Double Feature: ‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula’ and ‘Nosferatu The Vamprye’ Each Portray Vampires As Being More Lonely Than Sexy

In the glory days of theater-going, movie fans would sit back, relax, and enjoy not one but two features at their favorite movie theater. While it’s more difficult to find in our multiplex era, the wide variety of movie titles on streaming services means movie lovers can have their own double feature in the comfort of their own homes — and we’re here to help you decide what to watch. In this edition of the Decider Double Feature, we celebrate Halloween early with two auteur-driven retellings of one of the most important horror tales of all time: Francis Ford Coppola’s lush adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Werner Herzog’s unsettling remake of a classic silent feature Nosferatu the Vampyre.

Do you remember the Sexy Vampire Boom of the late aughts? (They seem so long ago.) Thanks to Twilight — and Robert Pattinson’s brooding portrayal of Edward Cullen, the role that made him a star — vampires were all the rage a decade ago, with teenagers (and, let’s face it, horny women of all ages) losing their minds over the tragic tale of a handsome undead teenage boy who fell in love with a mortal girl. While the Twilight series brought a few twists to the vampire genre (the primary difference between historical vampires and Stephenie Meyer’s world: her vampires had luminescent skin that sparkled in the sun), it continued the romantic quality of these immortal bloodsuckers: they are lonely and morose figures, cursed to wander through time without strong connections with others — until they encounter their true love (or someone that resembles it).

It all goes back to Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror novel Dracula, which has inspired countless film adaptations and subsequent ripoffs. Inspired by the real-life historical figure Vlad the Impaler, Dracula introduced the classic bloodsucking literary figure (as well as all of the conventional rules surrounding vampires: how they live and spread their immortality, how they change their forms, how they can be killed) and established an entirely new literary genre. And while there are so many movie Draculas to chose from, my favorite is the one who appears in a little movie I like to call Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (or Bram Stoker’s Dracula for short).

Bringing all of the lush and deadly aspects of the gothic romance to the screen, Coppola taps Gary Oldman to lead his all-star cast in the definitively faithful adaptation of Stoker’s novel. And Oldman is the perfect choice to play the count; he’s known for disappearing in his roles, and this film gives him the chance to play many different iterations of Dracula. He’s the old, withered being that Keanu Reeves’ character Jonathan Harker first encounters in his gloomy castle in Transylvania; he’s the destructive and monstrous creatures he embodies to wreak havoc on both his neighbors in the countryside and in metropolitan London, where he relocates; and he is the charming and seductive newcomer to England’s capital, where he meets and seduces Harker’s new bride (and spitting image of his own long-lost love), Mina (Winona Ryder).

Dracula is a horror film, yes, but it’s what we might call “elevated horror” today: an artistic, auteur-driven vision, more like The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby than a schlocky b-movie with plastic fangs dripping with thick, red-dyed corn syrup. That’s not to say, however, that Coppola doesn’t revere and respect the films that came before his own. Using practical effects rather than CGI, his Dracula is human in more ways than one. It’s well-crafted and gorgeous, probably more beautiful than more movies about an immortal being who kills for both blood and lust. But it also attempts to understand Dracula — former human, now beast. His origin story is that he’s heartbroken; renouncing God and anything heavenly, he embraces pure evil as a form of retribution (and self-flagellation). The result is high drama in the Grand Guignol tradition: it’s all emotion and gore, laid out before us, and it takes it serious enough to veer into camp. (My favorite part: a breathless Mina, overwhelmed with her sudden bloodlust, gasps, “Take me away from all this death!” It’s a fun thing to repeat to yourself when you recognize the absurdity of a stressful day, or need to recognize it.)

Coppola was not the first director to examine Dracula’s profound existential crisis. Werner Herzog’s vision of the vampire tale varies greatly from the traditional Stoker adaptations, but mostly because it’s a remake of a silent German horror film: F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu. That film was an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker’s novel; thanks to legal threats from the author’s estate, Murnau changed many details including the characters’ names, hence the pale and fanged villain “Count Orlok”). Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, on the other hand, gives its characters their classic names, with Klaus Kinski as Dracula, Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker, and Isabelle Adjani playing Lucy Harker (the one incongruity: rather than Mina, Herzog substitutes the name of her friend who is turned into a vampire by Dracula half-way through Stoker’s story).

Wearing prosthetics, makeup, and fangs to look just like the original Count Orlok, Kinski makes a perfect Dracula — in real life, the actor was a bit of a monster — but he also imbues his character with so much pathos that the vampire is almost an anti-hero. He’s not overcome with heartbreak or grief; rather, Kinski’s Dracula is just lonely as hell, having spent centuries on his own in a never-ending quest for blood. One can imagine, I guess, how much of a bummer that would be.

While Herzog makes his titular character a sad-sack bloodsucker, the writer-director actually gives his female lead some material to work with. Adjani’s Lucy is not just the first victim of the story, nor is she easily swayed by the vampire’s seduction. Rather, she’s onto him from the get-go, knowing that her husband has disappeared and that Dracula is likely to blame. Not to mention she’s the only one who happens to notice that the plague has swarmed the German city of Wismar just as Dracula arrives by boat. (Stoker’s novel coincided with an immigration panic in the late 19th century, with the denizens of London convinced that the Eastern Europeans flooding their city were bringing with them sickness and death.) And it’s Lucy who brings Dracula down by seducing him — he is too distracted by her beauty and her capability for love that he can’t recognize that she’s luring him into her trap.

Draculas might be a dime a dozen at this point, and you may think the whole bloodsucking business is old hat. Which, in a way, it is! But if you’re looking for two of the best and most visually striking versions of the classic tale, you can’t go wrong with these two adaptations that, despite their differences, boil down to one essential theme: one cannot imagine the loneliness of a Middle Ages vampire.

Tyler Coates is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Where to stream Bram Stoker's Dracula

Where to stream Nosferatu The Vampyre