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This 1979 Werner Herzog Horror Movie Is Required Viewing for Nosferatu Fans
Few Dracula flicks capture that gothic vampire dread like this one.
Legendary director Werner Herzog’s 1979 horror homage Nosferatu the Vampyre (stream it here on Peacock!) comes supernaturally close to serving as a definitive optical encyclopedia for what you probably have in mind when you think of classic Dracula at the movies. One part original creation from a screenplay Herzog wrote himself, and one part tribute to F. W. Murnau’s iconic 1922 silent film Nosferatu (including several shot-by-shot remake scenes), it shares a ton of credit alongside its century-old movie predecessor for pairing the mood and themes of Bram Stoker’s 1897 literary landmark, Dracula, with a distinctive visual vocabulary.
Bats taking flight in the night, the faces of mummies (filmed authentically in Mexico) forever frozen in the hour of their deaths, and especially the pale, weary, and frighteningly feral visage of Count Dracula himself (played by frequent Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski) — there’s hardly a frame of Nosferatu the Vampyre that doesn’t contain an indelible cinematic image of gothic horror at its most serious and sinister. But if you’re familiar with Herzog as a director, then the emphasis on imagery won’t come as a surprise… and it’s certainly apt for the subject matter.
With Robert Eggers' fresh take on Nosferatu currently tearing up the box office, it's the perfect time to revisit Herzog's version, which terrified audiences a few decades ago.
The definitive Dracula imagery of Nosferatu the Vampyre
“Our civilization is starving for new images,” Herzog once told the late Roger Ebert, who himself offered high praise for how Nosferatu the Vampyre elevated what was already a pretty familiar horror archetype: “Here is a film that does honor to the seriousness of vampires. No, I don't believe in them. But if they were real, here is how they must look.”
Ebert probably wasn’t only talking about Kinski’s performance as Count Dracula — though with his anciently overgrown fingernails, rat-bitten ears, ice-white bald head, and prominently fang-y teeth, the late German actor exudes an imposing on-screen dread that almost rates with Darth Vader for so successfully embodying storybook villainy.
The movie's cascade of archetypal gothic images persists at every turn — from early scenes that find Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) hiking it alone through a Carpathian mountain pass up to Dracula’s castle amid placidly treacherous roiling waters; to the convulsively creepy thrall laughter of faithful servant Renfield (Roland Topor); to the film’s closing moments, when rats have overtaken the city while the town’s few survivors hold a perverse street party in anticipation of their own imminent deaths.
In between, Nosferatu the Vampyre lets its camera linger patiently over the kind of grim and brooding imagery that tends to stay with you long after the credits have rolled. A ship’s sole-survivor captain lashes himself to his helm, determined to stave off death until he’s made it to port; later, that same ship guides itself with a slow and assured supernatural precision into an impossibly tiny canal — with the dead captain still strapped at his post. The eyes of heroine Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) pierce their completely dark surroundings with expressions of horror that tell wordless scary stories of their own. And even though you know it’s coming, the shock factor is real when Kinski’s Dracula breaks his blood-starved composure and savagely swats a chair aside for a taste of Harker’s freshly-sliced finger.
Lots of present-day fans know Herzog for his later-career acting roles: He’s the villainous “Client” in The Mandalorian who pays top dollar to get his hands on Baby Yoda; he played a terrific major bad guy’s role in the first Jack Reacher film opposite Tom Cruise; and he serves as the grounding narrative voice for many of his own critically adored documentary films, including higher-profile successes like 2005’s Grizzly Man and 2016’s Into the Inferno.
But as an actual director, Herzog has never done anything by half measures. When he and Kinski teamed up to tell the story of a man who moved a steam ship — over land — from one side of the Andes Mountains to the other in Fitzcarraldo, Herzog attempted to recreate the feat for the camera, at admittedly smaller scale, by capturing his own efforts at engineering the move of a 320-ton ship to the top of a hill. Herzog’s always been attracted to stories that center on obsessiveness, and in films like Nosferatu the Vampyre, there’s a labored-over quality — evident in the high visual drama suffusing almost every scene — that suggests he shares an artist’s kinship with the most obsessive of his own fictional characters.
Stream Nosferatu the Vampyre on Peacock here, and check out Robert Eggers Nosferatu in theaters now.
