Nosferatu the Vampyre Review

Review of Nosferatu, the Vampyre (1979) by screenqueeen: 👍 5/5

93/100

Herzog can breathe fresh, new life into even the thousandth retread of a story. this essentially resets NOSFERATU into what it was meant to be in the early 1920s, a genuine and inspired adaptation of Dracula. i love the choices he made with each music piece, announcing them in the opening credits gives you an idea of what mode of storytelling to expect and by extension of that a given pace and tone.

what i love about his filmmaking is how it focuses also on the flora and fauna, very much a part of culture and everyday lives whose collective health affects all those around them. there is just as much impact on the town as there is Johnathan, Lucy and their immediate circle through pursuance of the rats brought aboard and unloaded from the ill-fated vessel Dracula passively boards, alongside his own personal torment and hauntings of the lives of this cursed young couple. there is a very brief sequence of a party of people feasting outside in a courtyard at a long table luxuriously supplied with an abundance of food and wine. one of them toasts the rest, announcing that because they have contracted the black plague that came to their town it would make sense to then live some facet of life to the fullest and feast with friends with one last display of opulence, at the very least a social sense of that to create or mark one more memory, if even it would be bittersweet. the next shot is of a similar or the same table, overtaken by rats across the entire tabletop and underneath, swarming the shot*.

i really like where this goes by film's end as it serves to show how even a perpetually sad yet immensely powerful being such as Dracula could act in the undead pursuit of some kind of self preservation, spreading his seed through both Jonathan and Lucy. but his laments consistently throughout of the utter cruelty of immortality leads us to believe that his end was far less orchestrated by external forces than it was by his own hand to some degree. he needed a reassurance that some part of him could continue on before departing. the reception of his arrival in the midst of the rats, likely an oversight on his part, served to prove to him that he would never be welcome. where else can you go but far into the eternal sea of sunlight to join those who he suspects went before him?

*yeah i know about the rats thing Herzog did