F. W. Murnau

Career in horror

Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany, on December 28, 1888, and took the name Murnau, after a town south of Munich, around 1910. In the 1920s he became one of the central directors of German silent cinema, a filmmaker who moved the camera when most cameras stood still and who understood how light and shadow could carry a story without words. His reputation in horror rests on Nosferatu, the first great screen vampire, but he also made dramas, fantasies and a South Seas romance, and the best of them are as important to film history as his horror.

In 1926 he went to Hollywood on a contract with William Fox and made Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), one of the most admired films of the silent era. He died in a car accident in California on March 11, 1931, at the age of 42, a week before the premiere of his last film, Tabu. Of the 21 films he is credited with, Wikipedia counts eight as completely lost, so what survives is a partial record of a short, brilliant career.

Signature traits

• A moving camera, used to put the viewer inside a character's experience rather than outside it.
• Light and shadow as storytelling: silhouettes, windows, fog and darkness that are part of the drama.
• Natural locations combined with stylized staging and, when needed, forced perspective.
• A preference for wide-angle lenses and for staging action in depth, with actors moving toward and away from the camera.
• Stories told with very few words, so that images carry the meaning.
• A fascination with temptation, fate and the border between ordinary life and the uncanny.

Key horror titles

• Nosferatu (1922), the unauthorized Dracula adaptation that became a horror landmark
• Der letzte Mann, known as The Last Laugh (1924), a nearly wordless drama with Emil Jannings
• Faust (1926), his last German film, an expressionist spectacle with Gösta Ekman, Jannings and Camilla Horn
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), his Hollywood masterpiece
• Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931), made in the Pacific with Robert J. Flaherty

Early life and the war

Murnau grew up in a prosperous family. His father, Heinrich Plumpe, owned a cloth factory, and by the time Murnau was seven the family lived in Kassel. As a boy he staged plays at the family villa, and by about twelve he had read Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Shakespeare and Ibsen. He studied philology in Berlin and then art history and literature at Heidelberg. A student performance there caught the eye of Max Reinhardt, the leading theater director of the day, who invited him into his acting school.

Through Reinhardt's circle Murnau met artists including Franz Marc and the poet Else Lasker-Schüler, and he formed a close attachment to a young poet, Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, who was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915. Murnau was gay, and biographers describe the loss as a lasting influence on his work. When the First World War began he served in the army and then in the German air service, flying over northern France. Accounts differ about his exact role and how often he crashed. In December 1917 he landed in Switzerland and was interned until the war ended, and in the camp he worked with a theater group and wrote a film script.

The Berlin years before Nosferatu

After the war Murnau set up a production company with the actor Conrad Veidt and began directing in 1919. The films from this period are fragmentary today. David Bordwell, in a survey of the early work, counts nine Murnau films before Nosferatu and says only two survive more or less complete: Schloss Vogelöd (The Haunted Castle, 1921) and Der Gang in die Nacht (1921). His first film, Der Knabe in Blau (The Boy in Blue, 1919), is lost apart from a fragment, and the same fate has befallen others of the period, including Der Januskopf (1920), a version of the Jekyll and Hyde story with Veidt and Bela Lugosi.

What does survive shows a director learning in public. Der Gang in die Nacht, a melodrama starring Veidt as a blind painter, is built from long shots and actors moving in depth, with sudden cuts to closer views. Bordwell notes that Murnau favored wide-angle lenses throughout his career. Schloss Vogelöd, by contrast, is cut much faster, with 511 shots to the earlier film's 231, a change he links partly to the arrival of American films in German cinemas after a wartime ban ended in January 1921.

Nosferatu

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens was the only production of the short-lived Prana Film, founded in 1921 by Enrico Dieckmann and the occult-minded artist Albin Grau. Henrik Galeen wrote a script inspired by Bram Stoker's Dracula, though the company had not obtained the rights. Galeen renamed the characters, moved the story to the invented town of Wisborg, and added the rats and plague. Conrad Veidt is reported to have been offered the vampire; he declined, and Max Schreck took the part. Grau designed sets, costumes, makeup and publicity, and shaped the thin, rodent-like look of Count Orlok.

Shooting began in July 1921. Exteriors were filmed in Baltic towns such as Wismar and Lübeck and in northern Slovakia, where castle locations stood in for Transylvania, while interiors were shot at a Berlin studio. Cinematographer Fritz Arno Wagner had one camera, so there was only one original negative. Murnau worked from sketches and reportedly used a metronome to control the actors' pacing. The film premiered on March 4, 1922, at the Marmorsaal of the Berlin Zoological Garden. Its legal troubles began soon after: Stoker's estate sued, and a court ordered prints destroyed, but copies survived and the film became a cult classic. The film is a central text in any account of the screen vampire, and the timeline of early horror places it among the first works to treat fear as a visual language.

The Last Laugh and Faust

In 1924 Murnau directed The Last Laugh (Der letzte Mann) from a script by Carl Mayer, with Emil Jannings as a proud hotel doorman whose uniform is his identity. Produced by Erich Pommer for the UFA studio and photographed by Karl Freund, it used what became known as the unchained camera. Freund strapped a camera to his chest for a bicycle ride and lowered it from a window on a wire. The film has almost no intertitles, with a single title card near the end. It opened in Germany on December 23, 1924, and was a major critical and commercial success. Alfred Hitchcock called it an almost perfect film.

Faust (1926) was his last German film and UFA's most expensive and technically ambitious film until Metropolis the following year. Gösta Ekman played Faust, Jannings played Mephisto and Camilla Horn played Gretchen. Filming took six months and cost about two million reichsmarks, and only about half was recovered at the box office. One famous image shows a giant winged Mephisto spreading plague over a town, and the film's Bald Mountain sequence inspired the Night on Bald Mountain segment of Disney's Fantasia (1940). The film failed on release but is now regarded as a canonical work of German Expressionism.

Hollywood and Sunrise

Murnau moved to the United States in 1926 and joined the Fox studio. Sunrise, adapted by Carl Mayer from a story by Hermann Sudermann, was shot by Charles Rosher and Karl Struss with sets built in forced perspective; the city street set alone reportedly cost more than $200,000. Much of the exterior work was done at Lake Arrowhead. The film used the Fox Movietone system, so it had a synchronized score and effects but no spoken dialogue.

It premiered on September 23, 1927, alongside early talking newsreels, and earned about $818,000 in United States and Canadian rentals, which was not enough to make it a hit. At the first Academy Awards, held in 1929, it won for unique and artistic production and for cinematography, and Janet Gaynor won the first best actress award for her work in three films, including this one. The Library of Congress added it to the National Film Registry in 1989, and the 2022 Sight and Sound critics' poll ranked it 11th. Murnau's later American films, Four Devils (1928), now lost, and City Girl (1930), were reworked for sound and badly received, and he left Fox disillusioned.

Tabu and a sudden end

Murnau next went to the South Pacific. He and the documentary pioneer Robert J. Flaherty formed a company to make Tabu, and when a planned financial backer failed to pay, Murnau funded the film himself. Production ran from January to October 1930 in Tahiti and Bora Bora. He sent the Hollywood crew home to save money, trained local people to work on the crew, and cast non-professionals, including Anne Chevalier, who was found working in a cocktail bar. After Flaherty left over disagreements, cinematographer Floyd Crosby took over the camerawork and won the Academy Award for cinematography.

On March 10, 1931, a week before Tabu opened, Murnau was riding in a rented Packard up the Pacific Coast Highway when his valet swerved to avoid a truck and the car overturned. He suffered a head injury and died the next day at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital. A funeral service was held in Hollywood, and he was buried on April 13 in Stahnsdorf, near Berlin, with Fritz Lang giving the eulogy. In July 2015, the grave was disturbed and the skull removed. It has not been recovered, according to reports. Tabu was not a financial success, grossing about $472,000, but it entered the National Film Registry in 1994.

Preserving what survives

Murnau's films have survived by accident as often as by plan. Nosferatu has been restored several times by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation: according to Luciano Palumbo, the foundation's head of restoration and digitization, work was done in 1981 to 1984, 1987, 1996 and 2005. The last, by Luciano Berriatua, was prompted partly by color errors in the 1996 version and recovered the elaborate original intertitles, with about 40 missing German titles reconstructed from other sources.

Sunrise lost its original American negative in a 1937 Fox vault fire; a new negative was made from a surviving print, and the Academy Film Archive preserved the film in 2004. A complete nitrate print of Tabu was found in 1973, and the UCLA Film and Television Archive made a preservation negative. Faust survives in five distinct versions, including German, French and an American cut Murnau prepared for MGM, and a 106-minute reconstruction has been released. Kino released a reconstruction of the German version of The Last Laugh in 2008. Der Gang in die Nacht was restored digitally by the Munich Film Museum from four reels of camera negative. Each restoration shows how fragile the record is.

Influence and where to go next

Murnau's imprint on horror is deep but not always direct. The gaunt, shadow-casting vampire has been quoted, parodied and reworked for a century, and the idea that a film can build dread from composition alone runs through the supernatural horror tradition. The mobile camera of The Last Laugh influenced Hollywood and filmmakers worldwide, and Alfred Hitchcock praised it in the strongest terms. Murnau also appears as a character: Jim Shepard's 1998 novel Nosferatu is based on his life, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) fictionalizes the making of Nosferatu with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe as Orlok.

To explore his work, begin with Nosferatu, then watch Sunrise and Faust to see how much range the same director had. For later films that rely on a camera and a mood more than on dialogue, see Psycho and the psychological horror entry.

Verified details

• Murnau took his stage name from the town of Murnau, south of Munich.
• He studied philology in Berlin and art history and literature at Heidelberg.
• Max Reinhardt invited him into his acting school after seeing him in a student performance.
• He landed in Switzerland in December 1917 and was interned until the war ended.
• Nosferatu premiered on March 4, 1922, in Berlin.
• The Last Laugh has only one intertitle card.
• Sunrise premiered on September 23, 1927, alongside the first talking newsreels.
• The Library of Congress selected Sunrise for the National Film Registry in 1989 and Tabu in 1994.
• Floyd Crosby won the Academy Award for cinematography for Tabu.
• Murnau died on March 11, 1931, at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
• Fritz Lang gave the eulogy at his burial in Stahnsdorf.

Sources and further reading

• F. W. Murnau, Wikipedia
• Nosferatu, Wikipedia
• Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, Wikipedia
• The Last Laugh (1924 film), Wikipedia
• Faust (1926 film), Wikipedia
• Tabu: A Story of the South Seas, Wikipedia
• Murnau before Nosferatu, David Bordwell
• Nosferatu restoration, Scroll.in