Nosferatu The Vampyr

The Movie

• Starring:
  Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula
  Isabelle Adjani as Lucy Harker
  Bruno Ganz as Jonathan Harker
  Roland Topor as Renfield
  Walter Ladengast as Dr. Van Helsing
  Dan van Husen as Warden
  Jan Groth as Harbormaster
  Carsten Bodinus as Schrader
  Martje Grohmann as Mina
  Rijk de Gooyer as Town official
  Clemens Scheitz as Clerk
  Lo van Hensbergen
  John Leddy as Coachman
  Margiet van Hartingsveld
  Tim Beekman as Coffinbearer
  Jacques Dufilho as Captain
  Michael Edols as Lord of the manor
  Stefan Husar
  Roger Berry Losch
  Johan te Slaa
  Beverly Walker as Nun
• Director: Werner Herzog

Review

Sean Axmaker wrote:

Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers.

Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a distinctly feral quality.

But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning for Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love.

Bruno Ganz's sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife, Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's plague-like curse.

Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a quintessentially Herzog vision.

*

I'd go along with most of Axmaker's review; some of the rewriting and detail changes from both Stoker and Murnau's versions are irritating, but these are trivia when you consider the movie as a whole; the mood and atmosphere would have made Stoker proud, and Murnau wish he had modern equipment.

A fine film; a fitting closure for the Hammer era. See it.

The DVD

• Read more about DVD formats.
• Format: Color, Closed-captioned, Widescreen
• Aspect Ratio(s): 1.85:1
• Audio Encoding: Dolby Digital 5.1
• Studio: Anchor Bay Entertain
• DVD Release Date: July 9, 2002
• Run Time: 107

Special Features

Two-disc version features English and German languages.