Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) poster & wallpaper

Klaus Kinski, Isabelle Adjani, Bruno Ganz

Jonathan and Lucy live in Wismar and the Count wants a house there. Varna is a port on the Black Sea, close to Dracula's castle.

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PG, 2 hrs. 4 min.

Directed by: Werner Herzog

Release Date: January 17, 1979

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DVD Release Date: February 16, 1999

Stats: 815 reviews

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'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' Bruno Ganz and Klaus Kinski 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' Bruno Ganz and Klaus Kinski 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' 'Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht' The vampyre's kiss Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre) Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre)
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Flixster Reviews (815)

  • SirPant
    September 30, 2009
    SirPant
    Another great collaboration between Kinski & Herzog and a loving remake/retelling of a story loved by both men. Hard to watch if you don't like rats though!
  • bort16
    January 12, 2009
    bort16
    Some movies just stick with you, for better or for worse. I like it more when its for the better. Werner Herzog's 1979 version of the classic vampire tale, Nosferatu, has is one of those films that has stuck with me. Thankfully it's been for the better. In fact, my appreciation h...( read more)as only continued to grow and grow with time. It's one Herzog's more seen films, thanks to Kinski's reputation and the fact that most versions are in in English, but in my opinion, it's one of his more overlooked and under appreciated.
    Bram Stoker's story of Dracula has been told countless times on film, but only a few really noteworthy times. Probably the most widely seen is Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 Hollywood version. That version is not without it's merits. Gary Oldman is a fine actor, and does a good job with his version of the vampire, and Coppola flared the film up with an interesting visual style. The most respected and also well known version is the first, FW Murnau's silent film Nosferatu: eine Syphonie des Grauens. That film reserves itself a spot on any film aficionado's must see list for Murnau's expressionist artistry. It was an assuredly constructed film with brilliant imagery and an unforgettable turn by the preternaturally creepy Max Schreck. Many people will tell you that while having the highest respect for Murnau's film and it's stunning achievements, they found it something of a dull affair. And I include myself in that category. Todd Browning and Bela Lugosi's 1931 version, though that version is perhaps more of a cult classic than a full on artistic masterpiece like Murnau's.
    And then in the wings is Herzog's version. It too is respected by those who've seen it, and is itself something of a cult classic. It's a product of Herzog's famed collaboration with the volatile Klaus Kinski. Together they made five films, notably including Aguirre:Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo. Friend, documentarian, and the man who infamously won a bet which resulted in in Herzog literally eating his own shoe, Errol Morris once referred to Kinski as a bonified "crazy person." That opinion, by most psychological standards, was probably correct. So if there was ever anyone to offer up a performance worthy of comparison to Schreck's original, it's Kinski.
    The story follows closely to Murnau's version, except notably this time with the Stoker original name's, which were protected by copyright in 1922. Bruno Ganz (who brilliantly portrayed Hitler a few years back in Der Untergang) plays Jonathan Harker, who's called to deliver a real estate proposal to the Carpathian castle of Count Dracula. His wife Lucy is nervous of what may come and has strange dreams. His boss, Renfield is seemingly ever increasingly drifting further and further into excited insanity as Dracula's arrival draws nearer. Jonathan's trip to Count Dracula's castle is filled with tension and foreboding. He lodges for a night where he hears tales of a vampire and warnings, but continues on anyway through the mountains. This act contains one of the films most memorable sequences of imagery, set to Wagner's Prelude to Das Rheingold. It ends as a carriage mysteriously emerges from the fog to pick up Harker and carry him off to the castle.
    Count Dracula's castle is the definition of ominous. The colour palette is lifeless, and of course in tribute to Murnau, shadows seem to take on a life of their own. Harker is greeted by Kinski's terrifying Dracula with uncomfortable courtesy. He searches the castle one day to find Dracula sleeping... in a casket.
    While Jonathan is incapacitated, Count Dracula makes his way to Wismar on a ship. Mysteriously to the crew, they're all dying off. The ship carries hoards of rats. Is it the plague the captain ponders? When the ship finally arrives, everyone on board is dead. Dracula emerges, with him the rats, who flood the town.
    To continue to harp on about the story is at this point an exercise in redundancy. We all essentially all know what follows - Renfield is Dracula's minion, and the vampire is in love with Jonathan Harker's wife, Lucy. Herzog changes things up a bit for the end, but it's Herzog and Kinski's execution that sets the film off. It's executed with terrifying strangeness. The locations are unforgettable - something to be expected from a man who famously declared that he directs landscapes. Delft (in Holland) served as Wismar. It's canals throughout the town are haunting, especially as the death ship squeezes it's way through. The castle scenes are filmed at Castle Pernstejn, which I'm told still looks much like it did during filming.
    The film's opening sequence is of real life mummies in Mexico, which can still be visited. It's a surreal and haunting scene. Another strange and surreal moment comes when Harker wakes up to the a young boy playing violin standing above him. It's one of those great Herzog moments that seemingly serves no purpose other than as beautiful oddity. They do have a reason for being there, inexplicable as they seem, but even if they didn't I welcome them. The film's creepiest sequence, and one of the most unforgettable and brilliant scenes I've ever seen, takes place as Lucy Harker walks through the town square. Pigs and grey rats wander freely; the remaining townsfolk dance around the coffins; one group sits down for a nice meal in the wake of a plague. Lucy tries to escape those trying to dance with her, as the soundtrack plays a choral piece as Herzog's camera films from above, trailing behind, from always perfectly chosen distances to set the tone. The result is a purely visceral and delirious sequence that has never left my memory.
    There are two versions of the film available, Both basically the same. One's shot in English, the other in German. Herzog has said he prefers the German version, feeling that for some reason those scenes just flowed better. I'm inclined to agree. The English version was the one I first saw, and had a few initial problems with. But as the years passed, and the viewings increased, any problems with the film only seemed to add to Nosferatu's greatness. Some have said that in order for a film to be a true masterpiece, it has to have some flaws. Sounds silly, but there's something to it. Herzog's films are filled with lots of little flaws, many due to working with next to no funding. His films are deeply personal, and were understandably emotional affairs. And working with Kinski was always at least sometimes a volatile affair. But that's what does make these films so endearing. There are lots of technically "perfect" made films. Yet many of them that don't have that endearing quality. It's films like these that seem to stick with you, for better or for worse. For their flaws, or for what they achieve in spite of them.
  • columbiatch
    November 1, 2008
    columbiatch
    For the most part I was surprised at how faithful this was to the original up until the last 30 minutes. Herzog amazingly recreates the exact location of the original despite filming in a different country, even exactly copying some of the same shots. In terms of visuals the na...( read more)turalist approach here holds up extremely well against Murnau's expressionist imagery, and Kinski is probably the only modern actor capable of emulating Max Schreck. I liked Herzog's own touches to the story such as giving more focus to Lucy and her interaction with Dracula, as well as the campiness from the dialogue and the theatrical performances. That guy who plays Reinfield is absolutely hilarious, and Bruno Ganz gives a much better performance than the smuck in the original film. The problem was that I didn't care for the story from the original film and so the remake doesn't have enough of Herzog's sensibility to make it more interesting.
  • EarthlyAlien
    September 4, 2008
    EarthlyAlien
    "Death is not the worst. There are things more horrible than death."

    Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht lacks many of the conventional elements of a horror film. There are no shocks designed to make the audience jump out of their seats, no elaborate special effects, and ...( read more)very little blood. The film's horror is philosophical, and it springs from our most intimate fears (fear of death, fear of madness, fear of entropy). The mummified corpses that open the film stare vacantly at us, as if they were posing an unanswered question. Werner Herzog, who seems constantly driven to stare life's all-encompassing mysteries straight in the eye, is the perfect fit for a vampire film; few directors are so familiar with the uncanny.

    Photobucket

    Herzog's remake stays close to the plot of F.W. Murnau's original (although, unlike Murnau, he was allowed to use the characters' original names as the copyright on Bram Stoker's had expired). The film follows Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) as he journeys to a village in the Netherlands in search of Lucy Harker (Isabelle Adjani), the object of his desire. A plague follows Dracula, killing and consuming nearly everything in his path. Herzog's changes aren't structural but tonal. In Murnau's film, the plague that threatens to destroy an entire village is presented as an occasion for suspense (can anyone stop the monster before it is too late?) but Herzog tells the same story with a silent inevitability.

    As Jonathan (Bruno Ganz), Lucy's husband, makes the long journey through the Carpathian Mountains to his new employer, the prelude to Wagner's "The Rhine Gold" takes the place of typical horror film music on the soundtrack (the piece was also used wonderfully in Terrence Malick's The New World). Herzog subverts our expectations throughout the film; while it's bleak and arguably nihilistic, our response isn't dread, but wonder. Herzog presents fleeting images - a ghoulish cuckoo clock, a bat slowly climbing a curtain - that create a world perched between reality and dreams. Herzog is often labelled a naturalist, but he's really a romanticist - he's drawn to the beauty of decay, collapse, and the end of all things.

    At the centre of Herzog's vision is Kinski as the lonely Count Dracula. Max Schreck's version of the character is an iconic creature - a feral predator consumed by hunger and single-minded lust. Kinski is equally fearsome, but he's also more recognizably human. Dracula's feelings for Lucy are more romantic than carnal, but he's constantly betrayed by his own nature; the vampire appears embarrassed as he enters Harker's bedroom late at night for a snack. Kinski weighs down the Count's movements with the fatigue of a thousand years - he almost seems to welcome the relief of a death at sunrise. Kinski is primarily known for his intensity and psychotic temper, but in this and Herzog's Woycezk (which started filming just days after Nosferatu was completed), he displays astonishing vulnerability. He is doomed to destroy everything he touches, even that which he desires most.

    The saturated reds commonly associated with vampire films are absent here, replaced with funereal blacks, cold blues and vacant greys. The always-overcast sky looms over shadowy mountain passes, remote villages and bleak landscapes that extend to the horizon. A ghostly pallor covers not only Kinski but also Ganz and especially Adjani, whose porcelain beauty has never seemed more tragic. The story progresses with inexorable silence, accompanied by the ethereal score by Popol Vuh. The entire film is driven by a sense of creeping inevitability - only Renfield (played with scenery-chewing joy by Roland Topor, author of "The Tenant") possesses a vitality and a gleeful brand of gallows humour. His madness puts him in harmony with the escalating chaos surrounding him.

    As the plague and madness overwhelm the village, its residents (including an unusually ineffectual Van Helsing) try in vain to rationalise and solve the problem. A scene depicting members of the upper class going through the motions of a banquet and party among the rats carries a darkly funny charge as a reflection of the ever-changing state of European culture in the 20th century. The vampire here represents not only physical death but also the death of civilization, of enlightenment - of the soul. And Herzog provides no resolution, only the suggestion that evil cannot be stopped, but only travels unnoticed from one place and time to another, carrying out its unknown purpose. Herzog not only honours the original film but matches its brilliance in spaces. His Nosferatu is a deep and resonant experience. It finds poetry in the horror of the unreal.
  • PvtCaboose91
    July 10, 2008
    PvtCaboose91
    "Death is not the worst. There are things more horrible than death."


    It's an unfortunate fact that remakes have been commissioned for decades. Back in 1979 Werner Herzog set out to remake the unauthorised 1922 Dracula adaptation Nosferatu, which was dir

    ...( read more)ected by F.W. Murnau. The original 1922 silent movie will forever remain an essentially flawless horror classic. When Herzog decided to remake Murnau's masterpiece, it's obvious that he made a creative decision to stay more faithful to the source material written by Bram Stoker in the late 19th century. Originally, Murnau desired to make a cinematic version of Stoker's novel. However, due to copyright reasons, he was unable to fulfil this desire. Instead he made "cosmetic" changes to the novel (mainly changing the title from Dracula to Nosferatu) while keeping the original concept and essential series of events identical to the source material.

    Herzog's remake is a courteous re-imagining of Murnau's early silent picture. This remake is neither scary nor brutal as most vampire-oriented horror pictures tended to be in later years. Herzog's movie is instead moody, mesmeric, and entrancing: it's inexorably sinister and spellbinding as the vampiric Transylvanian fiend spreads corruption and pestilence, fundamentally generating a pervading atmosphere of malevolence as opposed to outright horror thrills. Imagery of the town devastated by an unknown plague town is particularly memorable. However, Herzog's filmmaking techniques strictly fall into the category of "art house" and certainly won't be liked by all.

    The film's plot remains faithful to its film forerunner as well as the original novel. Jonathan Harker (Ganz) works for a local real estate agency. Harker's employer sends him on an errand to stitch up a property deal with the enigmatically frightening Count Dracula (Kinski) who resides in the mysterious Transylvanian mountains. During Harker's expedition to Transylvania he discovers that the locals hearing the name Dracula is enough to build up anxiety, fear and trepidation. The locals are so terrified of Dracula's castle that no-one agrees to help him reach his desired destination. However, due to the promise of a substantial pay-check, Harker doesn't give up as he travels through the baffling, mesmerising landscape. Count Dracula transpires to be a bald man with a perplexingly disturbing personality underneath. Dracula is a man who perks up at the sight of blood...and at the sight of a photograph depicting Harker's striking wife Lucy (Adjani). Harker is left weakened and sapped of a lot of blood while Dracula sets forth for his new residence in search of Lucy. Dracula brings with him plague and death.

    Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre is slow-paced and a seemingly cumbersome film. This rendering of the classic vampire tale is simply one of the most stylish in existence. Herzog filmed his version across dazzling, extraordinary landscapes throughout Europe. The visuals also benefit from superb production design and excellent cinematography...everything is quite a treat to view. However there are countless flaws to also point out. Dramatically the film is exceedingly boring, as the slow pace is accompanied by mannered acting all-round. Perhaps this was intended to provide a dream-like quality to the proceedings, and in some ways it is quite successful. The stilted, unimaginative dialogue also drags the production down.

    Klaus Kinski is an interesting embodiment of the Dracula character. Kinski portrays Dracula quite similarly to the Max Schreck depiction in 1922. His appearance is cadaverous, ghastly and almost rodent-like. His features are extremely distinguished, especially during dialogue or horror scene. Kinski is duly creepy and endows his portrayal with additional sympathy. He is what he is and can't help it, and it's palpable that he feels sorry for himself. He is a melancholy creature, discontented with his perpetually despondent condition yet unable to do anything about it. Nosferatu the Vampyre is a competent, atmospheric remake that has been regarded as one of the most faithful Dracula adaptations of all time. But, considering the quality of Murnau's masterwork, it isn't overly necessary.
  • ahhh1989
    November 1, 2009
    ahhh1989
    The original was a masterpiece of horror, but somehow this film manages to be even more enchanting in even more ways than the original was. This is perhaps my all time favorite retelling of Dracula! This film has everything and it manages to just be scary as hell in a way that is...( read more)n't obvious. It really is one of the best horror films ever made.
  • daisy184
    October 14, 2009
    daisy184
    One of the classics and best vampire movies around
  • CHILIcheeseDONUTSwithTUNAonTOP
    September 4, 2009
    CHILIcheeseDONUTSwithTUNAonTOP
    I do not understand the purpose for this re-make. Sure it captures some of the same drab creepiness as the original, but the original was in so many ways superior. Maybe because of some people's aversion to silent film this could be attractive, but to me this was pointless.
  • rylanjp
    August 18, 2009
    rylanjp
    An atmospheric and dream-like vampire movie. There is much to admire but little to excite.
  • darfox11
    July 28, 2009
    darfox11
    remake of the classic

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