Nosferatu

One of those pieces of art where I can’t fully articulate why it’s so perfect to me, but I’ll try;  It appeals to a sensibility that feels tailor-made for me: an extremely dark yet lush color palette, death, both the brutality and the allure, lingering over every shot, touches of surrealism and eroticism that allow its world to entrance you a frenzy of emotions all leading to a collision with death. Each of the three times I’ve seen it I’ve expected to be less blown away, less immersed, but each time I was wrong. The aesthetics of Nosferatu are what make it one of my favorite horror franchises, and no other adaptation has made blood and shadows and grey skies as beautiful yet bleak and horrifying as this, never has a depiction of the death drive been so evocative and complete. Aesthetically it reminds me of how I felt watching Coppola’s Dracula (mostly due to its use of blood and shadows) except Nosferatu makes a much more radical commitment to baking the aesthetics entirely into the themes; this movie doesn’t worry about being viewed as shallow due to the lack of content to dig into in the plot and dialogue, because the form here is not separate from the content. It’s not a pretty dress for a lackluster foundation, it’s a complete experience, a sensual experience rather than an intellectual one; it doesn’t invite you to interpret it, it invites you to be overwhelmed by, horrified by, and attracted to an alluring, destructive, unstoppable force