Nosferatu in Venice is not a particularly successful film but it is one of interesting potentials. Venice is always a location that has afforded an enormous symbolic resonance – see films like Death in Venice (1971), Don’t Look Now (1973) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990). The city’s age, its narrowness, the shadows that seem to lurk in its corners – all have an aching beauty. But contrarily, the film uses this but never does anything with it. Occasionally there are images that strike – there’s one great shot of the vampire’s giant shadow pursuing a girl along the opposite wall of the street around a corner, an effect that could have been taken right from the original Nosferatu (1922). The dialogue does tend to epigrammatic vagueries, but occasionally offers some potent images. There’s a neat explanation for why the vampire must sleep in a patch of its own earth: “He carries with him always a patch of cursed land. He is lulled to sleep by the cries of the dead.” The ending in which the fearless vampire hunters, in seeking to kill the vampire, instead kill the person who offers him his release into true death and curse him to keep living, is rich in irony.