A hundred and three years on, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” still haunts the moviegoing unconscious. Newcomers feel shudders of recognition on seeing Murnau’s indelible evocations of a Transylvanian vampire on the prowl: a reverse-negative image of Nosferatu’s carriage clattering through a forest; majestically disquieting sequences of a pestilential ship gliding across the frame; the vampire toting his coffin through the deserted streets of a German town; his shadow seeping along the wall of a stairwell, bony fingers outstretched. Film societies, symphony orchestras, and alternative venues show “Nosferatu” on a regular basis, especially around Halloween. Remakes by Werner Herzog, in 1979, and Robert Eggers, in 2024, have further boosted the fame of the original, although neither matches its sinister lyricism. The appearance of the word “symphony” in the title highlights the revolutionary musicality of Murnau’s style, his way of turning images into silent song.

But how to handle the music itself? Although “Nosferatu” came out five years before sound came in, the composer Hans Erdmann supplied a score that ensembles could play at larger theatres. Much of Erdmann’s music later disappeared, and the surviving fragments, humidly late-Romantic in style, don’t suggest a lost masterpiece. In the absence of a fixed soundtrack, hundreds of alternatives have been devised, variously, by classical composers, film composers, rock bands, doom-metal groups, jazz ensembles, and noise collectives. Just before Halloween, the vocalist and composer Haley Fohr, who performs as Circuit des Yeux, supplied a gloomily atmospheric accompaniment for a screening of “Nosferatu” at the Philosophical Research Society, in Los Angeles—a blend of guitar drones, spectral vocals, and churning minimalist figuration.

In my experience, though, “Nosferatu” is most convincing when backed by organ. Battles with the unholy thrive on churchly tones. In late October, I went to San Diego to see the film at the Balboa Theatre, a century-old movie and vaudeville house. Its prized possession is a 1929 Wonder Morton organ, a four-manual instrument that once resided at a cinema in Queens. The performer was David Marsh, a thirty-year-old musician based in Mission Viejo, California. Marsh, an enthusiast of French organ improvisation, brought no written music to the gig, though he had a plan of action. He told me beforehand, “ ‘Nosferatu’ allows me to use everything I’ve got. There are romantic, sentimental moments, as when the young hero leaves his wife to go to Transylvania, and those call for an Old Hollywood sound. But it’s also horror, and that allows me to be an absolute madman—dissonance, chromaticism, cluster chords.”

In the idyllic early scenes, Marsh deployed a Korngoldian theme with rising intervals of a fifth and a sixth, then shifted it to the minor mode as a Transylvanian chill descended. When Nosferatu showed his corpselike face, the Wonder Morton’s Vox Humana (human voice) and concert-flute pipes buzzed together in a shrill cluster. Relentless ostinato figures underscored Nosferatu’s voyage by boat. The sunrise finale had a touch of M-G-M Messiaen. The audience exploded in applause before Marsh was done, and rightly so.

During the silent era, thousands of movie-theatre organs raised their quirky, quavery voices, with the Mighty Wurlitzer being the most popular model. According to the American Theatre Organ Society, a few hundred instruments remain in theatres, and they are experiencing a modest renaissance. Resident organists accompany silent-film screenings at, among other venues, the Stanford Theatre, in Palo Alto; the Ohio Theatre, in Columbus; the Circle Cinema, in Tulsa; and the Fox Theatre, in Atlanta. A raucous Mighty Wurlitzer at the Castro, in San Francisco, had a longtime cult following; the theatre is undergoing renovation and will reopen early next year with what is billed as the world’s largest digital organ.

In Los Angeles, the best place to see organ-powered silents is at the Old Town Music Hall, in El Segundo. This two-hundred-seat venue, which looks a bit like a Wild West opera house, first opened in 1921, providing entertainment to Standard Oil workers. In 1968, two theatre-organ enthusiasts, Bill Coffman and Bill Field, rented the building and installed a massive twenty-six-hundred-pipe Wurlitzer that they had rescued from the Fox West Coast Theatre, in Long Beach. Coffman and Field died in 2001 and 2020, respectively, but Old Town continues on a nonprofit basis, under the aegis of devoted volunteers.

Before a screening last month, I got a backstage tour from Stirling Yearian, a retired engineer and an amateur organist who helps maintain the Wurlitzer. The pipes, arrayed in chambers at the back of the theatre, must constantly be tuned, tested, and adjusted. In the basement are two vintage Spencer Orgoblo wind blowers, which power the pipes. Further complicating the upkeep is the mechanical intricacy of the Wurlitzer’s built-in sound effects: car horns, doorbells, footsteps, thunder. Yearian told me, “I haven’t accompanied a full-length silent yet, but I’ve done some shorts. They want me to do Laurel and Hardy’s ‘Big Business,’ which will be fun—a lot of door-knocking and door-slamming in that.”

Waiting in the greenroom was Robert Alan York, a veteran organist who studied classical repertory and improvisation in Paris and also possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of the American songbook. His assignment that day was a demanding one: King Vidor’s 1925 film “The Big Parade,” a two-and-a-half-hour epic about a rich playboy who goes to fight in the First World War and learns the ways of the common man. York told me, “When I first played it cold, I found myself in tears at times. It starts out as a sweet, romantic thing, and then it gets very intense.” Like Marsh in San Diego, York had no music in front of him, trusting that his memory and instinct would carry him through.

If “Nosferatu” has eerily failed to age, parts of “The Big Parade” are difficult for modern audiences to digest. The hero’s antic flirtations with a French maiden drag on at inordinate length, leaving an organist little room for creative invention. Later, though, Vidor generates an atmosphere of muddy dread that anticipates the harrowing tableaux of Lewis Milestone’s “All Quiet on the Western Front,” released five years later. Two complementary images frame the central battle sequences: first, trucks carry cocksure soldiers toward the front; then ambulances bring their bodies back. York responded with menacing pedal tones and Mahlerian march rhythms, relying heavily on the Wurlitzer’s automated drums.

On Halloween itself, silent-film buffs in L.A. gravitate toward Disney Hall. For more than twenty years, Disney has marked the day by screening a classic horror silent with the mightiest imaginable soundtrack: live accompaniment on its sixty-one-hundred-pipe concert organ, which the composer Terry Riley once nicknamed Hurricane Mama. This year’s offering was Wallace Worsley’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” from 1923, with Lon Chaney in the lead. At the console was Clark Wilson, a virtuosic, period-conscious organist who intermingles improvised episodes with stock pieces of the kind that were often used in the silent period: Saint-Saëns’s “Danse Macabre,” the Largo from Dvořák’s Ninth Symphony, “La Marseillaise.” These days, horror directors like to unsettle audiences with subterranean skronks and rumbles: none could equal the seismic impact of Hurricane Mama’s thirty-two-foot-long C pipe.

Audiences tend to come away from theatre-organ screenings in a jubilant mood, and I think I know the reason. Here, passive consumption becomes active and creative: the performer reacts with individual spontaneity while summoning sounds of orchestral heft. The technological mastery of cinematic spectacle is humanized by the immediacy of live performance. You understand why an artist like Murnau considered silent film the perfect medium. ♦