist boxes. It’s fantastic. The headless Murnau need not roll over in his grave.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
There is a specific type of deranged Method actor that the German nation alone is capable of producing, and when it does, it is this actor’s God-given duty to play Nosferatu. Case in point: Klaus Kinski’s jaw-dropping and note-perfect performance as the colorized Orlok, which maintains Max Schreck’s absolute repellant-ness yet imbues him with profound depth. Kinski’s Orlok is a monstrous “plague-bearer” who mourns his inhumanity, once remarking that “the absence of love is the most abject pain.” Writer-director (and fellow German weirdo) Werner Herzog achieves a remarkable balancing act of unshakeable (and periodically shot-for-shot) fealty to the source material while complicating its themes and virtually every character. Isabelle Adjani and her sadly born-too-late-for-silent-film face elevates Lucy Harker from self-sacrificing damsel to a heroine powering the film’s underlying current of subversive desire, and her confrontation with Kinski is one of vampire cinema’s high points. Altogether, Herzog teases out the original’s perversely erotic undercurrents in places where Eggers goes after them with a shovel. Both approaches work, but which you prefer is likely to reflect your larger feelings about cinematic subtlety.
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