Nosferatu, Brides of Dracula and Son of Frankenstein on the big screen this weekend

Nosferatu
Nosferatu

This weekend, on October 22nd and 23rd, the Loew’s Jersey Theatre will screen classic horror films, including Nosferatu, which will be screened with live organ accompaniment by Wayne Zimmerman of the Garden State Theatre Organ Society.

Friday, October 22un – 8 PM

Brides of Dracula (1960)
Cast: Peter Cushing, Yvonne Monlaur, Marita Hunt, David Peel, Freda Jackson
Director: Terence Fisher
If Universal Pictures distilled and defined the horror movie in black & white during the 1930s and ‘40s, the British studio Hammer Films re-imagined and redefined the genre in color beginning in the late 1950s. Brides of Dracula was the studio’s second vampire film, the sequel to its Horror of Dracula. A young woman is stranded in a foreboding Transylvanian village and encounters a handsome young Baron, who turns out to be a vampire. In her ignorance, the young woman looses the vampire upon a girl’s school – and herself. Fortunately, the arch nemesis of all vampires, Dr. Van Helsing, arrives to help.

Saturday, October 23rd – 6 PM

Son of Frankenstein (1938)
Cast: Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Basil Rathbone, Lionel Atwill
Director: Rowland V. Lee
Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s Monster is one of the most legendary performances in movie history. Karloff portrayed the Monster for the third and final time on the big screen in Son of Frankenstein. As if that wasn’t enough to make the film a classic, Karloff was joined by Bela Lugosi in what, arguably, was his finest Hollywood performance. When Dr. Frankenstein’s son, who has lived in America most of his life, returns to his ancestral home, he finds that local villagers still remember and fear his father’s creation. Goaded by a sinister man (Lugosi) living amid the ruins of his father’s castle, Frankenstein decides to revive his father’s Monster – but to reform its brutish nature and thereby vindicate his father’s memory. Of course things don’t work out as Frankenstein had planned.

Saturday, October 23rd – 8:20 PM

Nosferatu (1922)
Cast: Max Schreck, Alexander Granach, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroeder
Director: F.W. Murnau
In our time of CGI, surround-sound and even the revival of 3-D, an 88-year-old German silent film remains one of the most chilling and legendary horror movies ever made. Nosferatu was the first – although unauthorized – feature-film version of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” Stoker’s widow sued and won over copyright infringement, and all copies of Nosferatu were supposed to have been destroyed, but fortunately a few prints survived.

Nosferatu is now considered one of the best interpretations of Stoker’s Dracula ever filmed. Still, it differs from the book in several notable ways, including the names of central characters and locations. It, not the book, cemented into the Dracula canon the idea that vampires are destroyed by sunlight. And the ending differs from Stocker’s, and is one of the more suggestive mixes of innocence and evil, self-sacrifice and eroticism of the silent era.

Nosferatu is silent, with live organ accompaniment by Wayne Zimmerman on the Loew’s Wonder Morton.

The Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre is located at 54 Journal Square, in Jersey City, New Jersey. Find out more about this event at loewsjersey.org.