"Nosferatu," with a thrilling score by Adam Haws

There were 92 people in FrizzLit’s Dracula book club last year. Roughly half of them were artists, writers, filmmakers, or musicians, including the Seattle composer Adam Haws.

We read Dracula at a pace of about 50 pages a week, and met weekly on Zoom to discuss it. Some weeks I told stories about Bram Stoker’s life drawn from a biography of him I was reading.¹ Another week I arranged for a bat expert to give a slide presentation, separating bat facts from Stoker’s wacky superstitions.² Another week I invited an actor who’d played Renfield in a stage production of Dracula to talk about what it was like embodying a spider-eating maniac.³

But the best parts of that book club were the things I hadn’t planned.

One night a librarian in the club, Christina Byrne, told us all about “safety coffins,” invented at a time when people had good reason to fear being buried alive.

Another night, the writer Audrey Van Buskirk told us about her great-great-great uncle, a doctor who was also a graverobber. (Also known as a “resurrectionist.”) Back then, as explained in this book, there was no other way to obtain bodies for medical dissection/research.

This art was created by the painter and illustrator Levi Hastings, who was also a member of the book club. Artwork by Levi Hastings

But the most inspiring-to-behold unexpected surprise in that club was probably Adam’s music.

Each meeting of that book club, Adam Haws brought something new for us to listen to. Something that he’d written and recorded just for us. Something that was inspired by that week’s reading.

The week when we had just read about the voyage of the Demeter, for example, Adam wrote a piece called “The Voyage of the Demeter.” The week when Renfield had just been talking up eating living creatures, Adam wrote a piece called “On the Merits of Zoophagia.”

It never failed to blow our minds—the quality of his music, the way it expanded on what we’d just read, the way it added textures and sounds to our senses, and the tireless generosity of this talented musician who was creating it for us, for free, just because.

By the end of the book club, Adam had an entire album of Dracula-inspired music. Go buy it and you’ll be supporting him directly.

Nosferatu’s backstory & adding Adam’s music

The plan for the Dracula club had always been to end on a movie night, because the ending of Dracula the novel is unsatifying.⁴ I wanted the book club itself to have a satisfying conclusion, even if the novel doesn’t.

The selection for the movie night: Nosferatu, the German Expressionist silent horror classic directed by F. W. Murnau and released in 1922.

Infamously, Nosferatu is an adaption of Dracula that was made without the rights to Dracula, and after it was released, the estate of Bram Stoker sued for copyright infringement, and won, and all copies of Nosferatu were ordered by a judge to be destroyed.

Through sheer luck, one copy of the film survived, thanks to a French film collector whose archive somehow wasn’t destroyed by the Nazis. In 1947, that copy made its way to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and now it’s regarded as an iconic work of art and a vital piece of film history.

Nosferatu entered the public domain in 2019. Which means now any of us can drag it into iMovie, do whatever we want with it, and release it ourselves.

So I did. I dragged it into iMovie, deleted the original soundtrack by Hans Erdmann (which had been performed live when the film first premiered), and replaced Erdmann’s music with Adam’s Dracula music.

It took me 2 or 3 weeks, but it was fun work. It was exciting to listen to Adam’s music over and over, and watch the film over and over, and to get to decide where things should go. Wherever I ran out of Dracula music, I used Adam’s compositions from the book clubs of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Virginia Woolf’s Orlando.

The result is at the top of this post.⁵ The entire film Nosferatu, with none of the imagery altered in any way, except for a music credit for Adam popping up in the opening credits to cover Hans Erdmann’s name.

Watch it and see if you agree with me: Adam’s music makes the movie better. His score is so dynamic and layered and full of tension that it sends tingles up my spine, and propels me all the way through the film.

The visual album

In addition to Adam’s Dracula album (buy it already), and the full-length Nosferatu film I created in iMovie with Adam’s music (at the top of this post), there is also a visual album that Adam created.

It’s a series of music videos, essentially. These videos were created by Adam as he made each composition, and posted to YouTube as he went.

Many of the visuals are also drawn from Nosferatu footage. Look!

1. Did you know Bram Stoker’s mother, as a child during a cholera epidemic in Ireland in the 1830s, witnessed people being buried alive?

2. Among the things we learned: bats can’t fly right after eating. (DO BETTER, BRAM!) Also, there’s no such thing as a blind bat; all species of bat can see. Also, bats are the only mammals that can fly, and the veins in their wings are really fingers.

3. Basil Harris, who stole the show Renfield in ACT Theatre’s 2019 production of Dracula.

4. I originally typed “one of the worst endings in all of literature,” but then decided to confine my hyperbole to this footnote.

5. In book club, we also recorded ourselves saying sentences from Dracula, and I added those to the audio track of the version of Nosferatu we watched together back then. Here, in this version for Substack, I’ve decided not mix any human voices into Adam’s music.