#i initially was confused by why he was travelling by boat before realizing i'm conflating germany and the weimar republic
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senadimell · 2 years ago
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It’s been several weeks since I started watching Nosferatu, and I finally picked it up last night since I now have a knitting project suitably mindless that I can do without having to look at it and can watch the movie in peace. I’ve finished the third act, and I have to say, this is honestly really faithful to Dracula. Since it’s never been a secret that Nosferatu is heavily inspired by Dracula (read: an unauthorized adaption), I’m going to assign Dracula names to the roles characters play in the story rather than use their actual names most of the time.
The character combinations are interesting, but make a lot of sense given the large cast of characters in the book. I haven’t gotten far enough for most of the secondary characters to be a major presence, but I’ve read that they’re mostly absent, so the focus remains mostly on the Jonathan and Mina figures.
One of the biggest changes so far is that Mr. Hawkins and Renfield are combined into Knock, a now-malicious solicitor secretly in kahoots with the Count.
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Narratively speaking, this actually makes a more of sense than it might sound at first. Mr. Hawkins is mostly a plot device in the original story, not really a character, and given the restraints of a silent film, it would be rather challenging to establish why and how the Count wants to visit England. When you strip down the conversations from the captivity portion of the novel, you’re left with the challenge of how to convey the Count’s desire or to establish how exactly he made arrangements with a foreign solicitor, so giving him an agent abroad is a pretty economical way to convey that. Then, when the Count is travelling, using Knock as a Renfield-figure and thrall of the Count serves to heighten the tension, and while the “the life is in the blood” speeches are a little less mysterious, they do pair very well with the back-and-forth between the not-Demeter and not-Van Helsing teaching a botany class about carnivorous plants. 
The major downside of that choice is that it removes much of the nuance present in the books regarding the characters under the Count’s sway. Renfield and Seward’s back and forth about the nature of sanity is so far completely absent, and I expect this will be the case through the movie, going off of the visual language’s cartoonishly malicious depiction of Knock. Renfield’s humanity is really just not shown, and while Knock’s gleeful manner while eating bugs is quite similar to Renfield’s manner in the book, I highly doubt the element of resistance will show up.
Still, overall, this feels like a simplification rather than a warping of the story. Unfortunately, it’s a simplification that results in a caricature of mental illness, and yet I don’t think it’s a fundamental misreading of the story, unlike Drac/Mina pairings.
The second major change so far is that Mina and Lucy’s role have been combined into one, and given their similar narrative roles as vulnerable and beloved targets, this makes a lot of sense. Now, the Mina-figure is the sleepwalker. There is a slight change in that the prophetic dreams start earlier, but it also serves to emphasize her connection with Jonathan without the letter and journal devices. It also establishes her vulnerability early on, pretty much as soon as we realize that Jonathan is in peril, which is an effective way to convey the peril of Lucy-Mina without diary entries and serves to jump-start the middle act of the story (which I admittedly found rather slow during Dracula Daily)
In a related vein, there’s another convenience change that’s either big or small depending on what you view as an important theme. In Dracula, the Count seems primarily interested in England, and his later vendetta is the result of his predatory nature, not the driving motivation. In Nosferatu, that’s flipped, and his primary motivation to leave his castle is to track down not-Mina. He presumably did first send for a solicitor, though, so the motivation isn’t absent, it’s just less developed.
Apart from character changes, the biggest other change is that the Count spreads plague rather than just killing or turning characters. So far, it doesn’t feel fundamentally different from the book, but I don’t know yet if it will have larger plot implications down the line.
I will say, though, that the time period is always waiting a little bit uncomfortably at the back of my mind. It came out in 1922, and there’s just so much going on in the Weimar Republic at this time. It’s a culturally wild time. I don’t know a lot about this film, or its make, or how it was received, so I’m just left with vague implications about the various changes and how they would be received. What does it suggest that he spreads a plague? What does his increased focus on preying on Mina mean? What are the implications of the fact that he has an apparently willing agent abroad, or that Renfield is only a slavish caricature, totally devoted to the count?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, but they’re always looming somewhere as I watch.
#dracula daily#nosferatu#i initially was confused by why he was travelling by boat before realizing i'm conflating germany and the weimar republic#and forgetting about different territorial boundaries#then i also wondered whether or not the plague device diminished the effectiveness of the captain's sacrifice—why was he tying himself up?#i think i would not understand why he's doing it if i wasn't already familiar with dracula#still though i really loved those scenes#which i guess makes sense. the demeter passages were one of my favorite parts of Dracula Daily#however i will say that watching the captain and mate throw the corpse of their crewmate overboard was visually effective#in a way that i think the fearful journal entries would not have been able to translate directly to film#and i think one of the most impactful changes made by the chronological format (she says having only read it that way)#because for me the slow terrifying countdown was one of the most ominous parts of the book#because i was both concerned for the crew of the demeter but also worried about the main characters#if they survive and make it that's terrible; if they don't it's a tragedy#and since as a modern reader i already kind of know that dracula is a vampire and bad news#i don't think that the unravelling the mystery of the abandoned ship would have led to any real dread#i may not have known much about Dracula but as a modern reader i do know that the count's a vampire and that means bad news#(okay more accurate to say until her dream)#I have to say: epistolary to silent film might be one of the widest gulfs to jump (with maybe only ballet being further?)#because your ability to use words is very limited and an epistolary is all about the words#the thing they do have in common is the need to distill things down to their essence#because the conceit of the epistolary requires you to at least believe the characters are recounting what happened#so you can't get TOO detailed or verbose without an explanation for how their memory is so good or they don't get fatigued#and when they recount things they're really summarizing what happened. so they have to pick what matters most#and with a silent film you're trying to convey emotions without verbal/speaking people's primary form of communication#so body language is exaggerated and you are very limited in how much you can use words#and have to boil things down to their essentials
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