All along, the giveaway was in the name. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was perhaps meant to be best enjoyed in the dark of a theatre, accompanied by an accomplished live ensemble tearing into a soaring symphony. To their good fortune, Doha’s film and music lovers got to experience this spellbinding spectacle on Thursday evening.
German director FW Murnau’s iconic horror film of 1922, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, or in German, Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, was feted with the grand symphonic canvas that it deserved at the Katara Drama Theatre as part of The Doha Film Institute’s A Symphony of Films. The sweeping strains of the Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra (QPO) made for the live accompaniment of the original score while frame after frame of one of the silent era’s most influential masterpieces transported the audience, a full house, to a phantasmagoric time and space.
 An unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Nosferatu is regarded as a visual masterpiece, and has been voted as the second best-reviewed horror film. An immersed theatrical viewing backed by the QPO’s musical exploits made it easier to understand why. The strings section blended beautifully with the winds, the percussions, the horns, to accelerate and decelerate the story graph, with the impressive precision of an edited soundtrack — there was virtually no lag, and not even a noticeable mismatch of visuals and sound. The big splash of horror, the eerie happenings at Count Orlok’s castle, the love story of Hutter and Ellen, the gloom and doom that befalls the German city of Wisbourg; every visual was bolstered by QPO’s robust live performance.  
Murnau’s story starts off in Wisbourg, Germany, where a wily estate agent Knock sends his associate, Hutter, to Count Orlok’s castle in Transylvania as the Count wants to purchase an isolated house in Wisbourg. Knock decided to sell the Count a house that’s across the way from Hutter’s own home. As Hutter leaves his wife, Ellen, with his friends, and embarks on an arduous trek filled with dangers, many locals warn him from proceeding further. A callous Hutter makes his way to the castle where strange events have been occurring.
At the castle, while Hutter manages to sell the Count the house, he notices and also becomes a victim of bizarre occurrences, including inexplicable bites on his neck and a feeling “like there is a dark shadow hanging over him”. Eventually, Hutter stumbles upon the Count’s sleeping chamber in a crypt, and based on a book he has recently read, believes the Count is really a vampire or Nosferatu.
Even as Hutter desperately tries to flee the castle, the Count slips himself into a shipment of coffins, makes his way to Wisbourg, causing a great toll of death along his way, which people begin attributing to the plague. It only makes further sense then that there are rats in the coffin. Hutter manages to escape the castle and rushes to save Ellen from Nosferatu’s imminent arrival. In Wisbourg, Ellen senses the imminent darkness as Nosferatu nears the city. As the city falls prey to a wave of inexplicable plague, Ellen learns that a sinless woman can sacrifice herself to kill the vampire.
Nosferatu is clearly the genesis of vampire movies, a Dracula film bereft of all clichés, mostly because it’s the one setting the conventions. Critics have hailed it as the seminal moment for horror cinema.
In his review of the film, the great Roger Ebert had said, “In a sense, Murnau’s film is about all of the things we worry about at 3 in the morning — cancer, war, disease, madness. It suggests these dark fears in the very style of its visuals. Much of the film is shot in shadow. The corners of the screen are used more than is ordinary; characters lurk or cower there, and it’s a rule of composition that tension is created when the subject of a shot is removed from the center of the frame. Murnau’s special effects add to the disquieting atmosphere: the fast motion of Orlok’s servant, the disappearance of the phantom coach, the manifestation of the count out of thin air, the use of a photographic negative to give us white trees against a black sky.”