A Vamp for All Seasons : Doctor Brings Darker Dracula to Life in Restored Film Classic

They don’t call him the undead for nothing.

Dracula--the dark side’s snappiest dresser--is back from the grave and ready to party. Director Francis Ford Coppola is getting raves and enviable grosses for his stylishly over-the-top “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Anne Rice’s vampire books are cult classics. And now, on laser disc, comes a restored version of F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” (1922), the first movie made from Bram Stoker’s immortal novel.

Lokke Heiss of Santa Monica wrote and performed the commentary for the laser disc, due in December from Image Entertainment of Chatsworth. He also traveled to Munich, Germany, where he consulted with Enno Patalas, a film curator and Murnau expert who helped with such challenges as determining what colors Murnau used to tint particular sequences of the original film.

Heiss, 35, is a family practice physician who returned to school to study his other passion: film. He first analyzed Murnau’s haunting silent classic as a student at the USC School of Cinema-Television, where he earned a master’s of fine arts in production in 1991. Teacher David Shepard liked a paper Heiss wrote on the film and invited him to help with the project.

In his commentary, Heiss argues that vampires are immortal villains because they embody so many forbidden urges--from cannibalism to necrophilia. In Freudian terms, the vampire is the id in evening dress. Vampires do things humans imagine only in their darkest, most troubled dreams.

“Vampires can get away with it,” Heiss said. He says, for example, that the undead sink their fangs into the necks of either gender with impunity, at least until the man with the stake arrives.

Murnau, who had come out of German experimental theater, was only 32 when he made “Nosferatu,” which is regularly cited as an outstanding example of German Expressionist film. Released in 1922, it was the only movie made by a company called Prana-Film, whose founders hoped to specialize in artistically ambitious movies on occult themes.

But Prana-Film went bankrupt shortly thereafter, and that was the least of the movie’s problems. As Heiss recounts, Stoker’s widow launched a one-woman crusade against the unauthorized version of the novel, first published in 1897. Unable to extract any money from its makers, she finally set out to have every print destroyed. The widow failed, for which lovers of film are eternally grateful.

Heiss recommends that people who want to learn more about the story of “Dracula” and its cinematic and theatrical incarnations read David J. Skal’s book on the subject, “Hollywood Gothic.” Included is such Dracula arcana as the story of the Spanish film version of the novel. It was shot at night on the Universal lot, using the same sets where, by day, Bela Lugosi emerged from his comfy coffin and explained, “I don’t drink--wine.”

Heiss directs the attention of viewers of “Nosferatu” to such subtleties as Murnau’s painterly use of arches throughout the film. Heiss also points out that the movie doesn’t make much sense unless you see it with the original tints. Instead of viewing a black-and-white film, the 1920s audience saw a print that had been dyed or dipped in color to indicate when or where a particular scene took place. Night scenes, for instance, were tinted blue. Without the color to tell you it’s supposed to be sleepy time in Transylvania, the vampire seems to be doing the one thing the undead consider unthinkable: walking around while the sun shines.

Unlike Lugosi and other dapper Draculas, Nosferatu is a skulking, skeletal figure with ratlike teeth and talons that grow throughout the film. He also has a decidedly hooked nose. That centuries-old icon of anti-Semitism has prompted many critics to describe the character, portrayed by actor Max Schreck, as a chilling precursor of the stereotype of the Jew promulgated to genocidal effect by the Nazis. Hitler saw the movie, Heiss says, and so did Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s film buff from hell, but Heiss won’t speculate about the director’s intent. “You’d have to ask Murnau, and, of course, he’s dead.”

Murnau, who was briefly a teacher of Alfred Hitchcock, died in a car accident in Hollywood in 1932.

Heiss has no intention of hanging up his stethoscope, but he would like to find a way to combine his interests in medicine and film. He has worked on some medical educational videos, including one with the decidedly unsnappy title “Psychological Methodology.”

He is currently making a cartoon about the ear. OK, maybe it’s not “Nosferatu,” but wait till you see the skateboarding protagonist whiz through the twists and turns of the inner ear.