“Vampires get in free,” announced the poster at the door. A traditional defense against vampires is to not invite them in, but the Neighborhood Music School tempted fate last Friday, October 30th, hosting a live scoring of F.W. Murnau’s horror classic Nosferatu that encouraged audience members to dress up in spooky costumes.
Murnau’s film—as NMS teaching artist Istvan Peter B'Racz told the audience before the proceedings started—has its own cursed history. A loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the film was eventually banned after a lawsuit brought on by Stoker’s widow, Florence, which resulted in the judge ordering all copies destroyed. In true movie horror fashion, however, a few survived, turning the film into a classic (if only Florence had heard of the Streisand effect).
Another thing that was lost was the original score, by Hans Erdmann, giving rise to a tradition of composers putting their own spin on it. The version that B'Racz (synthesizer and piano) performed for us that night, joined by Thom Kozumplik on percussion and Tom Burnett on another synthesizer, not only provided a new sound for the movie, but also excised all intertitles; necessary dialogue was instead provided live by Burnett, who also interpolated poems by Edgar Allan Poe over certain passages.
Murnau’s film is moody enough on its own, relying on psychological tension rather than jump scares to rile up his audience. He seems to have had a thing for animals: there are wild horses, a howling hyena, and many, many rats, all used to disturbing effect. The monster, Count Orlock, does not resemble the vampires who got in for free that night: his fangs are not his canines, but rather his front teeth, and he has no hair to slick back; with his tall posture and elongated fingers, he resembles instead the creepypasta icon Slender Man.
Drawing on Murnau’s vibes, B'Racz, Kozumplik, and Burnett’s score for the film (which is appropriately subtitled “A Symphony of Horror”) emulates a relentless descent into madness. It reminded me of the work of Brian Reitzell, who scored the TV version of Hannibal with unusual instruments, like ping pong balls and mallets. While no such objects were present on stage, the trio nonetheless distorted natural sounds with the synthesizers, and Kozumplik got a lot of unholy music out of his steel drum. A theremin-like melody was constant throughout, while big moments were scored with both sound and light.
The effect proved magnetic at first, then somewhat hypnotic as the night went on, until the point when I felt sleep pull my eyelids down. It was partly the fact that Murnau’s film, which is very atmospheric at first, eventually becomes plot-heavy—something the live score mostly ignored, pulling my attention away from the screen rather than toward it. The narrative gets overly complicated, with lots of letters and passages of books carrying essential information; more than once, I felt the instinct to ask the music to be lowered so that I could concentrate on the words on screen.
The particular footage we were watching also suffered from not being treated: a big plot point is that the nosferatu only comes out at night, but cameras in the 1920s could not film in such low light, so the film reels were manually tinted to obscure daylight filming. In this version, which received no such treatment, the ending fell flat, as Orlock was destroyed by sunlight we had seen him exposed to several times before. Why go through the trouble of including subtitles and taking away dialogue, I wondered, but not address color?
One could argue that the point of a live scoring is not to watch the movie, but rather treat it as a multimedia accompaniment to the music…but I would politely disagree. The delight of a live score is to watch musicians sublimate their creativity to the images on screen, creating a connection between what we’re hearing and what we’re seeing, enhancing (and potentially transforming) images with sound. B'Racz, Kozumplik, and Burnett certainly did a lot of that, and quite compellingly. But, as the night went on, they seemed to start fighting the material, insisting on a relentless, uniformly horrific soundscape that overwrote Murnau’s pacing and even his comedy; the movie is quite camp, with lots of exaggerated expressions and ludicrous turns that were not acknowledged by the music. The suggestion, ultimately, was that the vibes mattered more than the story—a fine concept for a concert, perhaps, but less so in an event in which our attention was directed at the screen.
Still, I can scarcely imagine a better way to spend the last night before Halloween. The trio has created a spectacle that absolutely puts one in the mood of the spooky season. They’ve been performing it since 1994, and I’m glad to see them return to the Neighborhood Music School after a ten-year hiatus. The School itself has created a delightful ambiance to host them: with costumes and freshly-popped popcorn, children and adults alike were having the time of their life when I attended.
Still, was it wise to invite vampires in for free? I think not, but I was told the school has been around since 1911, which makes it older than Murnau’s film—so they clearly know how to fight for their lives.