F. W. Murnau

And then there's this screechy music.

And just like in Totally Stolen from Murnau's Nosferatu, Willy Loman rises up and has this smile on his face.

Then there's all of the different Willy's slide projections that are kind of zipping up the big, huge walls of Goodhart Hall.

Then Linda drives the stings in his heart.

Probably not.

And then a lot of people said the director, F.W. Murnau, was an occultist and he was into all these scary things, which not entirely true.

In reality, it was the producer who was the occultist and into all the scary stuff.

Oh.

Pretty much all of those 20s.

Oh, we can watch Sunrise.

That was a Murnau movie when he came to the US.

It's very good as well.

After Images is hosted by film writers Franck Boulleig and Marisa C. Hayes.

Would you make a pact with the devil in exchange for power and glory? That is the subject of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's 1926 masterpiece Faust, a German folktale.

It's the director's last German film before relocating to the United States.

Today, American film and television director John McNaughton guides us through this unforgettable piece of filmmaking that draws on older traditions of the legendary tale of Faust as well as Goethe's 1808 text.

It was directed by this famed director, also known for The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Metropolis, and The Big Heat.

Is it A, F.W. Murnau, B, Fritz Lang, or C, Ernst Lubitsch?

What did you call me? Okay.

A dragon heart.

[laughs] I'm so glad you asked.

You can do no better than the 1922 Murnau's classic Nosferatu.

Which there are so, which is so ironic in a sense-

Mm-hmm

Florence Stoker kept going to the mailbox looking for, "Okay, is there gonna be a paycheck for using my late husband's work? No? Well, let's do what they say in Mexico, may your life be filled with lawyers."

[laughs]

And for, like, three or four years, Murnau's life was filled with lawyers.

They lost the case, and the judge said, "Take every copy of that film and set it on fire.

Yeah.

I once worked on music for Murnau's famous Nosferatu, and I've always known that vampires would make an ideal subject for an opera or a musical.

In fact, I wrote Total Eclipse of the Heart, probably my most successful song ever, as a tribute to Nosferatu.

But we know he said also that he didn't finish the song until he met Bonnie Tyler and then wrote it with her in mind.

She finds a creature that's eating poppies and is still able to dream, and then she takes him, and he's gonna relive his past life as he dies, uh, with a, a film looped around a projector inside of his monstrous back.

And he kinda looks like Nosferatu from Murnau's Nosferatu film.

Mm-hmm.

Uh, so-