Film: Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror

Language: German intertitles with English subtitles

Nosferatu. A Symphony of Horror (1922), one of the most famous silent films, celebrates its centenary this year. The film’s powerful, expressionistic visual style has not lost its ability to frighten audiences today. It is based on Bram Stocker’s novel Dracula, but tells its own perverse tale of psychological horror and sexual dysfunction, strongly contrasted with the ‘normalcy’ projected by Biedemeier bourgeois society. With his unrivalled eye for poetic and atmospheric images, Murnau invites us to look ‘with horror into the secrets of nature’. The emotional charge of the film will be heightened, during our OverActing festival, by the performance of master-pianist Olga Pashchenko, who will perform the soundtrack – compiled especially for her by Jed Wentz from masterworks by composers like Mendelssohn, Liszt and Chopin – on an historical piano by Blüthner from 1865.