Nosferatu the Vampyre

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre is a stylish remake of the silent classic by F.W. Murnau. It is a solid vampire movie, but also thoroughly Herzog, with brooding meditation, a lot of scenery, and the absolutely correct casting of Klaus Kinski as Dracula.

The story conforms fairly closely to Murnau's film, that is to say not much like Bram Stoker's novel. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is sentto to Transylvania by his boss, Renfield, who is already a giggling lunatic, to give Count Dracula the documents on his purchase of a house in Wismar. Harker takes a long, arduous trip, finally reaching the nearest town, where no one will give him a ride. He walks instead, and Herzog uses a lot of what is presumably location scenes of the Carpathian Mountains at dusk.

Harker finally arrives at Dracula's castle, where the doors open by themselves. Kinski, made up to look like a giant rat, with a gray pallor, rodent teeth, Vulcan ears, and long, sharp fingernails, welcomes Harker, but unlike the traditional Dracula films, he isn't a whit handsome or charming. He speaks as if it were painful, or if he had never tried it before. We get some of the usual Dracula trappings--Harker is given a sumptuous meal, accidentally cuts himself, and Kinski sucks his blood. I would imagine if Harker had any doubts they would be gone by now. Dracula ends up biting him and then locking Harker in and packing up his boxes of earth for travel by ship. Harker escapes, and his wife (named Lucy, not Mina, for some reason), played by Isabelle Adjani, senses something is up.

Dracula fans will know much of the rest. The ship, over-run by rats, arrives in Wismar with no one alive aboard. The rats start spreading plague, and soon very few are left alive in town. Adjani, reading up on vampires, learns that the only way to defeat Dracula is to keep him up until after the cock crows, where he will die from exposure to the sun. She does this, and I loved the look on Kinski's face when he hears the fatal rooster crow. If he had a thought balloon it would read, "Oops."

Where Herzog's film goes different is that Harker picks up where Dracula left off, turning into a vampire himself.

The film has a lot of style and Herzog seems to have macabre fun with the material. At times it's a bit too heavy, but there are moments of wit, especially when he includes the line from the original where Dracula looks at Lucy's portrait and says, "What a lovely throat." The photography is mostly grim and colorless (I don't recall much blood spilled). It's a good example of when a serious filmmaker tackles a genre film. You never know how those will go, but this is one of the better ones.