Maestro Gillian B. Anderson leads the VSO in a performance of Nosferatu’s creepy, painstakingly reconstructed score

As scary scenes go, it’s a doozy. It has slowly dawned on young real-estate agent Thomas Hutter that his host, Count Orlok, is a nosferatu, or vampire. As the clock strikes midnight, the door to Hutter’s room swings inward, revealing a darkened castle corridor. Suddenly, Orlok himself appears, striding slowly but deliberately down the hall, his rail-thin arms and talonlike hands flat against his body. Futilely, a panicked Hutter tries to hide himself behind a bedsheet as the count’s gaunt form enters the room, his deep-set eyes burning with a pitiless blood lust.

The film is F. W. Murnau’s classic of German expressionist horror, 1922’s Nosferatu. And as chilling as the above scene is in silence, imagine it with a symphonic score swelling to a climax as Count Orlok steps through the doorway of Hutter’s room. According to Maryland-based musicologist and conductor Gillian B. Anderson, watching the film on DVD—or, heaven forbid, streaming it on YouTube—doesn’t compare to viewing it the way it was intended to be experienced: on a big screen, with the accompaniment of a full orchestra.

“It’s really a theatrical presentation, you know,” Anderson tells the Straight in a telephone interview. “It’s not like spinning a movie with the soundtrack already attached to it. It’s a much more dramatic event, and the energy from the live orchestra adds an element that isn’t there when you have a recording.”

Anderson should know. She has made a specialty of conducting orchestras in performances of the scores to 34 silent-film classics, including Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc, and, of course, Nosferatu, which she’ll present in conjunction with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the Orpheum on Saturday (October 31).

That Nosferatu, aptly subtitled A Symphony of Horror, survived to be screened 87 years after its initial theatrical run is akin to a miracle. It is a blatant cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, albeit with the names and locations changed. Nosferatu’s production company, Prana Film, had not actually acquired the rights to the book, but it forged ahead regardless. Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement, and the court ordered all copies of the movie destroyed. Needless to say, not all of them were, but the film’s musical accompaniment, composed by Hans Erdmann, was lost.

Working with arranger James Kessler, Anderson painstakingly reconstructed Erdmann’s score using as reference the composer’s own 40-minute Fantastisch-Romantische Suite, which incorporated some of the music from Nosferatu, and an exhaustive book Erdmann wrote about accompanying silent films. “Mostly, it’s very evocative,” Anderson says of Erdmann’s work. “It captures the kinetic energy and the mood of the scene. It certainly makes it all much spookier. His orchestration is masterful, so the colour of the orchestra is something that plays a big role in the effect that it has on the audience. The various themes that he’s chosen for Nosferatu [Orlok] and the heroine and Hutter, the hero, they’re all—instead of being blatant, which some silent-film scores can be—very appropriate, very suggestive, very sophisticated. It really adds to the mood.”

As for why Nosferatu retains such power, even in an era when depictions of bloodsuckers are everywhere, from Twilight to True Blood, it probably has much to do with the fact that, as portrayed by Max Schreck, Count Orlok is just plain creepy as hell. Anderson also credits Murnau’s masterful pacing, as well as his decisions about what not to show. “It’s because an awful lot is left to your imagination,” she says. “In other words, an awful lot of the other stuff has gotten more and more realistic. But there’s something considerably more terrifying about the suggestion and the evocation that are in that film that are not present in the other films. It’s much more abstract, and even the visual image itself is more poetic—it’s more painterly, if you want to put it that way. And in a way, that’s much more compelling than a very realistic rendition of this.

“I think the music plays into that, too,” she continues. “It’s really just perfectly moulded to the image. It’s very poetic. It’s very evocative. It doesn’t beat you over the head. The music for Nosferatu himself is very slow. It’s very spooky. It definitely establishes the mood right away.”

Since that mood is one of unadulterated dread, more sensitive viewers might wish to bring their own bedsheets to the theatre. That way, like Hutter, they’ll have somewhere to hide if things get too scary.