Shepard edited Writers at the Movies, an anthology of film appreciations, he regularly contributes film criticism to the Sunday New York Times, he’s the film columnist for the Believer, and much of his teaching at Williams College is in hugely popular, large lecture classes on film genres and great directors. Shepard explained his keen interest in cinema by saying, “Like a lot of people of our generation, I grew up on movies. We watched movies all the time in my house, so I’m sure that kind of model had a fundamental effect on how I constructed narrative. There are all sorts of ways in which film has directly and indirectly showed itself in my fiction, besides Nosferatu. I remember conceiving the end of [my novel] Paper Doll, which involved the massive and catastrophic 8th Air Force attack on Schweinfurt, in cinematic terms: What would you see at this point? Where would the camera be placed for this? There’s a way in which film pushes you toward both the visual and the kinetic, as opposed to, say, the intricately expositional, or ruminative. At other times … film has given me not only my governing metaphors, but my protagonists.”

Such is the case with Jim Shepard’s Nosferatu, a brilliant series of snapshots of a deeply flawed but seminal genius of the silent screen whose ambition it was “to photograph thought.”

—Ron Hansen

Charlottenburg, 1907

CHARLOTTENBURG, 1907

He first noted sleeplessness in his journal in May of 1907. That year he turned eighteen, passed his Abitur in Kassel, and moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg to study philology. There he got to know Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, who was first a schoolmate and then a soulmate. Their friendship made a poet out of Ehrenbaum-Degele, and a filmmaker out of Murnau.

Murnau was still at that point named Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe. He was a boy from the provinces. His friend’s mother was a well-known opera singer, and the father a wealthy banker. They lived in an oversized villa in the Grunewald. The family was passionately interested in culture, which was a sea change from what Wilhelm was used to at home.

Two years later, under the cover of darkness, he and his friend would travel south to an inn in the Upper Bavarian town of Murnau, where the next morning, in a sober, private ceremony, the student Wilhelm Plumpe would give up his cloddish surname and take the name with which he would become renowned.

But that August morning in 1907 he left his home with only his mother to part from. He was sick from nervous anticipation. He continually annoyed and comforted himself by rubbing his thumb over his fist. His mother told him to try to make friends at school. Begin over. And not to get the reputation of being quiet. Well-intended advice, but when the stars sang to the moon, he thought, then he’d be talkative and likeable.