I keep running into embarrassing gaps in my film knowledge: never seen a Hammer movie, never seen The Night Stalker. I know this month is, in part, an excuse to fill in some of those gaps but never has an absence of knowledge felt quite so large as it does now, having finally seen a Werner Herzog movie. I was glad I finally got to experience a Paul Morrissey film, I can officially check off ‘watched multiple lesbian vampire movies’ from the list, but now that I’ve seen ‘Nosferatu the Vampyre’ I’m suddenly aware of how much I need to see the rest of Herzog’s filmography. In addition to just being a good vampire movie it’s also a great movie full stop. We’ll circle back around to the vampire part in a minute but first I want to focus on the nuts and bolts of the movie itself.
For some reason Herzog has been sorted in my brain into “documentary filmmaker who also did some narrative fiction movies.” Looking at his filmography I guess that technically isn’t inaccurate but it certainly seems to be a limited view of his output. I’m one of those strange people who enjoys reading reviews and analyses of movies that I haven’t even seen so I’ve read descriptions of his movies, had people describe their reactions to them, so I guess I should have been more braced than I was for a really, really well put together movie.
I’m not qualified to get into many of the technical details but I can try to explicate the parts that most made an impression on me. First is the slow pace, established by few cuts and long, steady shots. The movie is never in any hurry and instead takes the time for you to really become familiar with its scenes, to really focus on the images it’s giving you. There’s a passage of the film where Jonathan Harker is travelling to the castle of Count Dracula that is unlike anything I’ve seen in any of the other movies where this exact journey is also portrayed. All of the other films included the bare minimum of time spent on it, either shoving it entirely offscreen or getting it over with during a montage. Here it’s a solid section of the movie as Harker first attempts to hire a carriage, then buy a horse, then is forced to simply set off on foot. The movie follows him along dirt roads, across mountain paths, up hills, he traverses an impossible set of terrains with no clear direction other than forward. The camera watches him impassively while the soundtrack underlines everything with dramatic tension.
As he passes into Dracula’s realm the entire tone of the film turns dreamlike. The camera watches as clouds pass overhead, Dracula’s carriage shows up in a place it should be physically impossible to reach, the castle itself is ruins against the sky but is intact as Harker enters it, food materializes despite there being no evidence of staff except a random boy badly playing a violin to no one, the movie eventually subsumes you into its atmosphere. This is mirrored in the second half, when after Dracula has moved to Wismar the city becomes awash with rats, the plague spreads and people toss their furniture into the streets, lines of pallbearers snake across the city square, and a character wanders among them in what seems like a dream sequence until it turns out to be all too real.
None of the individual elements of this movie would be all that out of place in any of the other ones I’ve seen so far but they way they’re shot, the emphasis placed upon them, and the way they work together add up into a more complete movie than any of the other vampire movies so far this month. I’ve seen Renfield before, I’ve seen Van Helsing, there have been secret books full of vampire knowledge, we technically again have a loving couple torn apart by Count Dracula. However. There’s no third act collapse here, no rush to an action scene or excuse for nudity shoved in by anxious producers, no attempt to uses name recognition to just turn something out into the theaters. Herzog has long stated that the original ‘Nosferatu’ is one of the best German language films of all time and it’s clear he made every effort to honor it with his remake.
Which brings us to the vampire part of this vampire feature, and Klaus Kinski. Everything I’ve ever read about Kinski painted him as a terror to work with, a borderline madman that only another madman like Herzog would ever dare work with. He is amazing in this movie. This is the first Count Dracula I’ve seen that’s actually scary. Some of that is the direction, some of that is the extensive makeup, the rest is just Kinski. He’s clearly basing his performance on that of Max Schreck (here’s where I admit another failing: I haven’t seen the 1922 Murnau original, at least in part because I wanted to see if this movie worked as more than just homage) but there’s never a second where I didn’t buy into his performance. It’s utterly unlike any of the other performances I’ve seen. This Dracula isn’t smooth like Lee or pathetic like Kier. He’s sad and lonely but also utterly evil, almost seemingly despite himself. When Harker cuts his finger in front of him and he fixates on it, just barely keeping himself from utterly devouring him but still pushing him across the room by just his obvious hunger, it’s genuinely threatening. He’s hunched and often still but it’s the stillness of a predator. His words are pleasant enough and he seems reasonable but it quickly becomes clear that the words are just passing time until his can go for your neck. When he arrives at Wismar he brings the rats and the plague and the same dreamlike sense of unreality and you absolutely understand why.
This is also the first Jonathan Harker that I liked. Played by Bruno Ganz he’s actually the protagonist of the first half of the movie before he hands it off to Lucy Harker in the second. There’s a key moment early on when he’s told he must leave to meet Count Dracula that very day but allows Lucy to persuade him to instead spend some time with her before he leaves. Just this simple scene, as they walk across the beach, lays the foundation for their relationship for the rest of the movie. We’re shown that he loves Lucy instead of just being told. It makes the ending, where after the death of Dracula Jonathan Harker himself becomes a vampire and rides off to start the cycle anew, all the more compelling.
Which leaves us our third character, Lucy Harker, played by Isabelle Adjani. I’m not sure why this version changes the name of this character from Mina. There is another character named Mina but she’s unimportant. She’s established early on to have an ethereal nature to her. She tries to keep Jonathan from traveling to meet Dracula as she senses the danger he’ll be in, seems to see his actions while he’s at the castle in her dreams, and she can tell there’s more troubling the town than just the black plague after the Count’s arrival. When confronted by Dracula in her own room she is able to deny his advances with a cross and her own convictions. She finds the book given to Jonathan that details what vampires are and how to kill one at the cost of ones own life. She tries to convince a useless Dr. Van Helsing (in this version a foolish man insisting on the supremacy of science, a fun little subversion of the usual portrayal) but eventually determines that she’s on her own. Deciding to end the menace she lures Dracula to her bedside and he feeds on her until the sun rises, whereupon he witnesses the sun and dies. She is, in every meaningful sense, the hero of the movie.
There’s just as few characters and just as little plot as in a lot of these movies but instead of just padding out the runtime with pointless summary conversations or shuffling people around while explaining things to each other that the audience already knows Herzog fills the rest of the movie with themes and captivating images. There’s a lot more going on than just one watch can really unearth. In interviews Herzog has stated that the section of the move where the town reacts to Dracula’s presence and the subsequent deaths and plague by tossing their furniture into the street, holding parties, and essentially going mad is an examination of Dracula as an agent of change, causing the bourgeoisie to question their attachment to material things. I’m sure that’s in there and maybe on a second watch I’ll catch all that. To me it was an example of the creeping unreality that the mere presence of Dracula brought into people’s lives. Herzog has described Dracula as not completely evil but a prisoner to his condition, unable to die and unable to really live, and there are certainly shades of that. It’s never stated but it’s made very clear by Kinski’s performance that the entire reason that Dracula wants to buy a house and move to town is that he’s so incredibly lonely, and it’s a loneliness that springs entirely from his own undead condition, one he can do nothing about.
Not to say there aren’t parts of the movie to criticize. There are occasional insertions of absurdist comedy that seem out of place. The climax of the movie is the death of Dracula and Lucy and the discovery of their corpses by Dr. Van Helsing. Jonathan Harker, revealed to have fully turned into a vampire by this point, accuses Van Helsing of the Count’s murder and insists he be arrested, whereupon everyone in attendance wonder to each other how that’s possible when all of the police and the staff at the jail have all died of the plague. It’s not a bad moment but it sticks out as oddly timed.
I could not be more impressed by this movie. The entire exercise is justified just by getting me to watch this. Normally I have to focus on plot minutiae or dig into a bad performance to stay interested, in the case of this movie I have to find new and different ways to explain how much I enjoyed watching it.
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