One of the first horror movies combines Bram Soker’s Dracula story with the scenery of a small German town during the plague. Nosferatu is regarded as the first vampire movie. The intrusion of the demonic into the bourgeois idyll depicted here might be read as a mirror for the collective fears during the early years of the Weimar Republic. Its nightmarish visions still have a disturbing effect, just as Max Schreck embodies the title character of the demonic blood-sucker in a frighteningly perfect manner. This movie is and remains one of the best of the two dozen or so adaptations of the Dracula story. The newly composed movie scores of Michael Obst and José M. Sánchez-Verdú have been created almost simultaneously.

Sánchez-Verdú takes up alienated fragments of the original score by Hans Erdmann. With Sánchez-Verdú, traditional means of cinematic composition take on a life of their own beyond the usual patterns. Both new movie scores know how to make Murnau’s symphony of pictures appear more immediate through the use of a contemporary sound language, as their music opens up the psychological dimensions of the movie.