Menu
Now that the fear economy is booming, you may be kicking yourself for investing everything in love. But before you dump all those stocks, ask yourself the perennial question: would you rather be loved or feared? You can’t have both, just like you’d never mistake a “follower” for a “friend.” This dilemma is at the heart of Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), one of a handful of movies I would take with me to a desert island, such is its existential beauty and enduring captivation. Count Dracula, played by a melancholy Klaus Kinski, is feared and he wants to be loved. Though he can poison a town with a word, he needs something more to soothe his loneliness because “time is an abyss” and passes too slowly. Lucy, on the other hand, played by Isabelle Adjani (whose radiance here is so overwhelming I’ll spare my thesaurus and let her be), lives in awe of death and the speed of passing time. Her selfless love for Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) becomes the thing that Dracula sets his unstaked heart on.
Nosferatu is the story of… look, if you don’t know the plot of Bram Stoker’s Dracula by now, then I frankly question your commitment to the genre. Let’s consider the changes, some carried over from Murnau’s 1922 version: Dracula is a rat-fanged starer into space and plague bringer; Jonathan is a restless clerk bored by the beauty of the Wismar canals (“which go nowhere but back on themselves”); and Van Helsing is a feckless Enlightenment science type who hasn’t got the faintest. Once Jonathan falls under the vampire’s spell, the story belongs to Lucy (Mina in the novel), and this is the film’s greatest strength. She becomes half Nancy Drew and half High Noon sheriff, hunting down the vampire after everyone ignores her cause. It should be noted that Herzog filmed two versions of Nosferatu, one in English and one in German, shooting different takes for dialogue. I refer here to the German version because the English in the subtitles is more direct and powerful, in my opinion, and the performances slightly more intense, though I can’t judge the native tongue.
This is the most German vampire movie imaginable. There are gorgeous landscape shots—often handheld, lending a documentary realism to an otherwise dreamlike film—of castle ruins, swirling mists, and a lonely ship at sea: images right out of a David Caspar Friedrich painting. In one sublime framing, Lucy sits with her back to us, staring out to sea from a broken graveyard, the pastels of her dress muted like flowers wilting into darkness, part of the general color scheme. Herzog scores his wanderer fantasy with the bright strumming and dark lament of Popol Vuh, his regular musical collaborators, and with an arresting Georgian folk tune that fans of Kate Bush (that other immortal) will recognize from her 1985 song “Hello Earth.” Also appearing is the stirring prelude from Wagner’s Das Rheingold, an opera whose very theme is the curse of power, in which Alberich, the Nibelung dwarf, foreswears love in return for gold that he uses to forge a magic ring. The music surges as Jonathan, despite warnings from the villagers, ascends a mountain to reach Dracula’s castle, seeking to manifest that most Nietzschean of human glories—the signing of a real estate contract. The music appears again later, bridging cause and effect as it plays over the introduction of a swarm of rats into the town of Wismar: to every glorious conquest, its noxious aftermath.
Let’s change the voice, grammatically speaking, of the earlier question: would you rather love or fear? Good news: you can do both. The value of the first is in fact directly proportional to the power of the second. Lucy, death-obsessed and wide-eyed with fear though she is, finds her strength in a faith that isn’t strictly religious. “I won’t even give that love to God,” she tells Dracula when he tries to bargain for the love that she has for Jonathan by promising to release his hostage mind. And when she does sacrifice herself—pointlessly, transcendently—it’s on her terms. She kisses Jonathan goodbye, maybe intuiting that he is already one more cursed Nibelung trading his love for power. His future is a desert, with boiling clouds on the horizon: when it comes to love, there isn’t always a return of investment. But Lucy, who follows her conscience, dies with a smile on her face. And we remember her earlier line, spoken as she shuts the door on the last person who might have helped her: “I see I have to do this alone.” 🩸
a writer living outside Philadelphia, is currently working on a horror project set in western Pennsylvania. He co-wrote the movie Anamorph, starring Willem Dafoe.
FRESH BLOOD
Planet of the Vampires is a film you haven’t seen at all if you haven’t seen it in the wee hours, with the lights off, and its hypnotic sound turned way up. This is Italian director Mario Bava’s Gothic haunted-house story...
BY TOM PHELAN | April 5, 2024
There is nothing quite so destabilizing as being told again and again that you are someone you are not.
BY LAURA WYNNE | March 8, 2024
A place where no actual blood was spilled—at least to my knowledge—my grandmother’s house proved strangely—even sagely—sanguinary as it pertained to an important development in my life.
BY COLIN FLEMING | June 19, 2024
RAVENOUS
This pre-Code offering packs a lot of story into its typically brisk running time, with several plot threads weaving together a (not always successful) tapestry of spooky and criminal doings.
READ MORE >
BY ANN OLSSON | Month 00, 2021
In what could be the fastest-resulting rape revenge movie, a drunken lout brutally forces himself on Ida, the young woman who doesn't return his affections, during a party over Labor Day.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
Beast is a lot of movies in one package - fractured fairy tale, belated-coming-of-age story, psychological drama, regional horror film - but above all it's a calling card for its leading lady, Jessie Buckley.
READ MORE >
BY LAURA KERN | Month 00, 2021
