Line #5 YMMV/Nosferatu


1	!From the 1922 film
2	* AssPull: One of the most famous in movie history; Creator/FWMurnau couldn't figure out how to kill Orlok, so he finally just said "Uh, sunlight? Yeah, that works..." [[LostInImitation Since then, almost every vampire in fiction for the past century]] has been [[WeakenedByTheLight vulnerable to it]]. Incidentally, the effect can also utterly fail if you see the silent film in a version without the tints, since in plain black-and-white, the orthochromatic film stock doesn't distinguish between day and night, and the tints (dark blue for night, amber for day) do the job better to distinguish both.
3	* CommonKnowledge:
4	** ''Nosferatu'' wasn't the first adaptation of ''Dracula''; a now-lost Hungarian film, Karoly Lajthay's ''Dracula's Death'', came out a year earlier. From [[http://mentalfloss.com/article/84080/11-nightmarish-facts-about-nosferatu surviving descriptions]], Lajthay took [[InNameOnly far greater liberties]] with the source material than Murnau.
5	** Max Schreck was a prolific stage and screen actor; ''Nosferatu'' was far from his only role, though it was only his third movie and is certainly his most well-known today. This myth remains strangely persistent even in the Internet era, due to a variety of conflicting information dating back to the film's initial release. The German press spread a rumor that Schreck was actually a pseudonym for Alfred Abel, who had previously worked with Creator/FWMurnau on ''Phantom'' and later starred in ''Film/{{Metropolis}}'', a claim repeated in some books into the 1980s;[[note]]this despite Schreck costarring with Abel in Murnau's ''The Grand Duke's Finances''[[/note]] other sources went further, claiming that Orlok was an unknown actor using Schreck's name. Greek film historian Adonis Kyru [[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-books-dracula-schreck/book-lifts-lid-on-star-of-eerie-first-dracula-film-idUSL0983779720080509 joked]] in an essay on the movie that Schreck's performance was so convincing that Murnau must have cast a ''real'' vampire as Orlok, an idea which later inspired the film ''Film/ShadowOfTheVampire''. Schreck's reputation an eccentric loner who rarely granted interviews or socialized with collaborators did nothing to dispel the rumors, even though by many accounts he was friendly on the set and he did take part in several promotional events during the film's release.
6	* CompleteMonster: [[LooksLikeOrlok Count Orlok]], the eponymous "Nosferatu," is one of the earliest examples of vampires in cinema and one of the most terrifying. When Thomas Hutter arrives in the Transylvanian Carpathian Mountains, the locals [[TheDreaded speak Orlok's name in hushed whispers]] and don't dare to venture out at dark. Upon meeting Orlok, Hutter is attacked and the count tries to feed from him fatally before being repulsed. Hutter witnesses Orlok loading up several coffins to be transported across the sea, and Orlok later kills the crew of the schooner transporting him. The other coffins are revealed to also contain plague-bearing rats, and Orlok's arrival spreads a deathly plague all over Europe. He uses the plague as cover to feed on the people of Hutter's home village of Wisborg without suspicion before Hutter's innocent wife Ellen catches his eye. Orlok attacks Ellen, draining her to death in her HeroicSacrifice to keep him distracted before the sun rises to destroy him. Orlok had spawned a legion of imitators and while later vampires were portrayed as sophisticated, urbane and charming, Orlok is nothing more than a cunning, evil and ravenous beast that can barely pass as a human being.
7	* GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff: This is arguably ''the'' best-known German film in the Anglophone world, and one of the most famous silent films around the world.
8	* IAmNotShazam: "Nosferatu" is not actually Orlok's name. In fact [[AsLongAsItSoundsForeign we don't even know what "nosferatu" actually means]] other than a garbled way to say "plaguebearer." Stoker borrowed the name from some English researcher in Romanian folklore and it's a garbled pseudo-Romanian word that appears in ''Literature/{{Dracula}}'', which Murnau selected as the title for his movie. Not helping is that his memorable appearance in ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants'', [[ParodyDisplacement which is where most younger audiences know him from]], does call him "Nosferatu".
9	* MemeticMutation: [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/NosferatuShadow.jpg Count Orlok's menacing shadow on the wall as he climbs the staircase]] is not only a legendary image in GermanExpressionism, but is one of the single most famous images in all of cinema.
10	* MoralEventHorizon: Orlok letting his plague-bearing rats roam through Wisborg and cause hundreds of innocent people to be infected with certainly deadly results just to detach attention from his vampire attacks.
11	* {{Narm}}:
12	** The scene where Hutter/Harker and Orlok/Dracula are commiserating together before Orlok is revealed to be a vampire comes across as kind of hilarious given how incredibly obvious it is that the guy is clearly an inhuman monster who reacts very suspiciously to the sight of blood, yet Hutter never seems to think too hard on it until it's spelled out for him.
13	** After Orlok arrives in the village, the movie switches between the main characters freaking out as his presence brings sickness and despair to their home and...the Count tiptoeing through town while carrying an awkwardly large coffin. And if that wasn't enough, the sheer ''number'' of scenes of him walking around seem to imply him saying "Drat, I know my house was around here ''somewhere''".
14	* NightmareRetardant:
15	** In the opening scenes the villagers claim that a werewolf roams through the forest at night. The atmosphere is really creepy and the audience wonders what this creature will look like. When the protagonist goes to sleep, the camera shows a wolflike creature walking in the forest, but it falls flat on its face due to having the "werewolf" be played by a striped hyena.
16	** The "plague rats" might have been frightening if they weren't obviously [[TerrifyingPetStoreRat pet rats]].
17	* OffendingTheCreatorsOwn:
18	** It's been [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosferatu#Themes frequently suggested]] by analysts that the film carries anti-Semitic undertones, given, among other things, Orlok's long-nosed design, his status as a foreign invader in a quiet German town, and him being analogized with rats and vermin. However, the film's screenwriter, Henrick Galeen, was Jewish, as were several members of the cast. It's also worth noting that the Nazis themselves ''hated'' this movie, and it appears on their famous list of "degenerate art".
19	*** Whether or not this was intentional is a matter of genuine scholarly debate; while there are hints at a lot of the uglier stereotypes of the time, most accounts suggest that F. W. Murnau himself didn't hold any real anti-Semitic views.
20	* SignatureScene:
21	** The plague ship massacre, especially the final part where Orlok comes on deck and stands in an empty ship all alone after killing all the crew.
22	** If you go to film school, prepare to watch the shot of [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/ba/NosferatuShadow.jpg Orlok's shadow on the wall]] many, many times.
23	** The awakening and rising of Count Orlok from his casket, which has constantly been stated as one of the greatest and most terrifying moments in cinematic horror.
24	* SpecialEffectFailure:
25	** When Count Orlok rises out of his coffin in the hull of the ship, there's a porthole right next to him and you can see bright daylight on the other side, which is fatal to him as we later learn.
26	** In order to make the carriage seem "supernaturally fast", they just {{undercrank}}ed the camera. In 1922 this certainly ''looked'' spooky, but today? [[http://bennyhillifier.com/?id=BoBu2C5PS8w Brings Benny Hill to mind]].
27	* SugarWiki/VisualEffectsOfAwesome: Max Schreck looks absolutely ''phenomenal'' in his Count Orlok attire, genuinely looking like a hideous monster of the night. It's especially impressive considering the time it was produced. Part of the reason it worked is because of the greater realism. It's often neglected that this poster-child of GermanExpressionism made extensive use of location shooting.
28	* WatchItForTheMeme: Some viewers watch the film just to find out who was the guy flickering the lights in an episode of ''WesternAnimation/SpongeBobSquarePants''.
29
30	!From the video game
31	* NintendoHard: The ''VideoGame/{{Prince of Persia\|1}}''-esque gameplay style and Kyle being unarmed the whole game logically result in this; the player must deal with enemies of all kinds, from little demons to large Frankenstein's Monster-like brutes, and many of them can and will attack you with relentless supernatural strength, greatly punishing the player for lacking either timing or precision, if not both. Even the very first enemy seen in the game becomes harder and harder to deal with as you go along. And then there's the stages themselves, filled with more, deadlier traps just as punishing as the enemies inhabiting them. Fortunately, the U.S. version has infinite continues to help. [[spoiler:But that won't necessarily help you save Erin.]]

Context YMMV / Nosferatu