“Time is an abyss.”
How else would a Werner Herzog movie describe the immortality of Dracula? That’s the count himself, lamenting his cursed, eternal state, in Nosferatu the Vampyre—a movie made even more Herzogian by the fact that Klaus Kinski, Herzog’s contentious collaborator, plays the title role.
With a polite, almost apologetic demeanor—yet sporting a bald, white dome, saber teeth, and long fingers and nails—Kinksi offers a distinct variation on the infamous vampire. He’s ghastly but gentle, like a combination of Max Schreck’s spindly spook in 1922’s Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi’s aristocratic stalker in 1931’s Dracula. Bruno Ganz is also on hand (barely, as he’s rather boring) playing Jonathan Harker, the real estate broker who travels to Count Dracula’s castle, while Isabelle Adjani—her porcelain, oval face seemingly created to be placed in a locket like the one Harker wears—plays his young wife, Lucy.
It takes a while, but once Dracula shows up, Nosferatu the Vampyre blooms into a Herzog picture. It’s the obsession with death, of course (“Death is not the worst,” the count also says), as well as the way the movie becomes a meditation on madness. Renfield, Dracula’s unhinged assistant, makes an appearance—Roland Topor comes off like Peter Lorre on speed—yet insanity spreads far beyond him, especially once Dracula arrives in Wismar, Germany (a change from the novel) on a ship teeming with rats that carry the plague. Bringing to fruition a question Lucy posed earlier in the film—“Do you think it is possible that we are so insane that one day we will all awake to find ourselves in straitjackets?”—the remaining residents of the ravaged town begin behaving bizarrely, independent of anything Dracula does.
This somewhat splits the movie in two by its end—one concerned with Dracula and his fate, the other with the townsfolk, who are reduced by the specter of certain death to having lavish dinner parties in the square, surrounded by swarming rats. By that point, Herzog seems far more interested in the latter.
Still, that doesn’t mean he gives Stoker’s story short shrift. His eye for landscape and architecture give the castle sequences a distinct atmosphere, as if nature itself had been bent to Dracula’s desires. And there is a single shot here that deserves a place all its own in the cinematic Dracula canon: Harker in bed in the bottom left corner of the frame, lit in a way that accentuates the deep brown wood of the headboard and the velvety purple of the curtains, while Kinski—spidery fingers outstretched—stands in the top right corner, lit so that he appears to be in black and white. Such shots, along with the stilted performances and languid pacing, make it feel as if the movie itself is in a trance. This is a world that seems, even before his arrival, to have fallen under Dracula’s spell.
(9/27/2023)
