![]() The tension between the film’s realistic mise en scéne and its utterly unrealistic vampire became my springboard into the story: strange things plague Nosferatu’s locations until, at last, a couple members of the crew discover Murnau has made a Faustian bargain with a supernatural villain. Since “Schreck” is German for fright, it must be a stage name, right? And since Max Schreck never appeared in any other movies before or after Nosferatu, it stands to reason a verisimilitude-obsessed director (as a matter of fact, Murnau’s last film was a documentary of sorts: Tabu: A Story of the South Seas) might have cast a real vampire in the role (film historians have since kindly pointed out I was in error about Schreck). The second is the fact that the film’s most fantastical feature, the rat-faced vampire, Count Orlok, was played by an actor called Max Schreck. Two things inspired me to write the script: the first is the fact that the film, shot on location throughout Germany and Eastern Europe, is surprisingly-disturbingly-realistic for a horror movie-if you don’t believe me, just compare it to 1920’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (which is frequently paired with Nosferatu on Halloween double features) or the Universal horror movies of the 1930s. Fortunately for film history, it didn’t happen). Also Nosferatu nearly became a lost film itself: the film is an unauthorized version of Dracula and, having lost in the courts, the producers were ordered to destroy all prints of the film. There’s evidence of a lost (!) 1920 Hungarian vampire movie, itself perhaps a version of Dracula. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu (Two quick digressions: first, Nosferatu wasn’t actually the first vampire movie rather it’s the first one to survive. It’s a fictionalized account of the filming of the first-ever vampire movie, F.W. My original script for the movie Shadow of the Vampire (2000) also falls into the cursed movie category. In fact, the shoot does seem to have been somewhat problem-plagued, but not necessarily more than any big budget movie-and much of the cast and crew are still alive in 2023 (its director, William Friedkin, passed away in 2023 and that was fifty years after supposedly encountering the movie’s curse). ![]() Unsurprisingly, the movie’s plot gave rise to the legend that making the movie summoned an actual demon who proceeded to bedevil cast and crew. The movie, of course, is about an adolescent girl living in Washington, D.C. ![]() Instead, the more immediate inspiration for this genre is probably the 1973 horror movie, The Exorcist. Still, the idea that disturbing the tomb released some kind of malevolent force that touched the lives of anybody else, including every individual who entered the tomb (I visited in 1999 and experienced no ill- effects) seems to have been mostly an invention of authors and tabloid journalists, albeit one that has persisted for a century. A year later, George Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, the individual who bankrolled the tomb’s discovery, did in fact die from a blood-related malady. I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that the roots of this novelistic genre can be traced to the so-called “curse” associated with the 1922 discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamun. ![]() Novels concerning sinister films contain one of the following subjects (or some combination of these): the “cursed” film, the film that fucks with the audience’s head, and the “lost” film.ġ. And, I think, no coincidence.īegin with definitions. I’ve always been fascinated, indeed professionally so, by this genre so the arrival, and timing, of these three books is particularly interesting. The three titles are: The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell, Silver Nitrate by Silvia Moreno- Garcia, and Ancient Images by Ramsey Campbell (first published in 1989). In 2023, two new novels, and one older title, were published in a niche of the detective/thriller genre concerning, to coin a term of art, “sinister films:” films-often lost, frequently silent, and usually scary-that have proven deleterious to their cast and crew during and after production and/or have a deleterious effect upon audiences unlucky enough to view them post-production.
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