Nosferatu - symphony of horror with live music

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu is the first significant horror film in the history of cinema. Despite the passage of more than a hundred years since its premiere, this silent, expressionist masterpiece remains a unique work and still sets the standards of the genre to this day.

Although the film is an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's immortal novel Dracula, the vampire character is portrayed in a completely different way than in the literary original. In Stoker, Dracula is both terrifying and seductive — demonic but endowed with the magnetic charm of a romantic hero. Meanwhile, Murnau deprives his ghost of all romanticism. Nosferatu is a repulsive “living corpse”, a ruthless predator driven solely by hunger for blood.

However, it is more than just another monster of horror cinema. Nosferatu resembles the dark force of nature — he brings plague to the city, is accompanied by rats and bats, and his presence becomes the personification of death. Beneath the almost animal lust for blood is also a legible erotic metaphor, referring to the relationship between sexuality and the death drive known from psychoanalysis.

Murnaul's vision of a vampire would not have been so suggestive without the unusual creation of Max Schreck. The character he created is inhuman, alien and deeply disturbing. The director masterfully exploited the modest technical capabilities of the early 1920s, introducing a number of bold formal solutions and co-creating the cinematic language that cinema uses to this day. Nosferatu impresses with its unique, strict visual style, which, despite the passage of time, does not lose its power of influence.

We want to bring this unique experience back to modern audiences and invite them to watch the film in a way that is as close as possible to its original presentation.

The original score composed by Hans Erdmann was already missing on the day of the film's premiere — according to reports, the score disappeared from the conductor's desk the same evening. To this day, it is not known with absolute certainty what the music that accompanied the first shows of Nosferatu sounded, despite numerous attempts to reconstruct it by contemporary composers and researchers.

The action of the film takes place in the middle of the 19th century. For our performance we chose the music of Johannes Brahms — a composer living in the same era as Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. His work perfectly captures the romantic character and drama of the Victorian era, creating a symbolic bridge between the time of the literary prototype and our contemporary interpretation of this dark history.

The music for the film will be performed by a string sextet accompanied by a piano, giving the whole an intimate and at the same time intense character. Conductor Katarzyna Marek will oversee the consistency of sound and the dramaturgy of the musical narrative.