Nosferatu Live September 27, 2007

Drawing on electronica, the avant-garde and jazz, Mr Harkness presents a specially written soundtrack to F.W. Murnau's classic masterpiece Nosferatu, the earliest surviving screen adaptaion of Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula.

By day Darryn Harkness plays in the internationally acclaimed rock band Serafin. By night, he moonlights as the brain behind the extraordinary family and collective that is The New Telepathics. Drawing on electronica, the avant-garde, jazz and afro-beat Mr Harkness presents a specially written soundtrack to the classic horror film Nosferatu.

Presenting and performing his new soundtrack by splicing together live sampling and looping with both composed and improvised music, the man is a veritable octopus somehow juggling duties on drums, guitars, bass and keyboards. The film in question is a classic of its kind, a silent masterpiece by F.W. Murnau. It is the earliest surviving screen adaptaion of Bram Stoker's Dracula novel and has quite rightly taken its place as a cult-classic in the history of cinema.
"Eschewing the elaborately artificial studio-bound sets that gave most German Expressionist films their luridly somber mood, Murnau used actual central European locations for his vampire tale, and he created a foreboding atmosphere through such cinematic techniques as negative exposures and stop-motion photography. Shot by Fritz Arno Wagner, the dramatic shadows and low angles that made Max Schreck's Dracula-esque vampire tower over his environs intensified the already frightening presence of Schreck's deathly vampire makeup. The effect of the low angles was not lost on Orson Welles and Gregg Toland when they made Citizen Kane (1941). Though some critics have noted that the stop-motion effects have not aged particularly well, Nosferatu's air of almost apocalyptic doom remains timeless, and Murnau's combination of real locations and a superhuman monster is a key precursor to, among others, Alfred Hitchcock's horror of the everyday and familiar." All Movie Guide

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Official Website: http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/nosferatu_live