The Lonely, Bitter Plague: Herzog's Nosferatu
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre might be my favorite cinematic version of the Dracula story (followed very closely by Francis Ford Coppola’s lavish, erotic and blood-soaked Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though the two are very different.) I think it takes the top spot mainly because of how it doubles down on the idea of the wicked Count as a metaphor for disease and pestilence. Dracula, as a character, has always had to balance his twin needs for affection and apocalypse, and it’s cool to see Herzog play with the former as almost a victim of the latter.
The last two films Herzog had finished share those themes: His 1977 feature Stroszek is about a travelling man in a failing romance, doomed wherever he goes. Meanwhile, his documentary short released the same year, La Soufriere, sees Herzog visiting the island of Guadeloupe that seems to be on the verge of volcanic annihilation (it isn’t in the end.) So he was no stranger to the idea of looming death and tragic connections. I think this helps to make Nosferatu feel particularly assured in its approach. Herzog doesn’t really play with the idea of “hope” in this one, things that have often helped balance the horrific legend of Dracula with hearty vampire-killing adventures. Instead, from the outset, contagion is inescapable. The whole film reeks of it.
It turns Dracula into a tragic figure, unable to help himself from devolving his journey into a mire of disease and death. With his rodent-like visage (obviously based on the make-up and prosthetics used on actor Max Schreck in the 1922 film,) his visions of companionship seem to be in a scrabbling race with his own epidemic. Herzog frames his obsession with Lucy not as a kind of lost love or destined meeting, but the final effort of a man who will infect the world. One cannot tell how many civilizations have fallen in this manner, but one look at Dracula (played by frequent Herzog collaborator Klaus Kinski in one of his best performances) makes it seem like this isn’t the first. He seems both driven and distracted, a creature without true meaning because everywhere he goes, that meaning is extinguished in his wake.
The end of the film, in which Van Helsing is arrested for murder and Jonathan Harker rides off as a vampire himself, is almost comically nihilistic. Of course, not knowing where the tragedy ends and the comedy begins and vice versa is a staple of Herzog, but here, in the midst of the total fall of mankind, the turn of events is hilariously efficient. A happy ending, a return to order - those are staples of a society and of structure. But Dracula, though now dead with a stake through his heart, has rid us of that. Calamity is all that’s left.
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