Streaming Availability: Shudder
Funny story, I've never seen a Werner Herzog movie. He's made over sixty movies, he's immensely beloved by my species of Film Bro types, I should probably fix that.
...Anyway, fixed.
1979's Nosferatu the Vampyre is a West German remake of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent film classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Since Nosferatu was an adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula novel with the names changed and a few details shuffled, that means Herzog is basically making yet another Dracula. The Murnau version tried to dodge 1920s copyright law by changing the names, but the remake ditches all of that. Our villain today is called "Count Dracula", not "Count Orlok". And I'll be honest, I miss the old names. Orlok could be special unique, where Dracula is just the same monster with a dozen faces that we've seen before.
Luckily for us, Werner Herzog made a really really good Dracula movie. Nosferatu the Vampyre might be single best-shot movie of this entire month so far. Throughout his career, Herzog, had filmed in some of the most inhospitable and dangerous places on Earth. The mountains of Central Europe look like excellent challenging hikes, but they had to be easy compared to the jungles of Peru. Nosferatu the Vampyre looks fantastic, this is the only Dracula movie I'm aware of to have been shot on-location. Our journey takes us from the picturesque canals of Delft, Netherlands (filling in for the German city of Wismar) to the mountains of what was then Czechoslovakia (filling in for the Carpathians) to an actual Old Bohemian castle.
This insistence on shooting real things did have negative consequences though. Many of the animals used in the shoot were reported mistreated. I've heard stories that as many as half of the rats died. Herzog's style could make Holland as unpredictable as the Amazon. There were multiple times the production almost collapsed. Apparently, there was even a brawl with a disgruntled local farmer who had been storing the rats in a barn, and Herzog was almost killed.
There are plenty of immensely striking images, the best we've seen since Carl Theodor Dreyer's Vampyr. We have a woman looking away from the camera on a cold morning beach surrounded by graves. There's the silhouette of the ruined fortress of Castle Dracula up on a mountain. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) being picked up by an ornate carriage in the middle of a dark cave. Count Dracula owns a cuckoo clock made out of skeletons. And Nosferatu the Vampyre's opening credits shows two tiny kitties playing in a bookcase. Tiny little baby guys, 10/10 kittens. They are not a mission statement of this movie's tone: plenty of horror will follow.
This is a long, patient film so we spent quite a while with Harker traveling to Castle Dracula to meet with his rat-like host. However, Harker is ever the fake-out protagonist, and that's still the case here. Usually the hero is Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), but not here, he's is a skeptic until it is too late. Rather, the hero is Jonathan's wife, Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), a fair-skinned, raven-haired woman with bulging eyes. She almost looks like a vampyre herself, honestly. Lucy is the one figure in Wismar who stands up against the horror. The rest all succumb to despair. Even Dracula cannot resist her willpower and charisma. He's just like all of us, in the end all he wants is a cute Goth GF.
The new Nosferatu is played by the deeply-troubled performer, Klaus Kinski. (Who I regrettably must mention was credibly accused of sexual assault multiple times, including by his own daughters.) Kinski looks like the Max Schreck original in terms of costuming: black coat, bald head, rat fangs, pointy ears. He even imitates Schreck's exaggerated almost Kabuki-like movements in the one scene that is a frame-by-frame recreation of the 1922 original. However, he cannot quite manage Orlok's moves with much grace, so they never try it again. In terms of performance, Kinski's face is much sadder and more vulnerable. His version is a cursed man lost in the infinity of immortality whose one reach out towards love can create only horror.
This vampyre's bite is not his greatest weapon. Rather, Herzog's take on the vampyrism is that of a plague that walks like a man. The scariest part of the novel Dracula is the account of the crew of the Demeter, slowly wiped out by their infectious vampyric cargo. Nosferatu the Vampyre continues that pandemic theme even after its Dracula makes landfall. The second half of the movie is more about the coming of the Black Death wiping out a town, which is much more disturbing than a few virgins missing some pints of blood. We see Wismar turn from an idyllic place of peace to a hellish place of nightmares, its lovely streets carpeted by rats. Slowly more and more coffins fill up the squares. In one scene, Lucy passes by an elegant party setting up a dinner table on the cobblestones. They all disappear in the edit, replaced by a mischief of rats resting on their food.
I also want to shout out Roland Topor as Renfield, who is not a major character in this movie. But he is a happy little freaky dude bouncing up and down in constant giggles, seems like a role that was a lot of fun to play. If Count Dracula comes for us one day, I hope I get to be Renfield.
Nosferatu the Vampyre is the strongest version of Bram Stoker's story since at least the 1931 Universal film. I'm pretty dazzled by how much dread and beauty Werner Herzog was able to fit into his movie. Spooky Month has a lot of bangers this year, and this is one of the best yet.
Now, I do have to mention that there was an unofficial sequel made in 1988 also starring Klaus Kinski. This is an Italian film known as Vampire in Venice or sometimes Nosferatu in Venice. I am not going to review that one. It was a disaster of a shoot, with most of its script not filmed, and the movie only barely finished at all in the edit. Kinski so was abusive on set, even molesting one of his female co-stars mid-scene, that the crew all quit in protest. Frankly, I do not want anything to do with that movie. We have plenty of less cursed things to cover.
Sorry for that downer, here's to next time: What if Nosferatu opened an antique store in rural Maine? We'll find out in Salem's Lot.
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