The world without, the world within and the space between: Amanda Dalton’s adaptation of Nosferatu for BBC Radio 3

Abstract

Made for BBC Radio 3, The Midnight Cry of the Deathbird (2012) is an adaptation of F. W. Murnau’s German expressionist silent film Nosferatu (1922), which serves as both a target text (of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, 1897) and a source text (of The Midnight Cry). Thus, complex layers of adaptation and audience expectations are evoked through medium-specific qualities, such as the ability of radio to represent the immaterial or disembodied and multiple spaces at the same time, including a between-world along inside/outside worlds. Radio can exist almost entirely in the mind, effortlessly navigating between outer and inner dimensions. This article explores questions of narration, embodiment/non-corporeality and inner space. Using Scott McCloud’s concept of radio as a ‘mono-sensory medium’, it centres primarily on the characters of the Nosferatu (a bodiless essence of contagion) and Roger, a friendly Everyman who serves as the listener’s radio guide.