Profs & Pints San Francisco: Nosferatu and Erotic Horror

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “Nosferatu and Erotic Horror,” on a film vampire’s many lives and seductive powers, with Michael Chemers, director of the Center for Monster Studies and professor and chair of the Department of Performance, Play, and Design at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

[Tickets available only online, at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/sf-nosferatu .]

Just the name Nosferatu conjures up horrific images in our collective psyche—of rats, wolves, and a preternaturally hideous but horribly seductive undead monster. With Halloween just around the corner and Robert Eggers' terrifying remake of the film Nosferatu fresh in people’s minds, it’s the perfect time to gain a more-than-fang-deep understanding of this famous vampiric villain.

Join Professor Michael Chemers, a scholar of monsters and horror who has extensively studied Nosferatu and other vampire films, for a look at the history of Nosferatu and what it tells us about horror, hatred, ourselves, and our desires.

You’ll learn how what started as F.W. Murnau's attempt to make a Germanified Dracula film without getting sued by Bram Stoker's estate has morphed over the last century of its existence into a powerhouse source of horror in its own right.

Nosferatu is the province of a particular kind of horror, a thrilling yarn of dark eroticism and power plays in which the villain, Count Orlok, invites the other characters into a unique dance of seduction and disgust. Innocence is tainted and must be sacrificed. Evil attracts even as it repels. Women, in particular, must succumb to the chauvinism of incompetent and malevolent men until they save the day, as both bait and trap.

Nosferatu is a vampire in stark relief, a paragon of darkness unreplicated in other, lighter vampire tales in which featured Hollywood hunks like Robert Pattinson played the bloodsucker. We’ll discuss how the actor-monsters of Nosferatu films—Max Schreck, Klaus Kinski, Willem Dafoe, and Bill Skarsgård—are somehow sexier than the other vampires who came at us through big screens. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Doors open at 5:30 and the talk begins at 6:30. Parking available nearby at the Mason O'Farrell garage.)

Image: An edited still from the original F.W. Murnau version of Nosferatu. Rose shadow added.