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Nosferatu the Vampyre

Watching Nosferatu The Vampyre, the amazing 1979 film now available to stream for free on Shout! Factory TV, is like floating into a creepy-crawly slow-motion nightmare of old-school horror imagery. Bats, rats, spiders’ webs, long fangs, chalk-pale skin, and much more: they’re all here. What a bizarre spell it casts.

The movie has an unusual backstory. It’s a remake of a 1922 silent classic by German director F.W. Murnau, one of the prime architects of horror picture high style who subsequently came to Hollywood and directed one of its most unusual romances, the incredible Sunrise, which was awarded a special Oscar at the very first Academy Awards ceremony. The 1979 version was the brainchild of director Werner Herzog. Herzog, a devoted friend of Lotte Eisner, a Murnau contemporary who was the author of one of the first critical studies of the pioneering filmmaker, revered Murnau’s work while at the same time wanting to put his own stamp on the material (which had been adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula without permission). During this period of Herzog’s career, he was known as an exacting cinematic realist. Making a movie about Spanish conquistadors going up the Amazon River, he really went up the Amazon River (see Aguirre, The Wrath Of God). Making a movie in which an entrepreneur drags a steamboat over a mountain, Herzog dragged a steamboat over a mountain (see Fitzcarraldo). And so on. And so the rats and bats and pestilent peripherals of this movie have a particular authenticity.

As does the movie’s vampire. Herzog’s frequent leading man was the supernaturally intense and frighteningly erratic Klaus Kinski. (Herzog’s own 1999 documentary on the late actor—he died in 1991—is called My Best Fiend.) Made up in the same style as Max Schreck of the Murnau film, Kinski here has chalk-white skin, a seemingly enlarged skull, jug ears, no hair, a rodent-like overbite, and extended, curly fingernails. He’s an amazing, appalling sight. But his performance is even more unnerving than his appearance. While he can’t quite be accused of underplaying, Kinski brings a dreadful quietude to his depiction of an undead creature in a constant state of need. (This Dracula does not have any brides serving him at his ruin of a castle.) The performances by international arthouse luminaries of the day Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani, as vampire targets Jonathan and Lucy Harker, are no less stylized—they frequently seem like sleepwalkers. (French writer and artist Roland Topor, who plays the madman Renfield, provides a nice over the top contrast.) As the action moves from Transylvania (Harker’s encounter with a troupe of gypsies who warn him against an undead summit speaks to Herzog’s ethnographic interests, which recur throughout his filmography) to Wismar, Germany—where an al fresco dining session in the midst of a vampire/vermin plague is one of the movie’s horrific highlights—the movie casts a spectacular spell. The finale, more pessimistic than Murnau’s original, and indeed perhaps than any other vampire movie to date, is enigmatically arresting.

Compared to most contemporary horror pictures, Herzog’s movie is slow going—but, as my description has likely implied, it’s a hypnotic kind of slow, and filled with visual flourishes that are still striking today. There are two versions out there, one in German, one in English, and while the German version is favored by Herzog (and makes more vivid some of the film’s more hermetic cultural references, as when various Kinski scenes are scored to Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” music), both films have the same visual punch. Check out when the vampire first accosts a sleeping Harker (above): Herzog and cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein light the scene so that the left side of the frame (Harker sleeping) is in full color, while the right side (Nosferatu staring at his intended prey) appears to be in black-and-white.

[Stream Nosferatu the Vampyre for free on Shout! Factory TV]

THE DESCENDENTS OF NOSFERATU

Only Lovers Left Alive — The droll hipster vampires of Jim Jarmusch’s witty, hypnotic, encyclopedic 2013 horror comedy are the happier descendants of Herzog’s pale, wide-eyed undead and soon-to-be undead.

Sinister — The 2012 Ethan Hawke-starrer has a spooky aesthetic with a visual style that frequently uses black-and-white with color effects that were clearly influenced by Herzog’s work.

The Twilight Saga (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse, Breaking Dawn Part One, Breaking Dawn Part Two) — Hey—these ARE vampire movies, after all, and the final two were directed by Bill Condon, a knowing filmmaker who injected some subtextual looks back at classic vampire flicks in his installments. And they’ve won Herzog’s (reserved) admiration. “Not that bad,” he called them in a recent personal appearance. “We have to take it seriously that there are films out there that know how to address a 14 or 15-year-old.” The director, whose eccentric bearing and unforgettable sonorous voice have made him a pop culture cult figure in recent decades (he just did a cameo on Parks And Rec), has even made a film starring Robert Pattinson.

Veteran (that is, old-ish) critic Glenn Kenny has written for oodles of publications and these days reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com. He blogs at Some Came Running and tweets (mostly in jest) at @glenn__kenny.

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