Jane Pickens to celebrate 100th anniversary of 'Nosferatu' with live film score

When it comes to pioneering works of art, the silent horror film "Nosferatu" is definitely one of them.

A product of German Expressionism from the 1920s and heavily influenced by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the film was the first to show a vampire dying from exposure to sunlight.

Since its release back in March 1922, "Nosferatu" is considered to be an influential masterpiece of cinema and filmmaking in general. With this year marking its 100th anniversary along with Halloween on its way, screenings to celebrate the film have been taking place in various theaters.

This includes the JPT Film + Event Center, 49 Touro Street in Newport, which will be showing the film while being accompanied by a live score on Oct. 27 and 7:30 p.m.

New Hampshire native Jeff Rapsis will be doing the scoring with a digital keyboard right next to the screen as the film is being shown. He got into the craft over a decade ago due to an opportunity that came to be, but he’s been playing music and a fan of vintage films since he was a kid.

“I studied music as a young person up through high school and I was very serious about it,” he said about how he got into live film scoring. “I also had a great interest in vintage films. I was one of those kids who liked the old ones while growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s. I was encouraged by my music teacher, who is also a film collector, to buy 60-millimeter prints of old silent comedies and it was a world that fascinated me.

"I never thought music and film as something that was united in any way, and after college I pursued a career in journalism and publishing so I didn’t really pursue either music or film professionally for a while. It was always interesting to me and around 15 years ago, when I was in my early 40s, things conspired for me to get back into it and I wound up doing music for some silent film screenings in the area that I live in around Manchester.”

“It was sort of an experiment, but I found that I could do it in a way that surprised me,” Rapsis said. “I was initially under the impression that it would take a lot of preparation. I would have to write everything out and plan it all out to have music ready for a two-hour film which would be a lot of work. There was a screening of the ‘Phantom Of The Opera’ that I had agreed to do for a local theater and it was two months away so I figured I would have enough time to get things together. But as things happened, I had no time to work on it at all. Showtime arrived and I went to the theater with my digital keyboard figuring that I’d just do what I could. To my surprise, at about 10 minutes of improvising unprepared music it was like I had learned to fly.”

This improvisational approach proved to be beneficial for Rapsis due to him not feeling constricted to prior planning. He also likes how it’s a unique outlet for him to channel his creativity on a regular basis.

“It was like I was thrown out of the nest and it was quite liberating because I wasn’t glued to some idea I produced in advance. I could go where the mood took me as the movie went along,” he said about his approach to scoring. “Then I started doing more and more of these screenings because I wanted to learn the craft and I wanted to practice. The only way I know how to do anything is by doing it a lot and trying to get better. I guess it is like shooting hoops or something where the more you practice the better you get.

"I started trying to find more places to do it and I wound up building up a schedule where I was doing 100 performances a year all around New England and other places. I found that the music and the film together was like chocolate and peanut butter. They were two things that were good on their own, but they’re even better together so it turned out to be a really effective way for me to express my creative impulse.”

'Nosferatu' is like ‘Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’ of silent film'

When it comes to the actual film, Rapsis considers "Nosferatu" to be on par with the standards of classical music. It’s also the film that he gets requested to score the most.

“In the world of vintage film, there are some films out of the thousands that were made that people just want to see again and again and 'Nosferatu' is like the Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony of silent film,” he said. “Somehow it’s established itself as a horror film that everybody has to see at least once, and when it came out in Germany during the early 1920s, it was so weird at the time.

"It’s still weird today because the whole experience of cinema without dialogue is so alien to us. It’s like it’s from another planet so it’s really taken on a life of its own. It’s a film about the undead and people seem to continue flocking to it over the decades. I’ve scored it a lot, it seems to be one that gets the most requests so it’s not like I don’t know the film but I always challenge myself to come up with different material when I’m performing.”

“I don’t want to fall back on stuff I’ve already done,” Rapsis added. “I want to keep the liveliness of the scoring going and I do that by keeping it fresh.”

For the upcoming screening and live scoring, Rapsis says the communal aspect of the event separates it from a lot of other forms of entertainment. He also mentions the collaborative experience the audience will have by watching and listening is a whole lot different than tuning into a film at home.

“The first thing to realize is that most people today have so many other options, they can watch films at home, they can watch things on YouTube and entertainment today is catered for that flexibility,” he said about the upcoming gathering. “You can watch a movie on your cell phone and you’ll get the same experience that the director wanted, but back then the only way to see a movie was to go to a cinema and people had to come together for this new storytelling experience.

"All the films made during that time, including 'Nosferatu,' had that baked into them and they were all designed for the big audience. It’s very different when you see a film with an audience that’s into it compared to when you’re home by yourself, it’s a group communal experience.”

“These films from 100 years ago, if you can put together a big audience and then show it with live music on the big screen, really do snap back to life in a way that transcends the time that it was made,” Rapsis said. “When you come to the screening of 'Nosferatu,' you’re going to be collaborating with everyone else in the audience to create a wonderful shared experience that was the essence of cinema when it first started.

"More than ever, we need reasons to get together and we need shared experiences. We need to get out of our living rooms, out of our boxes, get together and experience things as a group. Having an audience for a film with a live score makes it all that much more intense because we’re enjoying it all together, it’s an experience you can’t get at home.”

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Nosferatu 100th anniversary to be celebrated at Jane Pickens, Newport