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Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) Directed by Werner Herzog

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Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) Directed by Werner Herzog DAMN Werner! By Fearless Young Orphan Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) Directed by Werner Herzog Well this is a weirdass movie. You know, I think a lot of Werner Herzog – I was profoundly impressed by his film Fitzcarraldo and I absolutely loved his classic Aguirre: The Wrath of God (which is the best damn movie I’ve ever seen that featured a crazy man on a raft with half a million tiny monkeys). So I thought that his Nosferatu would be more of his wackiness, and oh yeah, it sure is. I’m just not sure it’s a good thing. I am utterly perplexed by this retelling of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula – I am fairly certain I hated it except that I keep coming up with these, “yes, I hated it, but . .” moments. Is this is a film that needs to be studied earnestly, or a film that is one big hilarious spoof of the whole genre, or just possibly, is it both of these things? Folks I have to admit something: maybe I’m just not smart enough to get it. No, let’s not be plagued with self-doubt. Let’s talk about the movie first and then we’ll decide how stupid I may or may not be. It’s Dracula, more or less, with a Herzog spin on it. Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) goes to Dracula’s castle to sell him some property in Jonathan’s home town (is it London in this case? I’m not sure) and leaves behind his wife Lucy Harker (Isabelle Adjani) to worry about him. He’s captured and tormented by Dracula (Klaus Kinski in full Nosferatu makeup all the time) and then returns later to Lucy as a near-vampiric catatonic while Dracula himself sneaks around Lucy’s house and tries to bite her until she tricks him into staying for breakfast and the sun does its work. There are some differences and some troubles: 1. Dr. Van Helsing is utterly useless to Lucy; he doesn’t believe her and she’s got to do all the vampire fighting on her own; so therefore . 2. Lucy Harker does all the vampire fighting on her own and she’s uses the power of her faith in God as her chief weapon; she’s no seduced dupe in this version but really kind of a badass, except for the fact that Adjani plays her as a spooky-eyed, portent-spewing worry-wart so she’s either batshit crazy or some kind of saint. Wait, those might be the same thing. 3. Renfield is so annoying it’s astonishing. Not even Dracula can stand to be around him. He plays his entire role as a cackling maniac and you’ll want him murdered violently in short order. 4. Jonathan Harker is the seduced dupe in this case. He comes back to Lucy as a ghoul and is slowly turning into a vampire. 5. There is no messing around with saving Lucy’s best girlfriend in this movie – Lucy and Mina (those names are used so interchangeably in the various movie versions of this tale that I get confused) are hardly more than casual acquaintances and, as I said, Lucy does all the work. 6. Dracula himself, the ugly bat-faced Nosferatu, is not a sexy temptation but a monster, plus he’s imminently sad, lonely, bored with his existence and desperate for love that he’s probably incapable of feeling. What he wants from Lucy is not a wife exactly – he seems to want his humanity restored even though that is impossible. It’s a remarkable interpretation and a performance that keeps the entire film just on the safe side of godawful. No, seriously. Klaus Kinski’s may be the most sympathetic Dracula I’ve seen. This is not a guy who has had an easy time of being undead. The glamour is not there. It’s a truly evil, truly sad existence. So with those players in place, the story unspools at a deadly slow pace. We’re 45 minutes into the film before Jonathan finally gets to Dracula’s castle to meet the guy. Before that, it’s just been encounters with suspicious peasants and interludes of Lucy Harker moping about on the beach looking like she’s about to die from scurvy. Maybe this over-long introduction, which eats up almost half the film, was my biggest problem with the movie. Because DAMN Werner, how much time does it take you to move a character to the story? I believe in building up suspense but DAMN. Jonathan’s journey to the castle is stunningly gorgeous, though – mountain-scapes and forests shrouded in mist and accompanied by Wagnerian music – so beautiful that you’ll feel guilty for wishing the whole movie would go up in flames. Or I did, anyway. DAMN, Werner. You confuse me so. Dracula brings the plague back with him. That’s a detail I hadn’t heard before. He comes bearing a million rats on the ghost ship (a million tiny monkeys on a raft is tons more fun) and everybody in the city is He’s bringing sexy back. And the plague. soon dying from plague – more proof that the Nosferatu lifestyle is one of destruction and decay, not of sex and love. It’s a heavy-handed symbolism, though, stagey and weird, as if the plague were a kind of somber party that the city throws and in which it can revel, feeling sorry for itself. Of course in any Dracula tale, the ultimate confrontation is for the soul of Lucy, or Mina, or whoever, and the death of Dracula – and in this case, Lucy is going to go it alone. The final encounter between Lucy and Dracula is, in this case at least, brilliant and awful and devastating and inspirational and filled with sick hopeless longing, and it is the only reason I didn’t just decide to write the whole movie off as utter boring bullshit. She offers herself up sacrificially with complete understanding of what she is doing, and he is her victim, not the other way around. Girl power, yeah! No, but seriously, folks. It’s a stunner, it will haunt you. I don’t know what to do about the Fangs Score. We’ve got a movie I could barely stand to watch, I was so bored, that has some unforgettable scenes and imagery and an interpretation of Dracula that is a braver than any I have seen. That being said, it is still the ultimate vampire tale. I want to give it Three Fangs; I want to give it Ten Fangs; I want to average it out and give it Seven Fangs except that this would be actually rather a worse score than merely Three because Seven is a far less interesting commentary. DAMN, Werner. I think you were pulling our legs, and I think you were futzing around wasting time, and I think you were being so daring as to take my breath away. Fine, Ten Fangs, you freakin’ loony. .
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