There are stories that belong to literature, and there are stories that seem to have been waiting for cinema.
The Faust legend is one of them.
For centuries, the story of the scholar who trades his soul for knowledge, experience, youth or worldly fulfilment has been repeatedly rewritten because its central temptation is almost infinitely adaptable. Christopher Marlowe transformed the legend into Renaissance tragedy. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe turned it into one of the great philosophical works of European literature. Later generations would reinvent the Faustian bargain through science, politics, art, technology, sex, wealth and the pursuit of immortality.
In 1926, F. W. Murnau attempted something different.
He turned Faust into an image.
Premiering at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo on 14 October 1926, Faust: Eine deutsche Volkssage arrived as one of the great technical and artistic achievements of German silent cinema. Produced by Erich Pommer for UFA, photographed by Carl Hoffmann and designed by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig, the film brought together material from the old Faust legend, Marlowe and Goethe rather than attempting a literal transcription of Goethe’s drama.
At 100, that distinction matters.
Murnau’s Faust is not simply Goethe translated into pictures. It is a cinematic argument with the Faust myth itself. It takes the philosophical questions of the literary tradition — knowledge, mortality, desire, temptation, redemption — and strips them down until they can be expressed through light, shadow, movement, architecture and the human face.
Goethe gave Western culture one of its great literary Fausts.
Murnau gave cinema one of its great nightmares.
From Goethe’s Page to Murnau’s Frame
The temptation when discussing an adaptation of Faust is to measure its fidelity to Goethe.
That is the wrong question.
Goethe’s Faust is vast, structurally eccentric and philosophically restless. It encompasses theological argument, poetry, comedy, romance, political allegory, classical mythology and metaphysical speculation. Murnau could never reproduce that totality in a silent feature, nor does he attempt to.
Instead, the screenplay by Hans Kyser draws upon several versions of the Faust tradition, including the old folk legend, Marlowe and Goethe. The result is effectively divided into two movements. The first draws heavily upon the folk tradition, introducing Faust during a devastating plague and establishing his pact with Mephisto. The second moves much closer to Goethe, with Gretchen becoming increasingly central to the tragedy.
This structure allows Murnau to do something profoundly cinematic.
He begins with the cosmic and gradually reduces it to the personal.
The film opens on a scale of apocalypse. A plague devastates the land. Mephisto spreads across the landscape like a supernatural force. Faust confronts the limits of his knowledge and finds that the intellectual authority he has accumulated cannot save the people around him.
But eventually the great philosophical problem becomes a human one.
Faust meets Gretchen.
The Devil’s bargain acquires consequences.
The apocalypse becomes intimate.
When Knowledge Fails
The plague is one of Murnau’s most important departures from the conventional Faust story because it establishes the emotional condition in which Faust becomes vulnerable.
He is not simply bored.
He is defeated.
His learning cannot cure the plague. His books cannot save the dying. His intellectual authority collapses in the face of suffering.
And this is where Mephisto enters.
The Devil does not initially need to persuade Faust that knowledge is worthless. Faust discovers its limits himself.
That distinction is crucial.
The Faustian bargain has often been reduced to a simple equation: ambitious man wants forbidden knowledge, Devil offers it, man pays the price. Murnau’s version is more interesting because Faust’s crisis begins with the realisation that knowledge without power is inadequate to the suffering of the world.
The Devil offers a solution.
Faust can cure the plague.
But the cure has a price.
The supernatural therefore enters through desperation rather than mere curiosity.
That makes the opening of Faust remarkably close to the psychological machinery of horror. The monster does not create the vulnerability. It identifies it.
Mephisto Descends
And then Emil Jannings appears.
There are many cinematic devils, but few have ever possessed the sheer physical presence of Jannings’ Mephisto.
He is not simply a man playing evil.
He becomes an image of evil.
Murnau repeatedly manipulates scale to make Mephisto seem larger than the human world around him. His enormous wings stretch across the landscape. His body becomes a looming architectural presence. In the plague sequence, he is not merely standing among the people; he appears to dominate the entire environment.
This is one of the great achievements of silent cinema: the Devil becomes geography.
Jannings also understands something important about the Devil.
Mephisto can be terrifying, but he is not required to be terrifying all the time.
He can be sardonic.
Petulant.
Amused.
Almost comic.
That is important because the Devil’s greatest power is not necessarily his ability to frighten Faust.
It is his ability to make the bargain appear reasonable.
The Faustian Bargain
The soul is the currency of the story, but the soul is not really what Faust wants.
He wants experience.
He wants youth.
He wants sensuality.
He wants freedom from the limitations of his existence.
He wants to stop being an old scholar trapped inside the accumulated knowledge of a life that has failed to satisfy him.
This is where Murnau’s film connects so powerfully with Goethe’s larger conception of Faust. The horror is not simply that Faust desires too much. It is that nothing he obtains is sufficient.
The Devil can give him youth.
But youth does not solve the problem.
He can give him beauty.
It does not solve the problem.
He can give him pleasure.
It does not solve the problem.
He can give him Gretchen.
And now another human being becomes entangled in the consequences.
The bargain therefore becomes a machine that converts desire into consequence.
Faust gets what he wants.
That is the horror.
The Devil as Cinema
Murnau’s greatest contribution to the Faust tradition may be the extent to which he understands that the Devil can be expressed without dialogue.
Silent cinema cannot give Mephisto the verbal fireworks that make Goethe’s Mephistopheles so compelling. Murnau compensates by making the character visual.
The Devil becomes movement.
He becomes silhouette.
He becomes shadow.
He becomes the sudden interruption of human scale.
This is where Faust connects directly to Murnau’s wider cinema. His films repeatedly treat architecture, landscape and light as psychological forces. In Nosferatu, space becomes a mechanism through which fear travels. In The Last Laugh, the camera turns physical environment into emotional experience. In Faust, the supernatural and the visual world become almost indistinguishable.
Murnau isn’t merely photographing a story about good and evil.
He is photographing the conflict between light and darkness.
The Architecture of Temptation
The sets by Robert Herlth and Walter Röhrig are essential to this achievement.
The world of Faust rarely feels like a neutral location in which characters happen to exist. It feels constructed around them.
Buildings lean.
Streets become corridors.
Interiors trap their occupants.
Landscapes become stages upon which supernatural forces operate.
The architecture has the logic of a dream rather than a realistic historical reconstruction.
That is one of the defining qualities of German Expressionism, but Faust pushes the idea further by connecting the environment directly to the metaphysical conflict. The world itself appears unstable because Faust’s moral universe has become unstable.
The frame is never simply containing the action.
It is judging it.
Faust and the Horror of Mortality
At the centre of the story is an anxiety that horror cinema would return to repeatedly throughout the twentieth century: the terror of being finite.
Faust’s problem is not simply that he is old.
It is that he is mortal.
Age is evidence of limitation. His body reminds him that knowledge cannot defeat time. His intellectual achievements cannot prevent death. His accumulated wisdom cannot make him infinite.
The Devil therefore offers the ultimate temptation: not knowledge, but escape.
Youth becomes supernatural technology.
The body becomes negotiable.
Time becomes something that can apparently be purchased.
This is why the Faustian bargain has proved so durable. Every generation discovers a new form of Faustian desire because every generation discovers a new way of being dissatisfied with the limits of human existence.
Murnau simply gives that dissatisfaction a face.
Gretchen and the Price of the Bargain
Then the film changes.
Gretchen enters, and Faust becomes less concerned with what Faust wants and increasingly concerned with what his wanting does to someone else.
Camilla Horn’s performance is crucial because Gretchen brings the film back from metaphysical abstraction to human vulnerability. The Devil may operate on a cosmic scale, but the consequences of Faust’s bargain are experienced by individual people.
Her brother Valentin dies.
Her mother dies.
Gretchen is abandoned.
She becomes increasingly isolated and ultimately descends into madness.
The Goethean tragedy takes over.
The Faustian bargain has acquired a human cost.
This is where Murnau’s adaptation becomes much darker than the image of Faust the adventurer might initially suggest.
Faust’s deal does not remain his private transaction.
It radiates outward.
Other people pay for it.
And Gretchen pays the most.
The Woman Inside the Faustian Myth
There is a temptation to regard Gretchen merely as the innocent victim of Faust’s corruption.
Murnau’s film is more complicated than that.
She is certainly caught inside forces she cannot control, but she is also the emotional mechanism through which the film exposes the inadequacy of Faust’s self-centred quest.
The old scholar wanted experience.
The young woman experiences the consequences.
That contrast gives the film its emotional structure.
Faust begins by believing that his dissatisfaction justifies extraordinary action.
Gretchen’s tragedy demonstrates that desire is never entirely private.
Someone else can become the collateral damage of another person’s attempt to transcend their limitations.
The Devil understands this.
Faust does not.
A Faustian Horror Film
Seen through the lens of horror, Faust becomes even more fascinating.
There is the plague.
There is supernatural possession of the landscape.
There is forbidden knowledge.
There is bodily transformation.
There is an ancient bargain.
There is a monstrous figure manipulating human desire.
There is death.
There is madness.
There is damnation.
But Murnau does not organise these elements according to the conventions of later horror cinema. There is no single monster stalking a group of protagonists. There is no conventional haunted house. There is no mystery to solve.
Instead, the horror emerges from temptation.
That is what makes Faust such an important ancestor to the genre.
The Devil does not simply attack the protagonist.
He gives him exactly what he thinks he wants.
The Production as Spectacle
There is something almost appropriate about the scale of Murnau’s production.
UFA committed enormous resources to the film, which became one of the studio’s most technically elaborate productions before Metropolis surpassed it the following year. Shooting took place between September 1925 and May 1926 at the Ufa studios in Berlin-Tempelhof.
The result is not a modest literary adaptation.
It is a cinematic spectacle.
Yet the extraordinary thing is that the spectacle never completely overwhelms the central idea.
The effects exist to visualise the metaphysical.
Mephisto’s wings are not merely impressive.
They make evil enormous.
The transformation of Faust is not merely a trick.
It makes mortality visible.
The plague is not simply a disaster.
It establishes the world in which faith and knowledge collapse.
Murnau repeatedly takes an abstract idea and searches for its physical equivalent.
That is what makes Faust feel so modern.
The Forgotten Battle Over the Words
There is another fascinating layer to the film’s history: even its words were caught in a battle over how Goethe’s legacy should reach the screen.
Gerhart Hauptmann, the Nobel Prize-winning German playwright, was commissioned to write the film’s verse intertitles. His titles were used at a Berlin preview in August 1926, but UFA ultimately discarded them for the October premiere, returning to Hans Kyser’s titles.
Modern restoration has made this history particularly significant.
The Munich Filmmuseum reconstructed a version using Hauptmann’s original intertitles, allowing audiences to experience a substantially different rhythm between text and image.
It is an extraordinary reminder that silent cinema was never actually silent.
Words mattered.
Music mattered.
The performance mattered.
And the relationship between those elements determined how the image was understood.
Murnau’s Faust has therefore survived not as one immutable object but as a film with its own complicated afterlife.
The Restoration of a Nightmare
That afterlife is part of what makes a centenary retrospective worthwhile.
The surviving film has travelled a remarkable path from its original UFA release to multiple versions, restorations and reconstructions. A major restoration by the Filmoteca Española was undertaken under Luciano Berriatúa in 1999, with a later digitalisation coordinated by the Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Foundation.
Different versions have also emphasised different material. The American release contained variations created for its intended audience, while later restorations have attempted to reconstruct the German version and recover material lost or altered over decades.
This matters because Faust is itself a film about transformation.
It has been transformed by history.
Its images have survived while its original circumstances have changed.
Its words have been replaced and recovered.
Its versions have diverged.
Its audience has changed.
And yet Mephisto remains.
From Faust to Frankenstein
It is impossible to watch Murnau’s Faust without thinking about the horror cinema that followed.
The connection to Frankenstein is particularly obvious.
Both stories begin with a learned man confronting the limits of human knowledge.
Both cross a forbidden boundary.
Both discover that knowledge can become dangerous when it is divorced from responsibility.
But there is a crucial distinction.
Victor Frankenstein tries to create life.
Faust tries to escape life as it has been given to him.
Frankenstein’s transgression is creation.
Faust’s is dissatisfaction.
The two stories eventually become almost interchangeable within popular culture because both embody the same warning: human beings can destroy themselves by refusing to accept the limits of being human.
That is one of the great engines of horror.
From Faust to Everything Else
Once you begin looking for the Faustian bargain in horror, it appears everywhere.
The scientist who wants to defeat death.
The artist who wants eternal genius.
The vampire who promises eternal youth.
The millionaire who wants immortality.
The occultist who seeks forbidden knowledge.
The grieving parent who wants the dead returned.
The desperate person who accepts supernatural power in exchange for an unseen price.
The modern horror film has repeatedly returned to the same structure because it is so fundamentally human.
We want something.
We believe we deserve it.
We become convinced that the price is manageable.
Then we discover that the price was the story.
The Devil in the Modern World
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Murnau’s Faust at 100 is that its Devil does not feel particularly old.
The world around him may be medieval or Romantic, but his method remains contemporary.
Mephisto identifies dissatisfaction.
He offers a solution.
He removes the obstacle.
He waits for the consequences.
That mechanism requires no particular period.
The Devil does not need to understand the twenty-first century.
He understands people.
That is why Faust continues to speak to horror cinema a century after its premiere. Technology changes. Society changes. Our anxieties change. But the desire to escape the conditions of our own existence remains remarkably persistent.
The bargain survives because the temptation survives.
Goethe’s Faust, Murnau’s Faust
This is where the relationship between the original Faust and Murnau’s film becomes particularly valuable.
Goethe’s work gives us the intellectual and philosophical architecture of the Faustian myth.
Murnau gives us its dream imagery.
Goethe can make Mephistopheles argue.
Murnau can make him fill the sky.
Goethe can explore Faust’s contradictions through language.
Murnau can place a man before a mirror, a woman in the snow, a plague beneath enormous wings, and a figure of evil looming over a city.
The filmmaker does not replace the writer.
He changes the vocabulary.
And that is the real achievement of Faust.
It demonstrates that adaptation does not have to mean reproduction.
Sometimes it means discovering what a story becomes when another medium removes everything except its essential images.
When the Devil Became a Shadow
A hundred years later, the extraordinary achievement of Faust is not simply that it remains beautiful.
It is that it remains conceptually alive.
The images have become part of cinema’s collective memory: Mephisto spreading his wings over the plague-stricken town; Faust confronting the limits of age; the transformation of the scholar into the young man; Gretchen’s descent into tragedy; the enormous spaces in which human beings appear almost insignificant.
Yet beneath the spectacle is a surprisingly simple horror story.
A man is unhappy with the limits of his existence.
Someone offers him a way out.
He accepts.
Other people suffer.
The Devil keeps his promise.
That last point is important.
Mephisto does not necessarily deceive Faust by refusing to deliver what was promised.
He gives him the bargain.
Faust is simply incapable of understanding what it will cost.
That is the essence of the Faustian horror story.
The Devil does not have to lie.
He only has to let us believe that we understand the deal.
At 100, Murnau’s Faust remains one of silent cinema’s great supernatural achievements because it transforms that idea into pure cinematic language. It is a film about knowledge and ignorance, mortality and desire, temptation and consequence, but above all it is a film about the danger of wanting to transcend the boundaries that define us.
Goethe gave Faust a language through which to question existence.
Murnau gave him a landscape of shadows.
And somewhere inside those shadows stands Mephisto, waiting patiently for the next person who believes that the price of getting everything they want might not be quite as high as it seems.
From the Library to the Screen
This centenary retrospective also connects directly with a recent episode of The Library of the Occult, where we explored Goethe’s original Faust and the extraordinary literary tradition surrounding the man who dared to bargain with the Devil. If Murnau’s film leaves you wanting to go deeper into the ideas behind the imagery — Faust’s pursuit of knowledge, his dissatisfaction with mortality, the nature of the bargain and Goethe’s much larger philosophical conception of the story — the Library episode is the perfect companion piece. The Library of the Occult examines Faust as literature; Faust at 100 examines what happens when that literature is transformed into cinema. Together, they offer two different ways of approaching the same enduring question: how much of ourselves are we willing to surrender to become the person we believe we want to be?
The Prognosis:
Faust remains essential horror cinema because its Devil is not merely an embodiment of evil. He is the embodiment of temptation itself. A century after Murnau first summoned him onto the screen, the most frightening thing about Mephisto is not that he can destroy us. It is that he knows exactly what we would ask for if he offered us the chance.
- Saul Muerte
