The Haunted Castle/Schloss Vogelrod (1921) - F. W. Murnau 

Well after struggling to stay awake and follow the plot I read that apparently I might not be alone. No one seems to know of any complete print of this film, and the version that has generally circulated is somewhere around 56 minutes. For this reason I wasn't entirely sure what the hell was going on, who shot who, and what was exactly haunted. By all accounts this was considered a mere stepping stone for Nosferatu. In more ways than one I was reminded of that film, because the first time I had seen Nosferatu was on a bad VHS with no musical accompaniment, same goes for the Haunted Castle, which has not been easy to find even in abridged fashion. A rather complete restoration took place on Murnau's long forgotten Phantom, so maybe there is hope, and certainly the recent Metropolis discovery can give some people faith. This film, a bit like The Burning Soil is to be sought out only for obsessive Murnau completionists like myself, not among his very best work and it seems even in the 1920's that mistaken identities and haunted house movies were getting formulaic and predictable, enough so that Paul Leni would satirize the genre by 1929's Cat and the Canary. Sad again though that now with this film out of the way I can only dream of watching more Murnau, lord I wish there was more out there.