Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/31/2015
7:30 pm
Location
Pasadena Presbyterian Church
Category(ies)
Pasadena Presbyterian Church opens its 2015-2016 Friends of Music concert series on Halloween, by screening the iconic silent-film classic Nosferatu, with Dr. Timothy Howard playing his award-winning original score on the church’s massive Aeolian-Skinner pipe organ to accompany the film.
As are all programs on the nine-concert series, the program is free (offering suggested). A dessert reception will follow.
Shot in 1921 by German expressionist F. W Murnau and released a year later, Nosferatu (also called Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror) is considered the greatest telling of the Dracula story. However, it almost never saw the light of day. The film was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with names and other details changed because the studio could not obtain the rights to the novel (for instance, “vampire” became “Nosferatu” and “Count Dracula” became “Count Orlok”). Stoker’s heirs sued over the adaptation, and a court ordered that all copies of the film be destroyed. However, a few prints of Nosferatu survived, and the film eventually came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.
“To watch F.W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” is to see the vampire movie before it had really seen itself,” writes Roger Ebert. “Here is the story of Dracula before it was buried alive in clichés, jokes, TV skits, cartoons and more than 30 other films. The film is in awe of its material. It seems to really believe in vampires … Nosferatu remains effective: It doesn’t scare us, but it haunts us.”
Free parking is available and the Sanctuary is handicap-accessible (map and directions).
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