Starting off Halloween with one of the first horror movies. Surprised how little adjusting it took to get into the rhythm of the silent film format, I haven't seen any since I was a kid but there's enough text exposition and compelling visuals that I wasn't as disoriented as I feared (helps that the BFI restoration and recoloration looks phenomenal, purists be damned). Max Schreck is still terrifying a century later, though it is equally hilarious to watch him carrying a coffin around a Victorian town like he just left Home Depot.
I did find myself dozing off a bit in the second half. The best visuals are front loaded and once Nosferatu gets on the ship the movie spends a dreadful amount of time recapping what we already know and playing up a disinteresting plague subplot (hard to be very compelled by the disruption of society if we never see it). The ending also comes quite suddenly, though I do appreciate the limited special effects as Nosferatu is dying. It would be pretty thematically thin, but I could see an argument for cutting the film as Hutter falls from the castle and committing to an ambiguous and frightening ending.
I need to read more interpretations of how this adapts Dracula. The antisemitism is pretty hard to miss, but the director and crew apparently being gay and Jewish puts a fascinating wrinkle in Stoker's xenophobia. I don't know that this matters in terms of the film itself which reads pretty bluntly as 20th century great replacement style bigotry, but I'm not familiar enough with the production to properly situate whatever tensions there may be between the text and creators.
Worth watching as a historical artifact. There's a lot of foundational imagery here and its historical context as a nearly lost film is incredible, but also it's a silent film from 100 years ago and that's just a mood you really have to be in.
Content warnings: rats, bugs