Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Official trailer

Nosferatu the Vampyre gets its 8.5 by doing the impossible.

It remakes a masterpiece and stands beside it without shame. Werner Herzog set out to honor Murnau’s 1922 silent film, which he considered the greatest film ever made in Germany, and he deepened it instead of modernizing it, making a slow, mournful, hypnotic art film about death and loneliness. Where the original was a horror film, Herzog’s is closer to a tragic poem, and his vampire frightens and grieves in equal measure.

He’s the most pitiable monster in the genre, a creature cursed with an eternity he no longer wants.

This is a film of immense beauty and almost unbearable melancholy, and it asks real patience. It moves at the pace of a dream or a funeral. For viewers willing to surrender to it, it’s one of the great vampire films. For those wanting fright or momentum, it’ll be a trial.

Herzog’s film puts me under a spell, and Kinski is the reason. His Count is the saddest monster I can think of, and the plague images are the most beautiful horror I know of in a vampire film. There are stretches where my patience runs thin, and they’re what keep it from a 9.

Kinski’s Sorrowful Monster

Klaus Kinski plays Count Dracula, and the performance reinvents what the vampire can be.

Kinski wears the full Orlok makeup from the original, the bald head, the rat teeth, the long claws, but where Max Schreck’s Orlok was pure predatory menace, Kinski’s Dracula is drowning in sorrow. He’s exhausted by immortality, desperate for love he can’t have, longing for the death that’s denied him. He’s a monster who would give anything to be human, or simply to end.

Kinski plays the Count’s loneliness as the deepest thing about him. In his great scene he tells Jonathan that the absence of love is the most abject anguish, and that time is an abyss for a creature that can’t die. That speech is the reason I rate the film this high. Kinski makes you pity the thing that brings the plague, and that pity turns the horror into tragedy through a single performance.

Herzog’s Hypnotic Beauty

The film is visually gorgeous in Herzog’s own way, full of landscapes that feel charged with meaning and sequences that border on the mystical.

The journey to the Count’s castle through the Carpathians is rendered as a passage into another world, with real mountains and rivers shot to feel like the edge of the living world. Herzog finds the uncanny in actual places. That gives the film a reality the studio-bound original couldn’t have.

The film’s most famous images come in its plague sequences.

When Dracula brings pestilence to the town of Wismar, Herzog stages scenes of eerie, beautiful doom, citizens dancing in the plague-stricken square, coffins carried through empty streets, rats flooding the town. A sequence of well-dressed townspeople holding a banquet in the square as the plague takes them, surrounded by rats and coffins, accepting their fate with strange calm, is among the most haunting things in any vampire film. Herzog finds beauty in death itself.

The banquet in the square is the image I carry away from this film. I find it lovelier and more frightening than any jump scare, and I’d put it up against anything Murnau shot.

The Tragic Triangle

Isabelle Adjani plays Lucy, here the film’s moral center and tragic heroine, and Bruno Ganz plays her husband Jonathan. Adjani, pale and luminous, gives Lucy an otherworldly intensity. She’s the only one who understands the true nature of the threat and the only one willing to sacrifice herself to stop it, offering her own blood to keep the Count past the dawn.

The film’s emotional architecture turns Lucy’s sacrifice into something tragic. She gives her life out of love and duty, and Herzog refuses to make the sacrifice clean or triumphant. The evil survives her and passes on, the darkness Dracula carried finds a new host, and the film ends on the cold suggestion that human goodness can’t stop it. The bleakness is a bold choice. Any studio would’ve sanded it down into a happy dawn, and Herzog lets her courage stand against an evil that simply moves on. That’s why the ending stays with me.

The Demands It Makes

This isn’t an easy film. Herzog’s pacing is glacial, his interest is in mood and meaning instead of plot or scares, and the film moves with the deliberate slowness of a ritual. There are long stretches with little dialogue and less action, scenes that exist purely to establish atmosphere and dread. A viewer expecting a horror film in any conventional sense will be lost, and even admirers of art cinema may find their patience tested in the film’s slower passages.

The slowness is the price of the film’s power. Herzog is after a hypnotic, trancelike state, and he won’t rush to get there. Meet it on its terms and it builds to something overwhelming. Fight it, check the clock, and it’ll feel interminable.

A few scenes do lose me, the ones that exist only for atmosphere and keep going past the point where I’ve taken it in, and I’d have trimmed a couple of them. That’s the half point below a 9 right there.

Is Nosferatu the Vampyre worth watching?

Nosferatu the Vampyre deserves its 8.5 as one of the great achievements in vampire cinema and a remake that stands beside its masterpiece source. Werner Herzog transforms Murnau’s horror film into a mournful tragedy, Klaus Kinski reinvents the vampire as the genre’s most pitiable monster, and the film’s hypnotic beauty and bleak vision linger long after it ends. It loses points only for a glacial pace and trancelike rhythm that demand real patience and will defeat anyone not on its wavelength.

This is the vampire film I’d give to anybody who thinks the genre has nothing left to say. It’s slow and sorrowful and gorgeous, it finds tragedy where Murnau found terror, and it justifies the 8.5 with Kinski’s grief and Herzog’s plague images. The only thing keeping it off a 9 is that glacial pace. It asks more of me than the film always pays back.

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