A fond and evocative re-creation of its forebear as directed by F.W. Murnau, Nosferatu the Vampyre still contains all the hallmarks of its director, Werner Herzog. Like Murnau’s film, Herzog’s is a period piece that shifts between the Transylvanian highlands marauded by the sinister, malicious Count Dracula, and the sleepy port city of Wismar (filmed in Delft, Netherlands); like that film, this one contains a deft series of shots featuring Count Dracula—his face in close-up, his spine-tingling appearance in the castle, his mannerisms concealing a bloodlust that brings a more literal meaning to that word; and both films contain the deliberate, fearsome ponderousness of an atmosphere leading to the sucking of blood, the perpetration of “evil”, without dispelling its tensions. The greatest success of these films is that they have embodied content as form, and form as content; they suggest convincingly how these creatures, and the world they inhabit, would look and feel if they did exist. This is the unsettling reality of a mannered, fanciful fiction.
While the similarities abound, Nosferatu the Vampyre contains many of the special tics and beauties of which Werner Herzog has long been the purveyor. The film is in color—a modern adaptation enhanced by the pacing and the scenic, contemplative tracking shots, like that of the coach driving alongside the stream whose surface reflects it, creating a dual image drawn out with stunning beauty. Characteristic of Herzog is this attention to the imagery of setting and location, contributing to the pacing as well as to the evocativeness of the story. Every image, every lingering shot and longish take, brews the coming events and intensifies their emotions. Herzog could be said to create an atmospheric heaviness, suited to heightened states and the other extremes common to many of his films. And in this film especially, this style works wonders.
An estate agent called to the office of his ratty, maniacal superior (Renfield, played by a convincing, jittery Roland Topor), Jonathan Harker (played by Bruno Ganz) learns of the interests of a Count Dracula, who wants to buy property in Wismar; convinced that the riches would please his porcelain wife, Lucy (as played by Isabelle Adjani), Jonathan accepts the task of traveling to Transylvania and sets out on horseback the same day, leaving with a languid wave as a man—practical, non-superstitious, dispassionate—that will never believe what the more cautious know to be true.
His long journey to the castle—first on horseback and later on foot, before the coach of Count Dracula spirits him to the castle—is the scenic journey leading to Borgo Pass and the desolate countryside in which a peasant’s hamlet plays host to the traveler. Already slow and lucid, like rainwater falling against a windowpane as seen from inside, the pacing of the story slows to the languid, seductive rhythms of a vampire’s bloodlust. The first sallies of the Count (played by Klaus Kinski), as he edges closer to the wary and stunned Jonathan Harker, are small dances, calculated with artfulness as the psychological parrying and strategy between predator and prey. Blood follows, and the Count has his way.
After Count Dracula sees the locket bearing Lucy’s picture, the journey back to Wismar is that sequence of wonderful crosscutting between the ship, bearing the murderous Count along the high seas, and the abortive attempts of Jonathan Harker to escape from the castle so that he can warn the town (and his wife) of the coming danger. Infesting the town as the emblems of an unearthly plague, thousands of rats accompany the ship that has floated into the canal, and following the spread of the plague and the Count’s furtive nightly rampages, these rats become the ubiquitous signs of death and decay. Rats scurrying over an open-air feast, abandoned by its diners that have died or fled: this is one of the memorable images of the film.
The attention to detail and the sumptuous images, and the deliberate pacing that, like the original, embodies in the atmosphere the seductive, murky tone of the story—this all contributes to the distinction of Nosferatu the Vampyre. Like many of the films filling the corpus of a bold and distinctive director, this one does honor to the cinematic tradition, even as it betrays the methods of a very modern innovator.
