MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Irish author Bram Stoker essentially invented the concept of the vampire as we know it in popular culture with his novel Dracula in 1897, but the first on-screen vampire actually appeared in 1922 in director F. W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens. Murnau’s film is a loose adaptation of Stoker’s story, with some key changes to the setting (England vs Germany), character names (Dracula is Orlok, Jonathan Harker is Thomas Hutter, Mina is Ellen), and some of the details on who and what the vampire is and does, but the core story is essentially the same. Hutter is a young clerk at the real estate company of Herr Knock, and is newly married to the lovely Ellen. Hutter is sent by Knock to negotiate a land deal on behalf of Count Orlok, who lives in a huge dilapidated castle in a far-flung corner of eastern Europe; when he arrives he finds Orlok to be a decrepit, ancient, terrifying creature, but nevertheless he signs the papers and purchases the property. Orlok sees a picture of Ellen in a locket that Hutter carries and recognizes her as the girl he has been mentally and sexually tormenting for years; he is obsessed with Ellen, and she is the reason he is purchasing the property in the first place. Orlok imprisons Hutter in his castle and leaves to finally claim Ellen as his own, but Hutter – who has realized that Orlok is a vampire – manages to escape and follows Orlok, intending to stop him.

It’s a familiar story to anyone who knows vampire lore, has read Stoker’s novel, or has seen any of the numerous film adaptations of the story, but director Robert Eggers’s new film Nosferatu is, for me, one of the best adaptations of it in cinema history. It is a quite staggering film. Artistically and visually, it is astonishing – the cinematography by Jarin Blaschke, the period production design by Craig Lathrop, the intricacy and authenticity of the costumes by Linda Muir, are all impeccable. The atmosphere that Eggers creates is palpable; he shoots the film mostly in a palette of pale blues and silvers along with black and white, and he often uses snow and fog to further desaturate the color – at least until the moments when he allows his film to explode in a riot of fiery technicolor. There is wonderful use of shadow as a storytelling device, something that F. W. Murnau also used to excellent effect.

The performances from the cast are stellar, starting with Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen, who reminded me a little of Linda Blair from The Exorcist – a sweet and pleasant girl who is slowly twisted, mentally tormented, and physically violated by an evil force, until she is an angular, anguished shell. Willem Dafoe chews the scenery with glee as Professor Von Franz, this story’s version of Van Helsing. Nicholas Hoult is initially earnest and kind as Hutter, but slowly becomes more and more damaged and bitter as Orlok’s evil spreads. And Bill Skarsgård as Orlok himself is transformative, embodying the character’s malevolence and putrescence entirely. Skarsgård was dementedly terrifying as Pennywise in the It movies, but here he is simply awe-inspiring; his voice, his physical presence, the way he moves, chilled me to the bone. And his presence is everywhere, even when he is not on screen; his influence on the whole film comes across in an overarching sense of decay and rot which creeps in from the edges of the film and infects everything, from the moth-eaten look of the clothes, to the gradual appearance of sores and lesions on certain characters’ bodies, to the perpetual presence of rats in the city after Orlok arrives. Eggers draws parallels between Orlok’s presence and the threat of plague, seeing both as infections that ruin anyone who comes into contact with them.

Previously, my favorite version of this story was Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula from 1992 starring Gary Oldman and Winona Ryder; I was drawn especially to that film’s opulent beauty and romance, and how it humanized Dracula, how it turned him into a doomed anti-hero cursed by God who simply wanted to be reunited with his soulmate, lost to him across oceans of time. Eggers’s Nosferatu is not like this. Skarsgård’s Orlok does not want to give and receive love in the way that Oldman’s Dracula does; instead, he wants to control and dominate and corrupt the innocent, and Ellen is just the latest vessel that allows him to do that. There is no handsome version of Orlok, no dashing gentleman to come in and sweep Ellen/Mina off her feet. There is just real, pervasive evil, doing evil things because that is what evil does. And I think that’s what, for me, makes Nosferatu such a terrifying film – there’s no reasoning with Orlok, no sense that you can reach his inner humanity, because there is no inner humanity. Although Orlok may think he loves Ellen, he himself says he is incapable of love, so what he has with her is nothing more than a carnal obsession. He is indeed like the plague, consuming and destroying with impunity.

Aurally, the film is a triumph too. I mentioned Skarsgård’s voice as Orlok before, an inhuman cross between an animal growl and a death rattle, astonishing in its unsettling gravitas, but Eggers and his sound team have done some incredible clever things elsewhere too. For example, all the ambient sounds heard in Orlok’s castle are actually manipulations of Skarsgård’s breathing, subtly and subliminally insinuating that the castle is an extension of Orlok himself, a place where you cannot escape his control. This extends to the music, too, which is by British composer Robin Carolan. This is only the second score of Carolan’s career – he previously co-scored Eggers’s film The Northman in 2022 with Sebastian Gainsborough – and prior to that he was known mostly as a producer and record label executive with Tri Angle Records, which released albums by Björk, Massive Attack, and Bobby Krlic/The Haxan Cloak, among many others.

I will stop here for a moment and say that, as is often the case with film scores like this, the in-film experience and the album experience are two markedly different things. As I wrote in my review of The Nun in 2018, one of the constant battles I have as a film music reviewer is the one between music I like listening to, and music that is good because it supports the film in exactly the way it needs to. Sometimes it’s easy, because the two are the same thing. My readers know that, for my listening pleasure, I love great memorable themes and big orchestras, lush romance, and bold and exciting action music. I am drawn to really cool compositional ideas and contrapuntal writing and rhythmic devices, interesting ways of using the instruments through the orchestrations and via extended performance techniques, clever thematic interplay, and so on. The problem arises for me when there’s a conflict, when the music fits absolutely perfectly in context, but is something I don’t particularly like listening to, and for me that arises most often in music for horror films. Nosferatu is another one of those scores.

Carolan’s music is a harsh, hard listen. The album’s accompanying information states that he took inspiration from several seemingly disparate sources, including Hungarian classical composer Béla Bartók, British experimental electronic music group Coil, Ukrainian film composer Leonid Grabovskiy, traditional Romanian folk music, and the darker and more obscure musical corners of the Hammer Horror catalogue. He uses a large orchestra including 60 string players and a full choir, with highlighted solos for cello, flute, and clarinet, as well as a basso profondo vocalist, but then augments this with ancient horns and pipes performed by virtuoso Letty Stott, and a custom percussion item called a toaca or semantron which sort of looks like a vertical xylophone made of wooden planks, and which Romanian orthodox monks would play to summon their brethren from all over the monastery to the praying room.

However, that description doesn’t really do justice to what the score actually sounds like. In an effort to capture the way that Orlok’s presence looms over the entire film, Carolan’s score is one of endless oppression and dread. It lurks in corners and down dark passages. It creaks and groans and moans like a ghoul from beyond the grave. It whispers unsettling obscenities into your ears, but then it stops whispering and screams at you. It casts a melancholy shadow of sadness and regret, carrying memories and bittersweet lullabies of a childhood ruined by Orlok’s degeneracy. And then, occasionally, it embraces a sort of hesitant romance, capturing the love between the human protagonists, while knowing their tragic fate. There are several themes weaving through the score, but they are hard to decipher, and tend to get a little lost in the overall sonic wall of dark oppression that Carolan creates, at least until the final 15 minutes of the very long album. Listeners who require strong and clear thematic ideas in their scores may find Nosferatu to be frustrating in that regard; I am one of those people, and for me that is really the only negative aspect of the score.

A lullaby music box theme appears in the opening cue, “Once Upon a Time,” but thereafter the score settles down into a long sequence of quite abstract orchestral and choral textures, full of string sustains and little shifting chords, punctuated by shrill outbursts of violent orchestral and choral horror. The explosion of noise at the end of “Come to Me,” when Orlok first appears to a pre-teen Ellen in her nightmares, is hair-raising, and the low, whispered voices that run all through “Incantation” are unnerving. A few moments of brooding romance and thematic consistency do occasionally peek through; the neoclassical strings of “Premonition” set the scene in the city of Wisberg, and then “Goodbye” has a lingering undercurrent of love and affection, as Ellen bids farewell to her husband to the fragile strains of their love theme, before ending with a sense of steely determination as Thomas leaves on horseback heading to Transylvania and Orlok’s castle.

The entire sequence from “Foreign Land” through to the end of “Wolves at the Door” underscores Thomas’s experiences in Transylvania, from his first night in an unfriendly Romani village, to his first meeting with Count Orlok in his castle, and the subsequent misery he experiences therein. The long drawn-out string figures and the unsettling voices are again prominent, and there is a ghastly 2-note motif for Orlok himself that starts to assert itself as the sequence unfolds, but here Carolan also starts to increase his use of the brass section, especially the ‘ancient brass’ sounds provided by specialist Letty Stott which give the score a sense of it being stuck in a dark and distant past. The final moments of “The Inn/Moroi,” the tolling bells in “Shrine,” the overbearing drama of “A Carriage Awaits,” and the grotesque choral crescendos that repeatedly build through “Covenant” and “The Crypt” are especially effective, as are the brief action sequences “Lost” and “Wolves at the Door” which underscore Hutter’s desperate attempts to escape from Orlok’s lair.

“Devourance” is full of eerie, skittering, crawling, agitated strings, to capture the state of mind and unsettling physical condition of Orlok’s minion, Herr Knock, as he languishes in a mental institution. The impossibly low male voices and clanging, cacophonous bells in “The Monastery” make Thomas’s convalescence there almost as disturbing as his time in Orlok’s castle. Eventually Thomas is well enough to return to Wisberg, where he imparts his story to his disbelieving best friend Friedrich Harding and Friedrich’s wife Anna. Realizing that Ellen is being stalked and mentally tortured by Orlok, and having learned that Orlok is now on the way to their home city, they call upon local physician Dr Siever for help; Siever in turn calls upon his former teacher Professor Von Franz, knowing that Von Franz is an expert in the occult, and the group makes plans to save Ellen and destroy Orlok.

Orlok’s theme emerges into ungodly prominence during “Increase Thy Thunders,” which raises its voice and increases its volume as Orlok attacks and devours various crewmembers of the ship bringing him closer to Wisberg, and to Ellen. Von Franz has an unexpectedly light and appealing musical identity that first appears in “The Professor,” gentle woodwinds and plucked harps, but this interlude is brief, and the score quickly settles back into the familiar dark string atmosphere as Orlok arrives in Wisberg, bringing rats, plague, and the stench of death with him.

The final third of the score moves back and forth between several ideas, notably the gentle love theme for Thomas and Ellen, the theme for Orlok, and the theme/instrumental textures for Von Franz, all of which are continually surrounded by increasingly menacing and oppressive orchestral passages that illustrate both Orlok’s power over Ellen, and how his presence in Wisberg causes endless death and anguish for its inhabitants. Carolan cleverly arranges Orlok’s theme in the style of the love theme in “Dreams Grow Darker,” but then abandons all warmth and engages in unadulterated horror in the “Possession” scene of Ellen being mentally tormented by Orlok.

“Orlok’s Shadow,” “The Vampyr,” and “The First Night” accompany the re-creation of the famous scene from the original 1922 Nosferatu where Orlok – who is represented only by his shadow, creeping through rooms and up staircases – finally appears to Ellen in her room and re-imposes his malevolent will on her. These cues drip with ghastly atmosphere; stark strings and quasi-religious choral tones as the shadow moves relentlessly ever-closer to Ellen’s chamber, and a full rendition of Orlok’s theme carried by a mournful solo cello expressing what is likely the closest thing to love the horrific creature will experience. It all builds to a monstrous crescendo of musical evil as Orlok – having been spurned by Ellen – ultimately vows revenge on everyone around her. The ways that Carolan weaves fragments of Orlok’s theme and the love theme throughout the sequence is excellent, as it is able to musically express a lot of the subtext in this pivotal scene – Orlok’s obsession with Ellen comes out as a nightmarish piece of romance, but Ellen’s love for Thomas is stronger.

“Death, All Around Us” is a lament for exactly that. “I Know Him” groans and howls, Carolan apparently experimenting with how to twist and torment his string players and their instruments, while his vocalists make inhuman and unearthly noises that erupt from the bowels of their range. Von Franz’s theme returns in “These Nightmares Exist” as he explains his ambitious plans to defeat Orlok to Thomas and Harding; then in the subsequent “A Priestess of Isis” he shares an intimate moment with Ellen in acknowledgement of his true plan: that, while Thomas and Harding are preoccupied elsewhere, she intends to willingly sacrifice her own life – while killing Orlok – in order to save everyone else. The fractured statements of Thomas and Ellen’s love theme that run through “Last Goodbye” and “Never Sleep Again” are heartbreaking.

The finale of the score begins in “The Third Night,” a dark and dramatic action motif for surging strings and chanted vocals as Thomas, Harding, and Von Franz infiltrate Orlok’s lair deep inside Grünewald Castle, intending to set his coffin ablaze and leave him with no sanctuary; however Von Franz’s ruse is revealed in “The Prince of Rats” when, instead of finding Orlok, they find Herr Knock sleeping there, and they drive a stake through his heart to the strains of scampering rodent-like strings. Instead, in “Her Will,” Ellen welcomes Orlok into her room one final time and tricks him into believing that she is willingly submitting to him, and is embracing his power over her. As Ellen allows Orlok to rape her a grotesquely romantic abomination of Orlok’s theme begins to emerge, and this reaches its powerful culmination in “Daybreak” as Ellen is able to use her sexuality to keep Orlok with her until the sun starts to rise. As the morning light streams through the window and hits Orlok he begins to literally melt into Ellen’s body, and Carolan scores this horrifying scene with a ravishing combination of Orlok’s theme and the love theme for Thomas and Ellen, playing in beautiful juxtaposition to the ungodly images on screen. It’s a powerful moment of aural exquisiteness that stands in enormous contrast to everything that has come before it, and it gives Ellen’s sacrifice an aura of religiosity that is very moving, and leads perfectly into the haunting sorrow and reflection of the conclusive pair, “Liliacs” and “Bound.”

Love and beauty, sex and lust and obsession, death and depravity. Nosferatu embodies all these things, and Robin Carolan’s score plays a major part in that. As I said earlier, this is not a score simply to play for fun; it’s too unnerving, too overwhelming, too tied to Bill Skarsgård’s embodiment of evil. Beyond the intense dark beauty of the last fifteen minutes or so, I don’t “enjoy” listening to it in the slightest, and I doubt anyone whose taste is for more thematic or adventurous fare will either. However, as an accompaniment for Robert Eggers’s astonishing film, it is an absolute triumph. It captures the film’s bleakness, its sense of despair and sorrow, its morbid beauty, and its sheer unadulterated terror, with absolute perfection, and when it comes down to it that’s really the only criteria that matters.

Buy the Nosferatu soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Once Upon a Time (0:42)
• Come to Me (2:02)
• Premonition (1:17)
• Herr Knock (1:22)
• Ellen’s Dream (2:00)
• Incantation (1:44)
• Goodbye (1:14)
• Foreign Land (0:45)
• The Inn/Moroi (3:09)
• Shrine (1:22)
• A Carriage Awaits (2:43)
• Come by the Fire (1:04)
• Destiny (1:13)
• The Castle (1:13)
• Covenant (4:08)
• The Crypt (2:13)
• Lost (2:48)
• Wolves at the Door (0:54)
• Hysterical Spell (1:41)
• Devourance (3:42)
• The Monastery (0:56)
• Solomonar (2:11)
• Increase thy Thunders (1:10)
• The Professor (1:34)
• Departure (0:37)
• Sickness (0:44)
• Dreams Grow Darker (1:49)
• Possession (2:31)
• That, is the Question (0:53)
• An Arrival (1:09)
• A Return (0:53)
• Grünewald (1:04)
• Despair in my Coming (1:52)
• A Curious Mark (1:01)
• Orlok’s Shadow (0:52)
• The Vampyr (1:36)
• The First Night (5:28)
• Codex (1:13)
• Death, All Around Us (1:01)
• I Know Him (4:59)
• The Second Night (1:48)
• These Nightmares Exist (1:18)
• A Priestess of Isis (1:48)
• Last Goodbye (1:07)
• Never Sleep Again (1:56)
• The Third Night (1:43)
• The Prince of Rats (1:52)
• Her Will (1:03)
• Daybreak (8:02)
• Liliacs (1:47)
• Bound (4:38)

Back Lot Music (2024)

Running Time: 97 minutes 26 seconds

Music composed by Robin Carolan. Conducted by Martin Andre. Orchestrations by Daniel Elms, Geoff Alexander, Martin Batchelar, David Butterworth, Samuel Pegg and Evan Rogers. Additional music by Daniel Elms. Recorded and mixed by Nick Wollage. Edited by Neil Stemp. Album produced by Robin Carolan and Daniel Elms.