"Is this your wife? What a lovely throat."

Erin go bragh and top o' the mornin' to ya! It's St. Patrick's Day, and I have a movie for you that's as Irish as Lucky Charms and green beer.

But first, the famous deaths roll call. Just one this week. I'll make it quick.

Keyboardist Keith Emerson passed this week in an apparent suicide, bringing an abrupt halt to a prolific career in trying to be as cool as a guitar player.  He nearly succeeded when he made his contribution to horror in 1980, creating the soundtrack to Dario Argento's Inferno.

Now that's out of the way, let's kiss this Blarney Stone.

I've spent a lot of time in America these past couple centuries, and I love how the Yankee Doodle Dandies have taken what was once the somber observance of the death of the man who brought Christianity to the Emerald Isle and turned it into a festival of violent self-debasement and public vomiting.

The real beauty of it is a lot of the participants aren't even Irish. They sport plastic green derbies and shamrock buttons in appropriation of a culture of which they are completely ignorant, and they get a pass, because "everyone is Irish on St. Patrick's Day."

So this week's Thursday Thriller is F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu. 

It's a German film that was released in 1922, which is also the year my favorite movie came out. 

The story is about -- well, OK, it's just Dracula, which was written by an Irishman, Bram Stoker. Murnau changed some details around, mostly names and locations, to avoid paying Stoker's widow for the copyrights.

For example, London becomes Bremen, a town made famous by an ass, a bitch, a pussy and a cock. Count Dracula becomes Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Harker becomes Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim). Mina becomes Ellen (Greta Schroder). Renfield becomes Knock (Alexander Granach) and so on.

If you look past the obvious plagiarism, Nosferatu is a pretty cool film. Schreck's performance as the Count is iconic, giving us a much creepier looking vampire than later cinematic incarnations.

Likewise, Granach gives us a sinister and manic Mr. Knock, with a wicked grin and some of the unruliest eyebrows ever committed to celluloid. 

Like a lot of silent horror films, Nosferatu relies heavily on shadow play to create an atmosphere of dread. It's interesting to see how they addressed technical limitations and solved problems at the time. Exterior shots were taken entirely in broad daylight, so night scenes were given a blue tint and day scenes were given yellow. 

Murnau and company didn't quite get away with the theft of Stoker's intellectual property. Mrs. Stoker sued and, according to IMDb, all prints of the film were to be destroyed. Lucky for us, some copies survived in foreign markets.

Nosferatu streams on Amazon Prime, Shudder and YouTube. Enjoy it in the spirit of ripping off the Irish.

Shit, I'm out of Guinness.