The Collision of Nostalgia: When Nosferatu Met Radiohead

"Nothing really belongs to us but time, which even he has who has nothing else."

They say we are a generation living in a perpetual state of nostalgia. We are caught in a constant state of looking back while technology drags us forward. I argue now that now as a generation chronically online, we are more conscious of the gap between what was and what is. We are so anxious about newness that we constantly rebrand gems of the past as aesthetic/trendy.

One such trend is the tale of Nosferatu, i.e., 'the offensive one.' A few months back, I stumbled onto something that made nostalgia feel less like escapism and more like a collision. As if getting a modern 2024 retelling by American filmmaker Robert Eggers was not enough, I witnessed a screening of Nosferatu (dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922) synced with Radiohead's Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001) albums.

I never imagined this pairing. On one side: a 1920s Gothic fever dream, German Expressionism at its most unsettling, Count Orlok with his bulbous head and skeletal fingers haunting every frame. On the other hand, Radiohead's electric, broken, self-deprecating anthems of modern alienation. Two things that had no business being in the same room together. And yet. Picture House calls this experience an "imaginative new take on an iconic horror classic!"

The Dissonance Made Sense

At first, my brain rebelled. The images and songs didn't belong together—they couldn't. Nosferatu is all shadow and silence, creeping dread rendered in stark black and white. Radiohead is noise and ache, paranoia wrapped in distortion. We've already decided what Nosferatu means, what Radiohead stands for. We have filed them away in our mental archives under 'classic horror' and 'existential rock.' But when you smash them together, you break those categories open. The brain doesn't know how to interpret this hybrid, how to form thoughts about it. So it scrambles, trying its hardest to keep the music and visuals in sync, searching for meaning in the collision.

Watching them together felt like cognitive dissonance, like trying to speak two languages at once. But wait, isn't that what many of us do every day? And maybe that's why something shifted. It started to work. In some sections, it worked better than it had any right to. The coupling was indeed strange, but also strangely symbiotic.

We don't just watch films, read books or listen to music anymore. We watch, read, listen to people watching, reading or listening to things. We carefully curate our responses.

We live vicariously now — we experience things through layers of media and collective memory. I feel as if we are always one step removed from the raw thing itself. We experience art through the filter of what we think we're supposed to feel about it. However, this felt like an attempt to short-circuit that process, to make us feel something unexpected before we could decide what we were supposed to think.

Omniplex Cinema, High Wycombe, 2 October 2025.

German Expressionism of Nosferatu Meets Modern Anxiety in Radiohead

What surprised me most: I have seen Nosferatu (1922) numerous times before. I've studied it, dissected its symbolism and written about it in film classes. However, this version—synced to Thom Yorke's wail and Jonny Greenwood's guitar—made it more .... offensive? Repulsive? Funny? Dramatic? Real? Cathartic? I could go on forever.

Suddenly, the film wasn't just about vampires. It was about the isolation, alienation and obsession. It was about an epidemic. It was about what happens when an old, rural force collides with modern society and refuses to integrate. What if Nosferatu isn't even the villain? What if the real horror isn't the monster, but the hysteria he unleashes—the way society treats illness, 'madness,' and the unknown?

Nosferatu Meets Radiohead suddenly felt like a meditation on mass behaviour during a crisis. On how medical establishments respond to what they don't understand. On how we label things "evil" when they are simply in the realm of undiscovered, unexplained. These questions hadn't occurred to me before. But with Radiohead's paranoid soundscapes layered underneath, they became impossible to ignore.

The dramatic gestures, the exaggerated shadows, the grotesque physicality of German Expressionism—all of it felt elevated by Radiohead's music. The edits flashed bright and frantic in places, cutting between Orlok's skeletal hands and Ellen's terror, and somehow it still felt natural. Like this is what the film was always trying to say, but we needed 21st-century anxiety to hear it properly.

Is this what modern art is - taking two familiar pieces and forcing them into uncomfortable proximity until something new emerges?

The Plan and Thought Behind

The silent synced movement isn't about creating perfect marriages of sound and image. It's about bringing new audiences into old spaces, getting people back into theatres, and spreading the word about classics from both film and music.

Silents Synced creator Josh Frank, who directed and remixed the project, is also the founder of the Blue Starlite, an independent boutique drive-in cinema founded in Austin, Texas in 2009. Frank says that the event cinema concept was a direct response to the incredible surge of attendance and interest that drive-in theatres experienced during the pandemic.

Their dedicated YouTube channels reads: “Silents Synced!” where classic silent movies are paired with rock music, featuring such influential groups as Radiohead, R.E.M., They Might Be Giants, Pearl Jam, Pixies, and Amon Tobin. An entirely new cinematic experience!

I read through the comments afterwards. People kept saying how good it was, how revelatory, how perfectly the two fit together. And honestly? I'm not sure I agree. Peter Bradshaw writes in The Guardian, "This new approach to silent cinema is like trying to watch a movie while your neighbour has their music on too loud." He goes on to say that it was an experience completely unrewarding. I would agree with him that I found it truly jarring; however, I appreciate the idea behind it and regarding the idea on-screen? Perhaps the point is that it got me thinking, questioning, and talking about a "silent film" in this era of constant stimulation. It made me watch a film I thought I knew and realise I didn't know it at all. And maybe that's just enough for a nostalgia-hungry audience like me.

Till next time, reader.

Love,

K.