Description
Check out the entire Nosferatu fine art print Collection!
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I love the scene in Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens after Count Orlok bites Ellen Hutter's "lovely neck" (a reference to a terribly alarming line of dialogue in the film, and the title of this piece). As Orlok slowly looks up, with his twisted claw wrapped around the head of his victim, he stares directly into the camera for a beat, which makes for one of the creepiest scenes ever. As I often do, I captured my own still of this scene for reference and tried to pay tribute to the moment by painting in a dark, minimal 2-tone feel inspired by the grim but stark look of the movie. To contrast the near-black brushwork, I created a graphic background with my signature gradient banding in greyscale. Then I fit everything into an oval with a grainy vignette to sort of fuse vintage and modern into one look and tie it all together.
It's easy to watch Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens today and scoff at how relatively tame it seems within the overall genre of horror ... but one must appreciate the fact that there possibly would be no horror genre at all if not for Nosferatu. It was a true masterwork of expressionist cinema, has inspired countless films, and is still to this day considered one of the greatest horror films of all time. Part of this is due to the fact that it was the pioneer of many "firsts" ... for starters, director F.W. Murnau is credited as having created the cinematic montage in Nosferatu, which has of course become a movie staple. Nosferatu was the first adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula, and a springboard directly into the iconic depiction of Count Dracula that virtually everyone on the planet is wildly familiar with today. Beyond this, it was really the first vampire movie - a strange thought, considering how common the very idea of vampires is now, and has been for as long as anyone can recall. Vampire "lore" has become so broad in its scope that it can now sometimes be fun/funny (see What We Do in the Shadows), and even cute/silly (see Hotel Transylvania and any array of kids' stickers/erasers/you-name-it around Halloween time). But what's cool is vampires can absolutely still be utterly horrifying to this day. And all roads lead back to the original, the one and only Nosferatu.
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