For those wondering why I have chosen the pseudonym Count Orlok '22, the reason behind this is simple: Count Orlok was the titular vampire character in the 1922 silent German horror film Nosferatu - Eine Symphonie des Grauens, which is my favorite film. The '22 is a reference to the year the film was released as well as to my age at the time of creating this alias.
Now back to the film. Nosferatu was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. The film's director, Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau uses the archetype of the blood-sucking vampire as a metaphor for the horrors of war and fascism. As the parasitic vampire, Orlok invades the small village of Wisborg, Germany, where he spreads a plague of death and destruction. This plague was a symbolic reference to the totalitarianism that was rising in Germany at the time the film was being made. Murnau, himself served as a pilot in WWI, but then after witnessing the senseless killing he condemned war and unnecessary death. Murnau left Germany just as the Nazi Party was beginning to rise in power. He went to America and there he shot a masterpiece (Sunrise - A Song of Two Humans), but after his next two projects were interfered with by studio executives, Murnau decided that the commercial interests of Hollywood conflicted with his own artistic aesthetics. Leaving America behind, he would next travel to Tahiti where he would direct his last motion picture (Tabu). Shortly before the film's premiere in 1931, Murnau would die in a tragic automobile accident.
By assuming this alias I am both paying tribute to a classic film and its brilliant director, as well as expressing my abhorrence for war and violence in all of its manifestations.
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