Nosferatu the Vampyre: Herzog's Melancholy Remake

Most vampire films are about appetite. Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is about exhaustion. Its Count has been alive for centuries, is bored of it, and would very much like to stop — a reading of Dracula that almost nobody had filmed before 1979 and that has been quietly borrowed ever since by every vampire who sighs on screen.

Herzog made it in 1979 as an explicit act of lineage. He has said repeatedly that he considered F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu the greatest film ever made in Germany, and that his generation of West German directors had no fathers, only grandfathers — the wartime rupture having severed them from anyone working in between. The remake was a way of reaching over the gap and shaking hands.

The legal joke that shaped both films

The reason Murnau’s film exists in its strange form is a lawsuit. Prana-Film adapted Bram Stoker’s novel without acquiring the rights, changed the names to Orlok, Hutter and Ellen, and lost in court to Stoker’s widow Florence, who won a judgment ordering every print destroyed. The 1922 film survives purely because copies had already escaped the country.

By 1979 Stoker’s novel had passed into the public domain, and Herzog took evident pleasure in restoring what the courts had taken. His vampire is called Dracula. His solicitor is Jonathan Harker, his wife is Lucy, the madman is Renfield. The film wears Murnau’s shot design and Stoker’s names simultaneously, which no other version can claim.

Herzog shot it twice, in German and in English, performance by performance rather than dubbing after the fact. The German version is the better film by a clear margin — the English readings are stiffer, and Isabelle Adjani in particular sounds like she is reciting. Seek out the German cut with subtitles.

Kinski under four hours of glue

Klaus Kinski’s Dracula is a piece of design before it is a performance. Reinhard Kaspar’s makeup — the bald dome, the rat teeth set at the front of the mouth, the enormous ears, the taloned fingers — took around four hours to apply each day and is a direct copy of Max Schreck’s Orlok. What Kinski does inside it is the departure.

Schreck’s Orlok is vermin: a creature of rigid movement and pure predation with no inner life to speak of. Kinski plays a man who has been condemned. His voice is soft and reasonable. His most famous speech tells Harker that time is an abyss, thousands of years deep, and that being unable to grow old is a cruelty — that death is not the worst thing. He says it quietly, over a meal he cannot eat, and the film stops dead to let him.

The pairing is the joke everyone knows: Herzog and Kinski made five films together across sixteen years, and their working relationship was famously violent enough that Herzog built an entire documentary out of it. Kinski’s Dracula is where the volatility got pointed inward. The performance is almost entirely stillness. When he stands in Lucy’s bedroom doorway, hands hanging, waiting to be invited, he looks less like a hunter than a beggar.

The town, the rats, and the best sequence in the film

Herzog shot the Wismar scenes in Delft, in the Netherlands, standing in for the north German port, with additional work in Schiedam. The story of the rats is the one that gets retold: Herzog imported thousands of laboratory rats — white, and dyed grey for the camera — and Delft’s authorities refused permission to release them in the town. Schiedam agreed. Depending on who is telling it the count sits around eleven thousand, and the rats arrived in worse condition than anyone had planned for.

What that expense buys is the film’s great set piece, and it is a triumph of tone. Plague has taken Wismar. The burghers, knowing they are dead, drag furniture into the town square, sit down to a formal dinner in their best clothes, and eat among the rats swarming over the cobbles. A string quartet plays. Lucy walks through the middle of it in daylight, trying to tell people what she knows, and nobody is interested any more.

The sequence works because Herzog refuses to shoot it as horror. There is no scoring sting, no rapid cutting, no reaction close-up telling you to recoil. The camera observes a dinner party. Popol Vuh’s score — Florian Fricke’s group, Herzog’s collaborators across most of his best work — supplies choral drone rather than menace, and the film opens with Wagner’s Rheingold prelude, which is a piece about a river beginning rather than a monster arriving. The effect is elegiac. This is what the whole film is doing: taking a monster movie and playing it as a funeral.

Herzog’s location work in the first act is doing the same job by different means. The journey to the castle was shot in the High Tatras and at Pernštejn Castle in Moravia, and Herzog lets it run long past the point of narrative usefulness — mist on ridgelines, a gypsy camp, Harker walking. Murnau went to real Slovakian locations for the same stretch in 1922, and Herzog is deliberately retracing him. The pacing choice pays off later: because the film has already trained you to sit still through landscape, the plague dinner in the square reads as one more thing being calmly observed rather than a shock. A director who had cut the Carpathian trek for pace would have had to shoot the rats as horror to get any charge out of them.

The opening credits do the same work in ninety seconds. Herzog shot the mummified corpses in the Museo de las Momias in Guanajuato, Mexico — real bodies, mouths open, disinterred for unpaid grave rents — and lays them under Popol Vuh before a single word of story. The film tells you at the door that it is about the indignity of the dead.

Where it sits

Nosferatu the Vampyre belongs to a small, awkward category: remakes that justify themselves by disagreeing with the original. Murnau’s film is about contamination from the east, and its politics have been argued over ever since. Herzog’s is about a creature who envies the people he kills, which reroutes the horror entirely — the dread comes from recognising the monster rather than fearing him.

The closest cousin is Dreyer’s Vampyr, which shares the fog-blind, slightly narcotic pacing and the willingness to let a scene drift. The most obvious descendant is Let the Right One In, where the vampire’s condition reads as a life sentence rather than a power fantasy — Tomas Alfredson’s film is far more Herzog’s grandchild than Murnau’s. The century-long argument about what the vampire is actually for is laid out in the vampire canon, and the metaphor’s mutations get their own treatment in the vampire as sexual metaphor.

Adjani is the film’s other secret. Herzog shoots her as a silent-film face — enormous eyes, white makeup, deliberate slowness — and she is the only person in Wismar who believes anything. Her Lucy is active where Murnau’s Ellen is sacrificial furniture, and she spends the last act doing detective work while the men consult each other and achieve nothing. Bruno Ganz plays Harker as a decent bore who is out of his depth from the first reel, and Roland Topor — the artist and novelist behind The Tenant — plays Renfield with a giggle that is the film’s only concession to camp.

The film is easy to find in restored editions with the German audio intact; the transfers made in the last decade finally resolve the fog, which cheaper releases turned into grey soup.

Spoilers below

Herzog’s ending is the reason the film matters, and it is a straight repudiation of Murnau.

In the 1922 film, Ellen sacrifices herself: she keeps Orlok at her throat until the cock crows, sunlight destroys him, and the plague lifts. Virtue wins and the town is cleansed. Herzog runs the same beat — Lucy offers herself, holds Dracula past dawn, and the light kills him — then keeps the camera rolling into the aftermath, where everything goes wrong.

Van Helsing, played by Walter Ladengast as an elderly rationalist who has spent the film refusing to believe a word of it, arrives too late to help and drives the stake in after the fact. He is promptly arrested for murder. The town has no functioning jail and no functioning anything, because everyone is dead, so the bureaucracy shuffles about trying to work out who is authorised to detain him. Herzog’s joke is bleak and precise: the institutions survive the apocalypse in the form of paperwork.

Then Jonathan, infected since Transylvania, sits up. He has become the thing. He orders the servant to sweep out the room, calls for his horse, and rides across a salt flat into the distance, saying he has much to do. Roland Topor’s Renfield has already been let out and gone capering off into the countryside.

So the plague is mobile, mounted, and headed somewhere with a purpose. Murnau’s ending purifies. Herzog’s disperses. The final shot is a horseman shrinking on a white expanse, and it lands as an inheritance being passed on: the sadness Dracula carried for centuries is now Jonathan’s problem, and he has a fresh set of centuries in which to feel it.