TRACK #243:

Nosferatu by Blue Öyster Cult

It’s been roughly 7 years, 6 months and 16 days since Blue Öyster Cult has made an appearance on The Shindig. Roughly.

Back then, it was their contribution to John Carpenter’s 1978 classic Halloween, (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, which afforded them an early nod on The Playlist.

Well now they’re back, all these years later, with the less inclusive, though infinitely more referential, Nosferatu.

This one was the final track on their 1977 release Spectres, an album which opens with the much more celebrated (though no less referential) Godzilla. As it happens, Nosferatu was actually the B-Side to Godzilla, making for one very referential 45.

Being horror fans, Nosferatu is a word I’m quite sure you are all fairly familiar with. But what hell is Nosferatu?

Well, it’s a word that for sure appears in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, though Ole Bram claimed he got it from Emily Gerard’s Transylvania Travelogue The Land Beyond the Forest. However, Emily seems to merely claim it’s a Romainian word which means “Vampire,” although no such word really seems to exist in Romanian.

Some claim the word came from the Greek “nosphoros” which meant “disease-carrying.” Others say it takes root in the old Romanian term “necurat,” meaning “unclean.” It was the kinda thing you’d say so you didn’t have to say “vampire,” lest speaking it’s name called the creature to you.

Lotta ideas. No concrete answers.

At any rate, occultist producer Albin Grau and screenwriter Henrik Galeen liked the word so much, they used it to evade securing any rights for their unauthorized 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

They were unsuccessful however, as Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, sued the shit out of them, bankrupted their fledgling occultist studio Prana-Film, and almost had every copy of the FW Murnau’s film Nosferatu burned into oblivion.

So, for almost 100 years now, “Nosferatu” has directly related to not just vampires, but specifically, Dracula.

And Blue Öyster Cult, like Grau, Galeen and Murnau, are clearly referencing Bram Stoker’s classic novel. So much so that some of the lyrics directly reference passages from the book.

But, since the 1922 Nosferatu is a silent picture, I’ve added some samples from Werner Herzog’s awesomely unsettling 1979 remake, just for a little ambiance.

So get unclean with Klaus Kinski and the disease carrying cultists of the Blue Öyster with…

Nos-fer-a-tu!