I was reminded of my latest choice for a horror remake by doing an intentional search for other movies I might be forgetting, and Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, which I'd always meant to see, made a particularly good choice given that Robert Eggers also just made a version of this movie last year.
And I have to tell you, I was sailing toward a full five stars on Letterboxd for the first half of this film.
Some of the choices in the second half didn't sit as well with me, but particularly the sequence of Jonathan Harker's approach to Transylvania was downright mesmerizing. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself.
Actually, now that I've started this post in a sort of discombobulated way, let me ask a question up front. You can leave the answer in the comments if you want.
Given that the various Nosferatus -- including F.W. Murnau's 1922 version, which is what makes Herzog's 1979 version qualify as a remake -- are also effectively remakes of Bram Stoker's Dracula, why is there such inconsistent use of the characters and their names? Here the apprentice attorney sent to Transylvania to close the deal, played by Bruno Ganz, is called Jonathan Harker, same as he was in Stoker's novel and in my favorite Dracula adaptation, the one directed by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992. However, in both Murnau's and Eggers' versions, he's called Thomas Hutter, and is in a relationship with a woman called Ellen.
I'd say Harker's fiancee, when he is called Harker, is at least always called Mina, but Herzog's version breaks with that apparent alignment as well. Here she's Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), and Mina is the much smaller role of her friend who looks after her while Jonathan is away. Whereas Lucy is the friend who looks after Mina in the original novel, and in Coppola's version.
Ah, okay, so Murnau's original was an unauthorized adaptation of Dracula, which is how we get the name Count Orlok in both Murnau's and Eggers' version. Herzog, in his famously idiosyncratic way, takes a little bit from wherever he wants, calling his vampire Dracula and using the other names from the novel, but giving him the severe appearance of Count Orlok, and also scrambling which woman is which for no reason I can understand.
Anyway.
I knew as soon as I started that I would spend this movie deeply in the embrace of my favorite era of filmmaking. I'm not going to say the 1970s has more movies I love than other decades, because I was only six when 1979 turned to 1980, and you can't discount the role of personal nostalgia in the films you love. So strictly speaking I probably love more films from the 1980s and 1990s than I do from the 1970s. But the 1970s are my favorite decade for the look and feel of a film, and within that I'm also including the sort of independent spirit that Herzog gives us here.
This is not a polished version of Wismar, Germany in 1850, but that's not what I'd want from Herzog or this film. It looks believable and lived in, probably close to how it would have actually looked (though the film was actually shot in the Netherlands). The "polish" -- this film's version of it, anyway -- comes when Harker sets out for Transylvania.
The look of Nosferatu is a triumph of cinematography by Jorg Schmidt-Reitwein, but I'm not sure the selection of shots would have felt the same in the hands of another director. We know Herzog has made a career on communicating the fear and awe nature inspires in him, and that's fully present here. In fact Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Herzog's 1972 film, is evoked several times here, first in a scene involving a raft going down a river, and later in a Wismar overrun by rats, which must have tested every resource of Herzog's rodent wrangler, just as Herzog tested every resource when he ordered a ship hauled over a mountain in Fitzcarraldo (which wouldn't occur until three years later). As you recall, the closing scene of Aguirre involves a raft overrun by monkeys.
Harker doesn't encounter vermin of any shape or size in his travels to Transylvania, many of which are conducted on foot, but he does encounter a living, breathing nature, suffused with fog and clouds and other conveyers of exquisite beauty. Herzog and Schmidt-Reitwein really linger on these passages. I think specifically of one entrancing sequence where we just watch the clouds move over a mountain peak for something like two minutes before the shot is finally broken. I was fully in this film's spell.
One of the reasons for that -- and I forgot to mention this when I first wrote this post, so I'm adding this a day later, sorry to those of you who missed it -- is the not one, but two different musical pieces I Shazam'd that are not the sort of music I usually Shazam. Both sounded familiar to me from elsewhere. The first was Richard Wagner's majestic "Vorspiel" from Das Rheingold in the Ring Cycle, which I was later able to piece together as having been used in Terence Malick's The New World. Then later there's Georgian folk song "Tsintskaro," which Kate Bush incorporates into her song "Hello Earth." Both are total mood setters.
Anyway, the spell continued with the arrival in Transylvania and the introduction to Dracula, as played by frequent Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski. This is an interesting role for Kinski as it involves him being a lot more contained than he usually is on film, particularly than he is in the two Herzog films mentioned above, one on either side of Nosferatu. As I was watching Kinski relish the role and be particularly creepy in it -- and the chiaroscuro use of light just enhances this -- I thought to myself that Kinski is the rare actor who could play either Dracula or Renfield, a character actually played by Roland Topor in this film. Renfield falls more within Kinski's traditional skill set. (Maybe Nicholas Hoult could pull it off too. Although he played the titular character in the movie Renfield from a couple years ago, he didn't play that character with the sort of histrionics one usually sees, and his actual look might be more suited for Dracula.)
Anyway, Kinski is great here, but I don't think it was possible for me to love any part of Nosferatu as much as I loved its first 30 minutes, and that more or less coincides with our introduction to Dracula. It was this portion of Eggers' film that also left me the most entranced, but there, my disappointment with the version of Count Orlok they introduced was more explicitly responsible for why I started being less enchanted with that film as it went. Here I think it was more of a coincidence, because I do really like Kinski's performance. (I guess all you have to do is make Orlok look sort of like Max Schreck. The deviation from Schreck's appearance is what gave me pause with Eggers' film.)
The time spent in Transylvania is quite good, and I particularly liked the return to Wismar by ship, in part because it does not go out of its way to present us with a macabre setting for this ship voyage. In many a Dracula adaptation, perhaps only excepting the feature-length version we saw in Last Voyage of the Demeter (which I also liked), we see only a small bit of this trip, and therefore, every shot is by night and by storm. Here, we get a lot of shots of this ship in the daylight, seeming to make it less mysterious, and in keeping with an intentionally stripped back approach by Herzog throughout. He still has a huge amount of joy filming this, as Herzog captures this boat and its crimson red sails through sweeping helicopter shots and the like.
The return to Wismar has some plot stuff that I wasn't sure about and some moments of unintentional goofiness. Most filmmakers find it unnecessary to show the logistics of Dracula's arrival/settling in Wismar -- which is, of course, London in other versions of the story -- but here Herzog shows a shot of Kinski carrying a coffin over his shoulder as he sets up his new home base. Did we need that? Probably not. Is the shot itself a little silly, and does it remove some of the mystery? Yes, for sure. We kind of feel like Dracula would have minions who would do this, even if we don't know who they are. We know he has Renfield, who could certainly take care of it, and this film also includes a scene of Dracula and Renfield together in which Dracula seems vaguely annoyed by his familiar, waving him away with his hand. This is also a bit comical and I think there are reasons we don't see their in-person interactions in other films.
Then there's some stuff I won't go into that appears to be just Herzog's deviations from previous material. I'll just say I'm not sure it all works. One thing I did think sort of worked was the danse macabre in Wismar, which also included a restaging of the last supper. It didn't necessarily work for me as a literal plot development, but it was a satisfying distillation of what Herzog has always called his "ecstatic truth." And then you have scenes of rats everywhere, as this story has a link to the bubonic plague that I don't believe other versions of the story have. You should see Nosferatu even if the only thing about it that sounds appealing is to watch the literally thousands of rats that you know are real, not digital as they would be today. How did they get all those rats?
I'm out of time on this post, so I'll just say, it dropped a full star from the potential five stars to merely four, though I've gone back and forth on whether to bump that up to 4.5. Let's just say this is another triumph for Herzog and I'm really glad that this month's theme finally gave me the opportunity I needed to see it.
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