Profs and Pints Alameda presents: “Nosferatu and Erotic Horror,” on a film vampire’s many lives and seductive powers, with Michael Chemers, director of the Center for Monster Studies and professor and chair of the Department of Performance, Play, and Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Just the name Nosferatu conjures up horrific images in our collective psyche—of rats, wolves, and a preternaturally hideous but horribly seductive undead monster. As Robert Eggers' terrifying remake of the film Nosferatu looms on the world's theater screens, it’s the perfect time to gain an understanding an understanding of this famous vampiric villain that is more than fang deep.
Join Professor Michael Chemers, a scholar of monsters and horror who has extensively studied Nosferatu and other vampire films, for a look at the history of Nosferatu and what it tells us about horror, hatred, ourselves, and our desires.
You’ll learn how what started as F.W. Murnau's attempt to make a Germanified Dracula film without getting sued by Bram Stoker's estate has morphed over the last century of its existence into a powerhouse source of horror in its own right.
Nosferatu is the province of a particular kind of horror, a thrilling yarn of dark eroticism and power plays in which the villain, Count Orlok, invites the other characters into a unique dance of seduction and disgust. Innocence is tainted and must be sacrificed. Evil attracts even as it repels. Women, in particular, must succumb to the chauvinism of incompetent and malevolent men until they save the day, as both bait and trap.
Nosferatu is a vampire in stark relief, a paragon of darkness unreplicated in lighter vampire tales featuring Hollywood hunks like Robert Pattinson as the bloodsucker. We’ll discuss how the actor-monsters of Nosferatu films—Max Schreck, Klaus Kinski, Willem Dafoe, and now Bill Skarsgård—are somehow sexier. (Tickets available only online. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image: An edited still from the original F.W. Murnau version of Nosferatu. Rose shadow added.