I got the Cinecrypt adaptation of Nosferatu as an additional perk with their Kickstarter of a short comic Nosferatu: A Winter’s Tale. The graphic has no publication detail such as publication date, editor etc.
However, it is an excellently put together adaptation, visually beautiful with art lifted from the celluloid. Story-wise it is not entirely film accurate (it glosses over aspects – so, for instance, although we see a Venus Flytrap we don’t see Bulwer’s lecture), but it certainly captures the spirit of the film. There are a couple of moments I want to mention.
Hutter in this is the innocent Hutter of the film and not the greedy, lecherous version that Fisher imagined. I was also struck that in the inn the emphasis for having him stay is most definitely centred on the 'werewolf' (Hutter mentions the Borgo Pass to the innkeeper but not Orlock, the werewolf is still depicted as a hyena). Ellen is often seen as psychically connected to either Hutter (my reading) or Orlock. In this she telepathically tells the vampire to leave Hutter alone and he realises that she can see him over the distance. This further ties with her instinctively knowing she has to sacrifice herself, rather than her reading the Book of the Vampyre to discover this. I was also struck with “Why did you have to kill them”, which references the flowers Hutter brings her as the story opens, becoming a repeated motif. I also thought that it was interesting to bring in Stoker’s physical description (minus the mention of moustache etc) into Hutter’s inner dialogue.
I was very taken with this, visually lovely and spiritually loyal to the film it was well worth getting. 8 out of 10.
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