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• 1 2020-09-18T16:37:45-04:00 Sickness Metaphors: Scenes from Nosferatu's Death Ship (Murnau 1922) 8 plain 2020-11-15T01:16:07-05:00
  In Murnau’s film, we watch Nosferatu’s journey to the innocent town of Wisburg. In his time aboard the ship that carries him, we see light and its absence influence Orlok’s power to weaponize the crew’s fear of the unknown, and use it as a mode of infection. At 55:00, a honey-yellow glow illuminates close-up shots of the cargo ship’s billowing sails, indicating daylight. On board, the first mate expresses concern for a crewmate whose fearful ‘delusions’ make him sick. While the man appears in ill health, the bright yellow daylight, as well as the dismissive attitude of the captain, makes light of his strange illness. However, moments later (57:21), the screen abruptly turns a cool, aqua-toned blue. The sick sailor, now alone, looks up in distress and sees Nosferatu, sitting off-center and partially invisible on his pile of coffins. Though we do not see it, context suggests that Orlok then kills him. The sailor’s terror, easily written off in daylight, is justified in the blue darkness, a light in which Nosferatu seems to gain the power to perform evil.
  A similar scene happens shortly after when, by the “light of the setting sun,” the first mate descends below deck to confront Orlok (59:23). Here, as before, the followed character moves from a warm-colored, open frame to the murky blue of the movie’s night. This ‘darkness’ is hailed by an increase in the orchestra’s frantic pitch; the first mate’s shirt is undone, he is visibly sweating and wild-eyed. As his axe swings wildly, we almost see the locus of control transmitted from his wielding hands to the coffin, blasted open, from which Nosferatu rises like a plank, face unreadable, his alien clawed fingers forming a focal point of the shot (59:48). Before his maddened fall into the ocean, we see a close up of the hysteric crewmate, face twisted in fear. In both of these sailor’s deaths, brushes with the unknown inspire fright as deadly as the force that incurs it. It is not by chance that Murnau’s Nosferatu gains power, and the ability to kill, in the dark – to dread darkness is a primal instinct, an evolutionary response to the unknown. Darkness, then, becomes a veil over Nosferatu, obscuring him. The vampire himself is the metaphorical and literal infectious illness on board. By obscuring him, the darkness obscures the disease, making it even more mysterious and terrifying. Both sailors die, though their death is not explicitly caused by Nosferatu’s actions – when darkness comes, he need only display his strangeness to compound their fear, which itself seems to kill them.  
  The power of fear, given by darkness, is shown in Nosferatu’s bizarre, science-defying acts. The coffin scene, in particular, is a poignant image of the Count’s connection to illness. Not only is he physically thin, drawn, and pale like a dead person, he moves like a stiff corpse being suspended by some supernatural force. The sense that something inhuman moves Nosferatu contributes to the mystery surrounding him, and thus to the fear that he, the illness, invokes. His anti-scientific mode of movement further estranges him in a way that invokes illness: just as unknown diseases elude medical explanation, his unseen system of self-propulsion defies a physics explanation. It is through this method that he shuffles slowly above deck, shrouded in the blue night that seems to have seeped from his hiding place below. Nosferatu, the illness himself, has carried up the darkness that brings him power, made evident by the menacingly low-angle shot of his figure.  
  The scene ends with a far-off shot of the ship, whose once golden billowing sails now hang stark black against a dark blue night sky. Just as darkness brings Nosferatu, it brings about the changes of Nosferatu’s disease, physically altering the ailing body of the ship. The Count is framed as an infection, using darkness and strangeness to invoke fear, a symptom of a disease which overtakes the healthy and transforms them into the insane sick. He ends by transforming the health of the vessel itself, removing its luster and converting it into a “death ship” (1:01:03).