The silent classic Nosferatu rises again for its 100th birthday at the North Bend Theatre on Halloween night.
As a special gift for this centennial celebration, local jazz great Danny Kolke of JazzClubs NW will accompany the movie on the keyboard, reviving the original musical score from 1922.
Courtesy of Kolke, North Bend Theatre audiences will experience the film the same way audiences experienced it in 1922, discovering new chills as the skillfully scored music elevates the creepiness created by Max Schreck, the actor who plays the vampire Count Orlok.
Schreck’s skin-crawling performance as the on-screen vampire Orlok is so convincing that some have speculated that he was an actual “living” vampire that the film’s director, Friedrich Murnau, discovered during his trip to Transylvania’s Carpathian mountains.
Dead or undead, Count Orlok possessed an uncanny ability to defy death both on and off-screen. Shortly after the movie premiered in Berlin in 1922, Bram Stoker’s widow discovered that Nosferatu had plagiarized her husband’s novel, Dracula, and she tried to drive a stake through its heart.
She sued, and the German courts agreed with her, ordering all copies of the film destroyed, including the negatives. Despite these attempts to kill it, Nosferatu survived and is now considered a horror masterpiece.
Experience the spine-tingling masterpiece on Halloween, October 31, at 7:30 PM with live music by Danny Kolke. Tickets are on sale at http://northbendtheatre.com.
For a complete night of horror, come by at 5:30 PM for HorrorFest 2022 to enjoy original short films created by students from Mount Si, Skyline, and Tahoma high schools.
