4/5 HERZOG'S REMAKE IS HYPNOTIC
  by Robin Simmons (Palm Springs area, CA United States)
"NOSFERATU" (1922) (1979)

See the extraodinary original and then the brilliant remake.

Filmmaker F.W. Marnau's "Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens" (1922) is the first in a long line of vampire films. Marnau freely adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula but Stoker's widow recognized similarities and sued Marnau and all prints of Marnau's film were ordered destroyed!

But a few copies of landmark and exquisite German expressionistic masterpiece escaped and were the inspiration for German writer-director Werner Herzog's remake "Nosferatu: The Vampyre" (1979).

Klaus Kinski's pale makeup, pointed ears, long fingernails and mannered gestures will unnerve in this atmospheric, deliberately paced, fever-dream of a movie. Isabelle Adjani co-stars as the distraught wife of Bruno Ganz's Jonathan Harker, who comes under the blood spell of Kinski's magnificent creature. The music, mood and images will reverberate long after the movie ends. The DVD includes the German language version with English subtitles as well as a full-length, but slightly different English version and a most unusual bonus commentary by Herzog himself.

Herzog's a genius and his cinema art will continue to penetrate our increasingly bifurcated self-aware and superficlal pop culture.

The beautiful box art is almost worth the cost of the DVD!

(Marnau's "Nosferatu": Not rated, full frame, 93 minutes: Herzog's "Nosferatu": PG, widescreen, 107 minutes)

4/5 A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
  by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979) is less a film about the struggle between good and evil than it is a film about the triumph of all-consuming Eros over theology. Each of the film's personages-Count Dracula, Lucy, Jonathan Harker-are seized by a destructively violent passion. Their desires are one. They are victims of a violent desire that exists on the other side of mortality, on the other side of good and evil.

All three characters mirror each other at certain crucial points.

Kinski's Nosferatu is He-Who-Desires: an incarnation which is curiously effeminate but also strangely virile, virtually androgynous, neither man nor woman. His vampire is leechlike, parasitical, much frailer and sicklier than other, more robust screen vampires (Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, etc.). When Jonathan eats his dinner, Nosferatu stares at his quarry's neck like a hound in rut. He has no existence outside of the living beings upon whom he feeds. So intensely enamored of Lucy's neck is Nosferatu that he is willing to leave his castle in Transylvania just to be near her. And when Nosferatu comes to Bremen, he brings the plague with him. His untrammeled desire for Lucy is pestilential, a cloud of rats. His all-enveloping love, his polymorphic attraction, is what brings the pestilence. Sexual desire is the plague. In this film, desire is figured as disease. A plague that ends in the "festive" destruction of Western civilization, a round-dance in which animals and humans mingle, a joyful plague of "perverse" sexuality.

Jonathan Harker is Nosferatu's double-willing to give up everything, willing to risk death, to go any extreme for the sake of his beloved, Lucy. And at the eerily open-ended conclusion of the film (and this is Herzog's most drastic departure from the original), Jonathan assumes the vampire's role completely. He effectively becomes his nemesis. There are no end-credits; the film continues infinitely. The final image is of a spreading desolation, the reign of negativity and the annihilation of civilization (which, as usual in Herzog, is affirmed as a joyous event---from what we see of civilization in this film, it doesn't appear worth saving; the annihilation of all social laws is here seen as something positive). Nosferatu nowhere dies in the space of the film. Indeed, Nosferatu's tragedy is not death but the impossibility of death.

In her conversation with Nosferatu, Lucy makes a startling proclamation: She is willing to refuse to God the love that she gives to Jonathan. Her unreserved (unholy?) desire for Jonathan surmounts her piety, her faith in God. Does this not bind her intimately with Nosferatu, the force of entropic negativity? By refusing God the love she gives to her man, she migrates to the country of darkness. With her spectral pallor, she is uncannily resemblant of Nosferatu. When he visits her in the bedroom, she embraces him, her dark lover, pulling him to her neck. Is this a self-sacrifice for the sake of the people of Bremen? For Jonathan's sake? Perhaps. But after Nosferatu is vanquished, why does the blood rush to her cheeks? And why, after Nosferatu has sapped her blood, why does she bask in what seems to be a post-coital glow?

Each of these characters are victims of the suicidal character of all sexual desire.

There are so many details in this film that will haunt your mind... Kinski's ghastly rat-like features. The way in which the camera makes you his victim, fresh for vampirization. The way in which all relations are inverted. Sickness surmounts health. Survival surmounts both death and life.

Unlike F.W. Murnau's 1922 original, the images in Herzog's film are not symbolic--that is, they do not subserve character or language. As in all of Herzog's cinema, the images are restored to their purity and form a pre-conceptual, pre-rational, pre-critical visual language all their own.

Dr. Joseph Suglia


5/5 Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (1979)-Excellent Remake!
  by Keith Mirenberg (www.spaceanimations.org)
Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (1979) was a great remake which I rate a five star production. This film really captured the essence of the famous original and allowed me to see what the original film maker might have captured on the film if he were making the movie today. The film appears to have been filmed on location in Europe (the castle looks very credible and perhaps found on location??) and this adds to the charm, and in some cases otherworldly effect of the movie which was a shear pleasure to watch.

1/5 CHEESY!
  by JOJO DANCER
THE MOVIE STARTS OUT RATHER CREEPY AND INTERESTING. JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR. IT THEN EVOLVES INTO A CHEESY AND CORNY PIECE OF RUBBISH. THE APPARANT HEROINE AT THE END DECIDES TO LET THE DISGUSTING VAMPIRE INTO HER ROOM TO SUCK HER BLOOD. SO SHE WILL NOW BECOME A VAMPIRE AND THUS TRICK DRACULA INTO FORGETTING IT IS DAWN AND THUS BE DESTROYED. AT ONE POINT IN THE SHOW RATS ARE EVERYWHERE AND PEOPLE ARE DYING OF THE PLAGUE AND WALKING AROUND LIKE ZOMBIES. WHY NOY MAKE IT MORE REALISTIC AND SHOW THE POPULATION ATTEMPTING TO ERADICATE THE RATS. NO, INSTEAD THEY ALLOW THE RATS EVERYWHERE.

5/5 magnificently dark and believable
  by Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France)
As one would expect from Herzog, this is a version of the Dracula story that is turned upside down: the hero is Lucy (the sister who is turned into a vampire in other versions), who understands what the count really is and seeks to destroy him all alone. Van Helsing in this version must be dragged along to see the truth, as he is a doddering old man at the end of his career and capacities to think. Indeed, he is a useless scientist. The time is also earlier, pre-industrial and with echos of the Middle Ages, even though it must be the 17C.

Kinsky is absolutely brilliant as Dracula, in one of his best performances. Rather than the sexual magnetism that Lugosi or Oldham exuded with such charisma, he is pathetically aware that he can only prey on love and humanity, from a distance. But he is compelled by blood lust. Kinski really doesn't look at all human, but a true creature of the night. Adjani was never more beautiful and depressed.

Dracula's arrival in Germany brings a far greater evil than just himself, again portrayed as the breakdown of all order and decency. Adjani walks through the town center, deserted except for those accepting death as a celebration, in a stunning reflection of medieval images of plague. They grab her, want her to dance with them, but she pursues her higher purpose.

The most shocking part is the end, totally unexpected and ominous, yet without overt horror. Again, perfectly done: not hollywood slick, but projecting the horror and its power into the unknown future. Only Herzog can do this so effectively.

Recommended warmly. It is poetry of horror.