13 Nights of Shocktober: Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

 by A.J.

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some horror movie recommendations to help you celebrate Shocktober.

Night 6: Vampire Night

“Can you imagine enduring centuries, and each day experiencing the same futilities?”

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Nosferatu the Vampyre (or, Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night) is German director Werner Herzog’s not quite remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror masterpiece. Murnau was not able to secure the rights to Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, so he changed the character names and locations and some plot points to avoid legal troubles. Herzog does not consider his film a remake, but he follows the structure of Murnau’s film more than Stoker’s novel. Werner Herzog is the kind of filmmaker incapable of making a simple genre picture. His version of Nosferatu is not straightforward horror, but it is haunting and transfixing.

The plot is familiar enough. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz), a young real estate attorney, is sent to Transylvania to oversee the purchase of an estate, close to his own home in Wismar, Germany, by the mysterious Count Dracula.  The Count falls in love with a picture of Jonathan’s wife, Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), imprisons Jonathan, and sets off to claim the young bride as his own.

Klaus Kinski plays Count Dracula as a forlorn creature of menace and despair. His look is the same as Count Orlok, played by Max Schreck, in Murnau’s Nosferatu, one of the most iconic images in film history, instantly recognizable whether you've seen the film or not. His skin is bone white, with a head like an animated skull, fingers like slender claws, and two pronounced fangs are front and center in his mouth. The vampire in Murnau’s film was only a monster, but here he is presented as a pitiful, melancholy creature. This Dracula has no brides or servants. He tells Harker that there are worse things than death, like enduring centuries repeating the same futile nights. In Wismar, he tells Lucy that he wishes to partake of what she and Jonathan share.

Count Dracula is a supernatural creature but still seems to be tied into Herzog’s fascination with the unrelenting and overwhelming force that nature has over humankind (see Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, and Grizzly Man for more intense and unrelenting nature). Harker’s journey through ageless mountains and canyons to Dracula’s castle is an extended sequence set to Richard Wagner’s prelude to Das Rheingold, a choice that enhances the natural landscape’s sense of beauty and awe and foreboding. Hidden deep in that intimidating landscape is Dracula.

Bram Stoker’s novel has Harker’s wife, Mena, as a perfect Victorian era woman that needs to be preserved and protected. Here, Harker’s wife, Lucy, mostly absent from the first half of the film, becomes the main character in the second half and is the only person willing to take action to stop Dracula and the plague spreading rats he has unleashed on the city. This version of Lucy is an agent not only for her own destiny but the whole city.

Herzog and cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein use a handheld camera for many scenes, adding a degree of uncomfortable authenticity and realism to the supernatural story. Unlike the Universal Studios and Hammer productions of Dracula, these locations and sets look and feel real and lived in. Everything from the chairs and silverware to Dracula’s macabre clock feel like real, functional things and imply that he can exist outside of fantasy.

Watching this film in 2021, it is especially horrifying that Dracula’s arrival in Wismar doesn’t just mean the arrival of a vampire. Dracula also brings a huge swarm of bubonic plague spreading rats. A scene of Lucy wandering through plague-ridden Wismar has her encountering a group of people in their finest clothes having their last supper; one tells her that all of the guests are infected with the plague so they are enjoying what they have while they can. The procession of coffins through the town square is like an endless macabre parade.

Herzog was tasked with producing two versions of this film: one in German and one in English, for international markets. After a scene was done in German it would be shot again with the same actors speaking English. Herzog has said that he views the German language version as more authentic since it was his attempt to link classic and modern German filmmaking. There is obviously some dubbing for the minor characters but, overall, I got the same effect from both versions. I recommend this film in general, but I highly recommend it for an atmospheric but not-so-scary night.