[hollywoodgothiq]

Fine with me.

May we give the last word to Leonard Wolf? I was reorganizing some stuff last night and happened upon my copy or "A Dream of Dracula," in which the scholar writes:

...Browning's DRACULA, with all due allowances for its slow pacing and its mistaken emphais, has the cool poise of a masterpiece in the horror of black and white. The film is strong because Browning, like Stoker, respected the vampire in his own terms. The theme of blood as embodied in the un-dead who drinks the life of beautiful maidens is in the foreground. The result, as with Stoker's DRACULA, is that the undeviating simplicity of the plot stirs up a rich cloud of mythic materials which, when it settles, gives the audience a well-found sense that it has been watching both a prototype and a classic. Murnau, on the other hand, was making something else. For one thing, his is a mideval imagination, and all he asks of the vampire story is that it should give him an occasion for a visual danse macabre. If NOSFERATU cannot have film descendants in the vampire genre, it is because Murnau had other things in mind: architecture, politics, and the triumph of love, for instance. Both films are equally classics, but in quite different genres. Browning's is American sexual horror at is innocent best; Murnau's is German distilled paranoia, portentous, dreamlike, and cold.