Many consider F.W. Murnau to be the greatest director of the German silent era, if not the greatest German director of all time. But much of what would come to define his trademark style is absent in Nosferatu, which stands as one of the earlier films in Murnau's career.
Some aspects of the film would go on to be trademarks of Murnau's filmmaking. The film's reverence for nature here was altogether absent from the film of his peers. Murnau often shot on location, and such shots imbued his films alternately with epic scope or lyrical touches, depending on how he chooses to edit them in. Contrast this with his peers like Fritz Lang, G.W. Pabst, and George Wiene, who exclusively relied on elaborate sets built in studios. Murnau would go on to use location shooting extensively when he could. While his other legendary films The Last Laugh and Sunrise were shot entirely on studio sets, Murnau would shoot his final film Tabu entirely on location in Tahiti, lending his only box office hit a documentary veracity.
But there are two signatures of the later Murnau that are noticeably absent from Nosferatu. One is the subjective camera style that would define Murnau's masterpiece Sunrise. In that film — made during Murnau's stint in Hollywood following the rise of the Nazis—we're served with sumptuous sweeping camera motion and slow tracking shots that put us right in the shoes, heads, and hearts of the young couple in love.
With that subjective camera style, Murnau developed a new means of expression in the film form. Murnau is considered one of the foremost proponents of German Expressionism precisely because he figured out how to marry it with the narrative film form in a way that was so influential that it still informs how film and television iaremade today.
The other component Nosferatu lacks is Murnau's sense of humanism. Something that makes his laters films like The Last Laugh, Sunrise, and Tabu such a pleasure to watch is the sense that his characters are so alive, so human. In Nosferatu, instead, we get types. Knock the madman, Hutter the greedy rationalist, Ellen the virgin, Count Orlok as evil personified. Of course, horror films tend to be more effective the less complex their characters are. The focus is not on how people develop, but on how a situation gets increasingly worse. There's good reason that we get fairly one-dimensional characters in this film, and it's that their inner lives really aren't all that important for making an incredibly scary vampire film.
There is one last touch in Nosferatu, though, which we can see in all of Murnau's films. As Lotte Eisner points out in her fantastic book about Weimar filmmaking The Haunted Screen, Murnau does display a signature clunkiness. She notes that even though Murnau is capable of unparalleled poetry and lyricism, he always does manage some heavy-handed sentimentality and truly difficult filmmaking at some point in his films.
Those early scenes of life in Wisborg prove especially hollow and difficult, with Ellen playing with the cat and the young couple in puppy love and that random guy in the street telling Hutter not to rush to his fate. It's not clear in the first five minutes of this film that we are about to witness a tour de force of horror filmmaking. The fact that Murnau managed to make such timeless, peerless films despite these off moments testifies even more eloquently to what he was capable of when firing on all cylinders.
