Werner Herzog is quoted as saying about his incarnation of the Nosferatu finally officially recognized as Count Dracula that “he is so suffering, so human, so sad, so desperately longing for love that you don't see the claws and fangs any more.”
Perhaps and then again perhaps not. After all, in his remake of the original actor Klaus Kinski presents just as grotesque and rodent-like a visage as Max Schrek in F.W. Murnau’s groundbreaking silent film. Herzog released his remake just a couple of years after another a remake of another classic monster movie and, like Herzog, producer Dino De Laurentiis promised that modern audiences would feel empathy and compassion to his version of Kong. But then again, his version of Kong was not nearly as terrorizing as Kinski’s channeling of Schreck’s vampyr. Nevertheless, Herzog does make good on his promise even if it may be more difficult than he imagined to send audiences out the theater so overwhelmed by the emotion that they could overlook the hideous makeup.
While Herzog mirrors Murnau’s original in a number of ways other than replicating the extreme visual impact of a Count Dracula who is as far from the urbane eastern European aristocrat made famous by Bela Lugosi, he also goes to great lengths to contemporize his story and break with the tradition of the romanticized figure of the vampire. Indeed, at some points along the way, Kinski’s vampire comes dangerously close to lapsing into the sphere of Captain Bringdown occupied by the Wolf-Man. Fortunately, Kinski can act rings around Lon Chaney, Jr. and even if he couldn’t, this Dracula is not nearly the whiner that Chaney’s Lawrence Talbot proved to be with each successive application of the makeup for the next sequel. Murnau’s vampyr is all terror; whether due to the limited acting range of Schreck or by directorial design, he is not expected to be anything else. But then, Murnau was effectively making the first significant vampire film and also the first to introduce supernatural and occult elements.
While the later official adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel with Bela Lugosi definitively set the template for vampire films to come for the next several decades, Murnau can be rightly credited with inventing the genre as it is known today. The two biggest differences in the approaches of German cinema and Hollywood were that the vampire was not hideous to look at and he was a romantic figure of mystery and the uncanny. Basically, Murnau knew all he needed from his vampire was to scare the garlic out of them. That simply would not do for a film made in the wake of so many films about vampires that any authentic figure can only be a rough guess at best. What matters is not the number, but the effect and the effect of the vampire genre was that even had he wanted to make something closer to a shot-by-shot remake of the original, Herzog could not have done it. Audience in the late 1970’s demanded something more. Much more; they wanted their vampires to be psychologically complex.
And that is where there is no denying that Herzog’s remake—regardless of what may think of the pacing or any other cinematic aspect of the movie—leaves the original in the dust. It would take almost thirty years for another vampire film to build upon what Herzog sought to accomplish. Just a few months after Herzog released his film in Germany, one of the biggest-grossing vampire movies in decades opened in theaters around America. Where Herzog’s vampire is tortured and has reached the point where he seeks an end to his eternal life, the vampire in Love at First Bite is a party animal in silk suits who dances to disco and wows the ladies. After that would come vampires who are now the mortal enemies of werewolves and after that came the nadir of the vampire in America: the sparkling magazine models of Twilight.
Nobody seemed eager to follow Herzog in presenting the downside to being a vampire. The disgusting element of drinking blood. The fact that you are stuck in the age you died forever. The reality that you will outlive everyone you ever love. Only one movie since Herzog’s Nosferatu has come along to dig even deeper into sad, suffering agony of longing for love so desperately that you an audience does not just forget the fangs, but leaves the theater very unlikely to ever fantasize about the romance of becoming the undead.
For those looking for a devastating double feature on the ugly business of being a vampire, settle in for the night with Nosferatu the Vampyr followed by Let the Right One In. The latter is almost an unofficial sequel to the former.
