Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Nosferatu the Vampyre (“Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht”)
Directed by Werner Herzog
Written by Werner Herzog
1979/West Germany
Werner Herzog Filmproduktion/Gaumont/Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen
First viewing
#668 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
IMDb users say 7.5/10; I say 8/10

[box] Count Dracula: [Hearing howling] Listen… [More howling] Listen. The children of the night make their music.[/box]

Werner Herzog’s homage to Murnau is a visual feast.

Renfield sends Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) on a dangerous but potentially lucrative journey to Transylvania to try to sell a house to Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski).  Harker’s wife Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) has a bad feeling about the trip and urges him not to go. When Harker returns, he is gravely ill and demented.  Dracula arrives to occupy his new house and brings with him a ship full of rats and an epidemic of plague.  Doctor Van Helsing does not believe in the occult or vampires so it is up to Lucy to slay the fiend.

I love Werner Herzog’s sense of lighting and framing so from the opening, in which a shot of books, fruit, and kittens looked to me like an Old Master, I was hooked.  In addition, Klaus Kinski may make the very best Dracula ever.  He actually looked like a bat to me and was scary and pathetic at the same time.  I had not known that Bruno Ganz was in this film.  He is one of my very favorite actors and he is wonderful, as always, here, especially as he transitions from before his encounter with Dracula to after.  The score, done by frequent collaborators Florian Fricke and Popul Vuh, adds to the atmosphere.

That said, the story started losing me about the time Dracula arrived with those rats.  Oh, how I hate the creatures!  I don’t know how Isabelle Adjani could stand to walk through them.  But it wasn’t just the rats.  The film starts getting more and more surreal to the point where it lost some of its earlier appeal.  Nevertheless, I could have looked at the pictures for another hour.

BFI Trailer