They’ve been regularly made since the very first film of the kind in the 1920s, but perhaps the 1970s were particularly unusual for the sheer volume of vampire horror films which emerged. Many different varieties of vampire horror appeared, too: Hammer Studios toyed with classic stories and folklore to create their own lurid, luxuriant spin, with many of their best-known vampire films getting released during the decade; other studios, contrastingly, felt the time was right to make fun of vampire tropes, delivering full-blown comedies such as Love at First Bite (1979). But perhaps the most visually-appealing, tonally-different film of its kind was Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. It’s a film which can trace its lineage back to the very birth of horror cinema via its links to the Murnau original, and then to the epistolary novel which has birthed so many on-screen incarnations of Count Dracula, creating a movie culture all of its own. But, aside from its pedigree in this respect, Herzog’s Nosferatu is quite unique in its depiction of the jaded, lonely Count Dracula, a character compelled to live forever, and a man who seems to detest his own ghoulish existence. Truly one of the most existentially bleak renditions of the Dracula story, there are no grand battles or salacious details here. What we get instead is a blend of staggering beauty and pitiable loss. It’s a remarkable piece of cinema.
The story itself is quite straightforward, and quite closely follows the version of the Dracula story used by Murnau. In both, the story has been moved from England to Germany, and set largely in a small German town (Wismar). Also in both, Jonathan Harker is sent abroad to Transylvania to attend to the needs of a mysterious nobleman, though ‘Orlok’ is dispensed with in Herzog’s telling of the tale. Harker agrees to take the job, and leaves his wife Lucy in the hands of friends before beginning on his way. It’s a strange thing, but there doesn’t seem to be any story quite like Dracula for having its key characters shuffled around and reassembled; unlike Stoker’s original, here it’s Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) who is wed to Harker, and Mina appears only as a peripheral figure. Van Helsing (Walter Ledengast) and Renfield (Roland Topor) do their turns, but Van Helsing is unusually minor in this particular version, whilst it’s characters who are usually completely passive who come into their own here (more below).
Harker is beset by risk throughout his journey to Transylvania – a journey which is itself agonisingly long, and afforded far more on-screen time than we usually see. Whilst the locations used are very beautiful, Harker’s vulnerability is brought into sharp relief by his environs – places he does not know, but must safely navigate nonetheless. He trudges over unlit grasslands, sidles his way along perilous waterfall paths and pleads with those he encounters to help him; he’s met with taciturn refusals by authentically dour rustics, and must do things for himself. He’s finally swept up by a mysterious black coach and deposited at the ramshackle castle, where the monstrous Count Dracula awaits him. Nobleman he might be, but he’s far closer to monstrous here than any number of the suave and well-dressed Draculas that we may see elsewhere. Like Orlok, Klaus Kinski’s Dracula is wraith-like, and it’s difficult to understand how Harker is able to greet him quite so calmly given his pallor, his sharp teeth and nails and his preternatural appearance more generally. Yet, Harker – at least at first – is quietly polite, if alarmed, assisting the Count with the business he has been entrusted with. It’s Dracula’s frightening response to seeing a drop of his blood which first fully repels him, and leads him to want to escape from the castle. By the time he realises what Dracula’s plans are, it’s too late: things have been set in motion, and Harker will ultimately be unable to “stop the black coffins” which are soon headed for Wismar.
Throughout this part of the film, Herzog is a genius at making us feel some sympathy with each main character. Harker is, in all respects, a good man who took this fool’s errand because he hoped it would benefit him and his beloved Lucy; Ganz enacts a certain level of naivety and vulnerability incredibly well, and as he increasingly begins to gain a sense of his own danger, we empathise with his attempt to escape. But Kinski is a Dracula like no other. We are used – and maybe far more so in the 70s – to seeing vampires as privileged somehow, as revelling in their eternal life and feeling great anger towards anyone who would attempt to snuff it out. Whatever befell Kinski’s Dracula some centuries before, it has hardly preserved him in some perfect state, nor has it seemingly done anything other than make him suffer. He has degenerated, more animal than man, compelled to lap up blood in order to drag on his miserable existence. Why does he not electively die, we might ask? Does he not know what would do the trick? Well, perhaps he just can’t. He simply continues, going through the motions. And after everything, despite his repellent appearance, he has a human heart still. He suffers. He can remember enough of love to suffer by its absence, and he feels that death is not the worst thing that can befall a person. His gentle, introspective brooding is very affecting, and very unusual too. You find yourself sympathising with a monstrous creature; this is a rare skill, but one which the relationship between the director and the actor is able to offer. In this, Herzog has been able to embellish the character of Dracula as-written (Stoker’s Dracula is rather two-dimensional, with only one paltry mention of ‘having loved’) and Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht therefore establishes a new kind of cinematic vampire. Even now, nothing has ever come close to that.
The character of Lucy – as played by the beautiful Isabelle Adjani – breaks further ground, and gives a new kind of life to a character who seems to be a straightforward victim in so many tellings of this story. Here, rather than taking a salacious path into living death where she needs a band of men to ‘save’ her, Lucy is unusually active. She is, throughout, in tune with her husband’s sufferings and senses his plight; when he returns to Wismar, though he is utterly catatonic (and Jonathan effectively dies on her without recognising her), she puts her efforts into investigating what has happened to her little town. It is Lucy who understands what Dracula is, and where he is; she even has the presence of mind to remonstrate with him. It is, of course, completely in keeping with the film overall that her efforts to restore order are ruined in the very final reels. Yes, she is pure of heart, and as the lore stated, she was able to sacrifice herself to destroy the vampire. It nearly, nearly works. Unfortunately, and in contrast to Murnau’s vision, the love of her life has by then become a damned creature himself. The ‘plague’ which has decimated the infrastructure of the town may have cast all people together in a kind of literal danse macabre, but so long as enough of the old social order exists for him to order a servant to sweep up the crumbled host which Lucy intended to keep him fixed in his seat, then the old social order can still be exploited.
So is anything about the ending of this film redemptive? Dracula finally opts out of time, but the decision is ultimately made for him; his death throes don’t seem to grant him peace, either. He dies, an ugly wraith on an unfamiliar floor; there’s no redemptive last sunrise here. Lucy dies too, for all her best efforts, and her husband – mobile at last – escapes, to do god knows what elsewhere. Will he become like Dracula – will he one day remember the woman who loved him, and feel something of the same abject pain? It’s a sobering thought. But then, the whole film is painted in these colours, and any happiness here is fleeting. It can perhaps be best summed up by Lucy, blindly seeking help in the town square, as a procession of pale coffins is carried past and around her. She is hemmed in by death, by forces unrecognisable, as ‘plague’ disrupts everything she’s ever valued. This isn’t, by the way, a film to watch when you’re labouring under any sort of existential angst (or is it perfect?)
Whilst, yes, the eagle-eyed may have noticed a few anachronisms along the way in Nosferatu (at last, we’ve found people with more of a dismal attitude to life than Dracula) for me, the atmosphere is perfect throughout. It’s a film which melds the picturesque and the grotesque; finery rots, grave-mould intrudes, a microcosm collapses in on itself. And for forty years now, audiences have been able to embrace this rare pestilence. It’s a film that will no doubt still being talked about in forty years more. Time is, after all, an abyss…