Originally, Nosferatu was supposed to show at the Capitol Theater on February 28. Some among you may recall that we had an unscheduled earthquake on that day, essentially shutting down the more historic and less well-tended parts of the Washington's capitol. I learned it had been rescheduled tonight at happy hour, five hours before the show went on. Thank god.

Picture the experience of seeing a silent movie in a theater. Now make it an old theater, contemporary of the same genre. Imagine an orchestra pit instead of recorded music. Now make that orchestra an indie-punk band. Make the film one of the creepiest and most fanatically perfected movies of that era. That's what happened tonight.

Sitting in the balcony with the rest of the sweltering twenty-somethings, I thought about how it might be to see the movie without a more classically orchestral soundtrack, or with no music at all. Rock and roll made the movie beautiful. It brought out the subtlety, rather than drawing attention to corny makeup, bad lighting, elements that would make it historically valuable but essentially a comedy of nearly expired kitsch. The cyan tint over broad daylight to effect nightfall seemed artistic rather than kludgey. The latter day fictional interpretation of Max Schreck didn't occur to me until I was out of the theater. The choppy, unfinished flow came across as merely human, and thus effective.

For whatever reason, I wasn't going to make it, when it was originally scheduled. The universe wanted me to see Nosferatu tonight. Thank god.