Murnau's Nosferatu, set to Kid A and Amnesiac, reaches UK cinemas

Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which runs F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent Nosferatu against Amnesiac and Kid A, opens in cinemas across the UK and Ireland on 2 October, timed to Kid A's 25th anniversary. The two albums play in order and almost whole, Amnesiac first. “Everything in Its Right Place” plays as the plague ship sails for the town, and “Untitled”, the hidden track at the end of Kid A, plays over the last shot of the sun through Ellen's window.

The film comes from Silents Synced, a series that pairs silent films with well-known albums from the 1990s on, devised by Josh Frank of the Blue Starlite urban drive-in in Austin, Texas. The print has touches of colour, some of it pulsing in time with the music, and Orlok and Knock are tinted red; the new visuals are by André Ouellette and Myles Mangino, the Pixies' lighting designer. The Radiohead version was first shown in Los Angeles in September 2024. It is the first Silents Synced title in Britain.

In March a packed house at IU Cinema in Indiana saw it, and the reviewer for WIUX, the university's student radio, found the albums suited the film far better than expected. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian gives it two stars out of five and calls the whole idea wrong-headed, because the albums were never written for the film. For him it is like watching a film while the neighbours play their records too loud, until film and music alike turn into wallpaper.

Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, the UK cinema trailer· CinemaLiveInfowatch on youtube →