| Nosferatu the Vampyre | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | Werner Herzog |
| Screenplay by | Werner Herzog |
| Based on | Dracula byBram Stoker Nosferatu byF. W. Murnau |
| Produced by |
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| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein |
| Edited by | Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus |
| Music by | Popol Vuh |
Production companies |
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| Distributed by | 20th Century Fox (Germany)[1] Gaumont Distribution (France) |
Release dates |
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Running time | 107 minutes[2] |
| Countries | West Germany France |
| Languages |
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| Budget | |
Nosferatu the Vampyre (German:Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht,lit. 'Nosferatu: Phantom of the Night') is a 1979gothichorror film directed and written byWerner Herzog. The film serves as both a remake[a] of the 1922 filmNosferatu and an adaptation ofBram Stoker's 1897 novelDracula.[b] Herzog’s film is set in 19th-centuryWismar, Germany, andTransylvania. The picture starsKlaus Kinski asCount Dracula,Isabelle Adjani as Lucy Harker,Bruno Ganz asJonathan Harker, and French artist-writerRoland Topor asRenfield. There are two different versions of the film, one in which the actors speak English, and one in which they speak German.[5]
Herzog's production ofNosferatu was very well received by critics and enjoyed a comfortable degree of commercial success.[6] The film also marks the second of five collaborations between director Herzog and actor Kinski,[7] following 1972'sAguirre, the Wrath of God. The film had one million admissions inWest Germany and grossedITL 53,870,000 in Italy.[8] It was also a modest success in Adjani's home country, taking in 933,533 admissions in France.[9]
A novelization of the screenplay was written byPaul Monette and published by bothAvon Publishing andPicador in 1979. The 1988 Italian horror filmNosferatu in Venice is a "sequel-in-name-only",[10] again featuring Kinski in the title role.[11]
In 1850, Jonathan Harker is an estate agent inWismar, Germany. His employer, Renfield, tasks him to visit Count Dracula, who wishes to buy a property in the town. Leaving his wife Lucy behind, Harker travels to Transylvania. En route, he stops at an inn, where the locals beg for him to stay away from the accursed castle. Ignoring the villagers' pleas, Harker continues his journey and arrives at Dracula's castle, where he meets the Count, a man with large ears, pale skin, sharp teeth and long fingernails.
The Count is enchanted by a small portrait of Lucy and agrees to purchase the Wismar property. As Jonathan's visit progresses, he is haunted at night by several encounters with Dracula. In Wismar, Lucy is tormented by nightmares, plagued by images of impending doom. Meanwhile, Renfield is committed to an asylum, having apparently gone insane and bitten a cow. To Harker's horror, he finds the Count asleep in a coffin, confirming to him that Dracula is indeed a vampire. That night, Dracula leaves for Wismar, taking coffins filled with the cursed earth that he needs for his vampiric rest. Harker finds himself imprisoned in the castle and attempts to escape through a window, severely injuring himself in the process. Taken to a hospital, he becomes increasingly ill.
Dracula travels with his coffins by ship to Wismar, systematically killing the ship's crew during the voyage. Death spreads throughout the town on the ship's arrival, which the local doctors, includingAbraham Van Helsing, attribute to a plague caused by the rats from the ship, which begin swarming through the streets. The ailing Jonathan is transported home, but does not appear to recognize Lucy and says the sunlight is hurting him. That night, Dracula visits Lucy. Weary and unable to die, he demands some of the love that she gives to Jonathan, to no avail.
Now certain that something other than plague is responsible for the deaths, Lucy tries to convince the townspeople, who are skeptical and uninterested as they engage in adanse macabre and have alast supper. From a book given to Jonathan by the Transylvanians, Lucy discovers she can defeat Dracula by distracting him until dawn, at which time the rays of the sun will destroy him, but only at the cost of her own life. Jonathan's illness grows worse as his memory worsens and his skin turns pale. Dracula sends Renfield, who has escaped from the asylum, north toRiga as theforerunner for an outbreak of theBlack Death.
Lucy spreads crumbled, consecratedHosts in Dracula's coffins and around Jonathan and the chair he is sitting in. That night, she lures Dracula to her bedroom, where he drinks her blood. She distracts Dracula from the call of the rooster, and at the first light of day he dies. Van Helsing arrives to discover Lucy dead but victorious. He then drives a stake through the heart of Dracula to make sure that Lucy's sacrifice was not in vain. Awakening from his sickness, Jonathan has Van Helsing arrested for Dracula's murder. Getting a maid to sweep away the crumbled Host from around his chair, Jonathan, now a vampire, then states that he has much to do and rides away on horseback, garbed in the same fluttering black as Dracula.
While the basic story is derived fromBram Stoker's novelDracula, director Herzog made the 1979 film primarily as a homage remake ofF. W. Murnau'ssilent filmNosferatu (1922), which differs somewhat from Stoker's original work. The makers of the earlier film changed several minor details and character names. They also did not have permission to use the intellectual property of the novel, which was owned (at the time) by Stoker's widowFlorence. A lawsuit was filed, resulting in an order for the destruction of all prints of the film. Some prints survived and were restored after Florence Stoker had died and the copyright had expired.[13] By the 1960s and early 1970s, the original silent returned to circulation, and was enjoyed by a new generation of moviegoers.[14]
Herzog considered Murnau'sNosferatu to be the greatest film ever to come out of Germany,[15] and was eager to make his own version of the film, withKlaus Kinski in the leading role.[16] By 1979,Dracula had entered thepublic domain, so Herzog opted to include the original character names.
Herzog saw his film as a parable about the fragility of order in a staid, bourgeois town. "It is more than a horror film," he says. "Nosferatu is not a monster, but an ambivalent, masterful force of change. When the plague threatens, people throw their property into the streets; they discard their bourgeois trappings. A re‐evaluation of life and its meaning takes place."[17] Adjani said about her heroine: "There's a sexual element. She is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination — as we all would think. First, she hopes to save the people of the town by sacrificing herself. But then, there is a moment of transition. There is a scene when he is sucking her blood — sucking and sucking like an animal—and suddenly, her face takes on a new expression, a sexual one, and she will not let him go away anymore. There is a desire that has been born. A moment like this has never been seen in a vampire picture".[17] According to Kinski: "We see Dracula sympathetically [in this film]. He is a man without free will. He cannot choose, and he cannot cease to be. He is a kind of incarnation of evil, but he is also a man who is suffering, suffering for love. This makes it so much more dramatic, more double‐edged."[17]
Nosferatu the Vampyre was co-produced byWerner Herzog Filmproduktion, French film companyGaumont, and West German public-service television stationZDF. As was common for West German films during the 1970s,Nosferatu the Vampyre was filmed on a minimal budget and with a crew of just 16 people. Herzog could not film inWismar, where the original Murnau film was shot, so he relocated production toDelft, Netherlands.[6] Parts of the film were shot in nearbySchiedam, after the Delft authorities refused to allow Herzog to release 11,000 rats for a scene in the film.[15] Dracula's home is represented by locations inCzechoslovakia. Herzog originally intended to film inTransylvania, butNicolae Ceaușescu's regime would not allow it due to the relation between the character of count Dracula andVlad the Impaler.Pernštejn Castle stands in for castle Dracula in the film, both interiors and exteriors.[citation needed]
At the request of distributor20th Century Fox, Herzog produced two versions of the film simultaneously to appeal to English-speaking audiences. Most of the scenes with dialogue were filmed twice, once in German and again in English, although a few scenes were shot once with dubbing used as needed. In 2014, Herzog called the English version "great", but the German version the "more authentic" version of the two.[18]
Herzog himself filmed the opening sequence at theMummies of Guanajuato museum inGuanajuato,Mexico, where a large number of naturallymummified bodies of the victims of an 1833cholera epidemic are on public display. Herzog had first seen the Guanajuato mummies while visiting in the 1960s. On his return in the 1970s, he took the corpses out of the glass cases where they were normally stored. He propped them against a wall to film them, arranging them in a sequence running roughly from childhood to old age.[19]
Kinski's Dracula make-up, with black costume, bald head, rat-like teeth, and long fingernails, is an imitation ofMax Schreck's makeup in the 1922 original. The makeup artist who worked on Kinski was the Japanese artist Reiko Kruk. Although he fought with Herzog and others during the making of other films, Kinski got along with Kruk, and the four-hour makeup sessions went on with no outbursts from Kinski himself.[citation needed] Several shots in the movie are faithful recreations of iconic images from Murnau's original film, some almost perfectly identical to their counterparts, intended as homages to Murnau.[20]
Thefilm score toNosferatu the Vampyre was composed by the West German groupPopol Vuh, who have collaborated with Herzog on numerous projects. Music for the film comprises material from the group's albumBrüder des Schattens – Söhne des Lichts.[21] Additionally, the film featuresRichard Wagner's prelude toDas Rheingold,Charles Gounod's "Sanctus" fromMesse solennelle à Sainte Cécile and traditionalGeorgian folk song "Tsintskaro", sung by Vocal Ensemble Gordela.[22]
Dutch behavioral biologistMaarten 't Hart, hired by Herzog for his expertise with laboratory rats, revealed that, after witnessing the inhumane way in which the rats were treated, he no longer wished to cooperate. Apart from traveling conditions that were so poor that the rats, imported from Hungary, had started to eat each other upon arrival in the Netherlands, Herzog insisted the plain white rats be dyed gray. To do so, according to 't Hart, the cages containing the rats needed to be submerged in boiling water for several seconds, causing another half of them to die. The surviving rats proceeded to lick themselves clean of the dye immediately, as 't Hart had predicted they would. 't Hart also implied sheep and horses that appear in the movie were treated very poorly but did not specify this any further.[23]
Released asNosferatu: Phantom der Nacht in German andNosferatu the Vampyre in English, the film was entered into the29th Berlin International Film Festival, where production designerHenning von Gierke won theSilver Bear for an outstanding single achievement.[24]
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Film review aggregatorRotten Tomatoes reports a 93% approval critic response based on 71 reviews, with an average rating of 8.4/10. The website's critical consensus states: "Stunning visuals from Werner Herzog and an intense portrayal of the famed bloodsucker from Klaus Kinski make this remake ofNosferatu a horror classic in its own right."[25]Metacritic, which uses aweighted average, assigned the film a score of 79 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.[26]
In contemporary reviews, the film is noted for maintaining an element of horror, with numerous deaths and a grim atmosphere. Still, it features a more expanded plot than manyDracula productions, with a greater emphasis on the vampire's tragic loneliness.[27] Dracula is still a ghastly figure, but with a greater sense ofpathos; weary, unloved, and doomed to immortality. Reviewer John J. Puccio of MovieMet considers it a faithful homage to Murnau's original film, significantly updating the original material and avoiding the danger of being overly derivative.[28]
Roger Ebert ofThe Chicago Sun-Times reviewed the film upon its 1979 release, giving it four stars out of a possible four, writing: "There is nothing pleasant about Herzog's vampire", which was "played totally without ego by Klaus Kinski". Ebert added, "This movie isn't even scary. It's so slow it's meditative at times, but it is the most evocative series of images centered around the idea of the vampire that I have ever seen since F.W. Murnau'sNosferatu, which was made in 1922."[29] In 2011 Ebert added the film to his "Great Movies Collection." Concluding his review, Ebert said:
One striking quality of the film is its beauty. Herzog's pictorial eye is not often enough credited. His films always upstage it with their themes. We are focused on what happens, and there are few 'beauty shots.' Look here at his control of the color palette, his off-center compositions, of the dramatic counterpoint of light and dark. 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.[30]
| Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Berlin International Film Festival | Golden Bear | Werner Herzog | Nominated | [24] |
| Silver Bear for an outstanding single achievement | Henning von Gierke | Won[c] | ||
| Cartagena Film Festival | Golden Pelican for Best Actor | Klaus Kinski | Won | |
| German Film Awards | Best Director | Werner Herzog | Nominated | |
| Best Actor | Klaus Kinski | Won | ||
| Best Actress | Isabelle Adjani | Nominated | ||
| Best Cinematography | Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein | Nominated | ||
| Best Production Design | Henning von Gierke, Gisela Storch | Nominated | ||
| National Board of Review Awards | Top Five Foreign Language Films | Nosferatu the Vampyre | Won | [31] |
| Sant Jordi Awards | Best Performance in a Foreign Film | Klaus Kinski | Won | |
| Saturn Awards | Best Foreign Film | Nosferatu the Vampyre | Nominated | [32] |
| Best Costumes | Gisela Storch | Nominated |
The choral section of 'Hello Earth' is taken from a Georgian folk song called 'Zinzkaro', which Bush heard performed by the Vocal Ensemble Gordela on the soundtrack of Werner Herzog's 1979 German vampire film Nosferatu The Vampire, one of her more esoteric borrowings.
