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Review
NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE
(Nosferatu, Phantom Der Nacht)
Rating: 
West Germany/France. 1979.
Director/Screenplay/Producer – Werner Herzog, Based on the Novel Dracula by Bram Stoker and 1922 Film Nosferatu Written by Henrik Galeen, Photography – Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, Music – Florian Flicke & Popol Vuh, Special Effects – Cornelius Siegel, Makeup – Dominique Ansambl Gordela & Reiko Kruk, Production Design – Ulrich Bergfelder & Henning von Gierke. Production Company – Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/Gaumont.
Cast:
Klaus Kinski (Count Dracula), Bruno Ganz (Jonathan Harker), Isabelle Adjani (Lucy Harker), Walter Ladengast (Dr Van Helsing), Roland Topor (Renfield)
Plot: Real-estate agent Jonathan Harker leaves his hometown of Wismar and travels to Transylvania to complete a property sale for Count Dracula. But the pale, rat-like Dracula drinks Jonathan’s blood and then leaves him locked in his castle while he departs for Wismar. Dracula arrives in a ship filled with plague-infected rats. And as Wismar succumbs to the plague, Dracula emerges at night to drink his fill. Captivated by the beauty of Jonathan’s wife Lucy, Dracula determines to make her his.
1979 heralded a big vampire movie revival. It was the same year that also saw the lavish Dracula (1979) remake with Frank Langella, the tv adaptation of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot (1979), a tv pilot called Vampire (1979) and the spoofy Love at First Bite (1979) – even Nightwing (1979) featuring killer vampire bats. Nosferatu the Vampyre however was a direct remake of Nosferatu (1922), the silent classic that was the first ever vampire film and the first (unofficial) screen adaptation of Dracula (1897).
The remake comes courtesy of German director Werner Herzog. Werner Herzog had made films like The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser (1974) and Strosczek (1977), but was then mostly known for Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1977) and the later Fitzcarraldo (1982), the latter two being made under extraordinarily arduous conditions where Herzog took entire film crews into the Amazonian rainforest.
The original Nosferatu was highly controversial when it came out because the filmmakers had failed to purchase the screen rights to the Dracula story from Bram Stoker’s widow. Attempts were made to disguise the connection by naming Dracula as Count Orlock, but she successfully sued and all prints of the film were ordered destroyed. By the time of this remake, Dracula was of course in public domain and Werner Herzog was free to name the characters Dracula, Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing and so on. Certainly as adaptations go, Herzog launches into the book with a determination to shake up expectations of the story. Van Helsing is played as an indecisive old duffer rather than a sharp-witted savant who, when he finally does get around to staking the vampire, is promptly arrested for murder. And the ending with a now vampiric Jonathan Harker riding off along a beach to take Dracula’s place all certainly makes for the most divergent of any version of the Bram Stoker tale to date.
In the original Nosferatu, director F.W. Murnau invoked a world of the wholly fantastique surrounding the vampire. There was the sense of having stepped over a physical line into a world that operated on almost Mediaeval notions. (Murnau’s later Faust (1926) embraces an even more comprehensive Mediaeval worldview with images of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and a personified Death covering an entire town in the shadow of its cloak). On the other hand Werner Herzog is a quite different filmmaker to F.W. Murnau. Herzog is a painstaking realist and his films reject easy Hollywood dramatic cliches. Herzog is renowned for going to extraordinary lengths to make films, including twice trekking into the Amazonian rainforest, recruiting native tribes as extras and building entire settlements, which he had to settle into over two seasons when the production was rained out. Herzog being such a concertedly realist filmmaker, it seems almost as though Murnau’s sense of a palpably fantastical otherworld is something alien to him. The most otherworldly Nosferatu the Vampyre gets is Jonathan Herher’s journey through the rawly natural mountain terrain accompanied by a languidly dreamy score by German avant garde rock group Popol Vuh (who for some reason take their name from the Mayan holy book). Herzog rejects almost any sense of Klaus Kinski’s Nosferatu as a supernatural being. There are no scenes here, as in the original, of Nosferatu vertically rising up out of his coffin or disappearing like a transparent wraith, this Dracula never demonstrates any supernatural powers, rather Kinski’s vampire is a sad pitiful creature whose condition is relayed solely in physical terms.
Herzog conducts some often shot-for-shot copies of scenes from the original. Other times though the film is quite variant. Where F.W. Murnau was influenced by the Expressionist lighting schemes of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919), Werner Herzog draws upon classical artwork – Expressionistic images of Dracula’s giant bloated shadow moving along a whole wall impressively vie with the totentatz and Last Supper tableaux of the dying townspeople in the rat-infested streets, while Isabella Adjani’s Lucy is modeled as a pre-Raphaelite Madonna in a performance given entirely in the weeping, fainting fits of a Gothic heroine.
One of Herzog’s greatest successes is the casting of his frequent collaborator Klaus Kinski as Dracula. Kinski is made up like Max Schreck in the original – bald and pale-faced, in high black Chinese collar and six-inch fingernails. But where Max Schreck played the part as an otherworldly figure of piercing unearthly intensity, Klaus Kinski plays with a creepy whimpering shuffle. His Nosferatu seems like a frightened rat emerging into the daylight, ever so cautiously trying to find the acceptance of human company. It’s a wonderful performance on Klaus Kinski’s part and the sad, haunted soliloquies Herzog writes for him are quite marvelous.
As with the Murnau original, Dracula is not seen as a sensual seducer – as he is seen in most English-speaking versions of the story – but rather as a figurer associated with rats and the Black Plague. Herzog also keeps the original metaphor in the 1922 film of the town of Wismar as a stylized, idyllic perfect center of petty bourgeoisie values and Dracula as an incarnation of Mediaeval Death baying at the door. Interestingly Herzog and his crew were refused permission to shoot the original Bremen locations used by Murnau in the original, so traveled to the Dutch town of Delft instead. However after shooting began and it was learned that they were planning to release a horde of rats throughout the town, the town’s mayor refused further permission and the production was forced to further relocate in Germany to shoot all the rat scenes.
Nosferatu the Vampyre was sequelized, sans Werner Herzog but with Klaus Kinski and this time a full head of hair, in the rather dull Nosferatu in Venice/Vampires in Venice (1988).
Werner Herzog’s other genre films include the surreal likes of Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970) and Heart of Glass (1976) and the susbequent The Wild Blue Yonder (2005), a mockumentary about alien visitors. Herzog also starred in and produced the amusing mockumentary Incident at Loch Ness (2004). Later Herzog documented his tempestuous love/hate working relationship with the seemingly half-deranged Klaus Kinski, which stretched through four films, in the documentary My Best Fiend (1999). The part of Van Helsing was played by the late Belgian writer and theatre director Roland Topor, who also designed and wrote the screenplay for the French animated sf film Fantastic Planet (1973), the novel and screenplay for the wonderfully paranoid Roman Polanski film The Tenant (1976) and script and art direction of the hilariously perverse Belgian talking animal puppet version of the Marquis de Sade story, Marquis (1990).
Other adaptations of Dracula are:– Nosferatu (1922); Dracula (1931) with Bela Lugosi; the Hammer Dracula/The Horror of Dracula (1958) with Christopher Lee; the Spanish Count Dracula (1970) also with Christopher Lee; the cinematically-released tv movie Dracula (1974), with Jack Palance; Count Dracula (1977), the BBC tv adaptation with Louis Jourdan; the lushly romantic Dracula (1979) with Frank Langella; Francis Ford Coppola’s visually ravishing Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), featuring Gary Oldman; Guy Maddin’s silent ballet adaptation Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (2002); the modernized Italian tv movie version Dracula (2002) with Patrick Bergin; and Dracula (2006) with Marc Warren. Last updated: Friday, 12 September 2008
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