Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is a real estate agent in the employ of Renfield (Roland Topor) tasked with making the four-week journey from Wismar to Transylvania to review the sale of a large, empty estate home back in Germany with Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski), coincidentally enough the neighboring lot to Jonathan’s own home.  Despite the worrying of his wife, Lucy (Isabelle Adjani), and the desperate pleas of the travelers he meets at a village inn, Jonathan makes the trek, and after being captivated by Lucy’s beauty seen from a portrait in Jonathan’s locket, the allure of being her neighbor quickly sways the Count’s decision to sign the bill of sale.  The Count leaves his castle in the dark of night, trapping Jonathan in the old halls and forcing the man to escape from a window before making the journey to Wismar. Though Dracula arrives before Jonathan who is informed in the hospital, he did not make the trip alone as he brought with him The Black Death, and soon the whole town fears they will succumb to the deadly plague brought by the mysterious stranger.  

Werner Herzog mounts his take on the Bram Stoker novel, Dracula, more so as a homage to F. W. Murnau’s silent staple Nosferatu (1922) than a direct adaptation of the source text.  He delivers Nosferatu the Vampyre, to Twentieth Century Fox in 1979, who only agreed to release the audacious project with the caveat that Herzog also shoot an English-language cut.  The director complied but would later state that the German-language cut, under the title Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, is more closely aligned with his vision.  Regardless of which language is being spoken, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein’s cinematography coupled with Florian Fricke’s score delivers a haunting nightmare that honors and expands on Murnau’s work and can still instill dread in audiences some forty years after its initial release. 

Ganz is at the heart of the film, at least for the first half, and is our window into this strange world.  Playing the straight man in a horror film is always a thankless task as the supporting cast gets to lean into all the eccentricities of the narrative, something the ratty Topor embraces early on, but Ganz handles the satedness of the role with grace.  As the narrative evolves, it begins to shift its focus from Harker, to his wife, and as a reward for his steadiness in the first act, the third act allows Ganz to embrace the weird through some menacing character choices that create great unease in the audience. 

The subtlety that rules over the entire film is one of the strongest aspects of the film which touches on various elements of gothic horror, human drama, and unrequited romance.  Never leaning too far in any one direction, Herzog’s script strikes up a perfect balance that it also never feels like any of these ideas are half-baked, but rather it all works in favor of creating an overwhelmingly full film, a world that feels genuinely lived in yet not manufactured.  It is not surprising given that Herzog’s documentary titles far outnumber his narrative works, but even in these flights of fancy, he always has an eye for the grounded reality – the human element at the core of his narrative – to inspire and drive his characters and in this instance, he is focused on love.     

The object of affection in Nosferatu comes in the form of Adjani’s Lucy, whose wide-eyed brand of horror echos back to Greta Schröder’s performance as Ellen in Murnau’s work; whose name had to be changed as the novel was protected by copyright, a concession Herzog avoided by officially starting production the day the work fell into the hands of the public domain.  Adjani would later cement her place in the Hall of Fame for women in horror with her work in Andrzej Zulawski’s Possession (1981) as another wife driven insane by the supernatural forces at work around her.  It may sound like a reductive role, but for the last act of the film, much of the action is driven by Lucy who has a considerable amount of agency over her plot line, though she has to fight tooth and nail to get it.  It is a far cry from the meeker version of Lucy at the start of the film, whose superstitious dreams are cast aside as nonsense by her businessman husband, notably not in a “get thee to a nunnery” type of way, but rather Jonathan argues that it is an important transaction, and it needs to be done. 

It sets the stage for the final act when Lucy convinces Jonathan of her own necessary transaction to destroy Count Dracula and save the town from the Black Death. There is a wonderful scene in the town square when the procession of coffins is interrupted by Lucy asking to see the mayor of the town only to be told that there is no one on that council left. They have all died and the few who do remain in town are quintessentially abandoned. Until now, Herzog made audiences uncomfortable in his strange world, but here the fear is amplified. The fear and loneliness captured in a harrowing shot of the Captain (Jacques Dufilho) of the Demeter, tied to the wheel leading a ship full of ghosts, hints at this loneliness to come, and now that he has made land and no there is no escaping this terrible fate. Armed with some occult text Jonathan received from a gypsy in the inn, Lucy consults Dr. Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), and together they make the difficult decision to use her as the bait for Dracula to distract him at daybreak and let the first rays of the morning sun subdue him. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the care that Lucy shows in this final act is heartbreaking as she lays a salt line around Jonathan – who has been returned to her care from the hospital but is unable to recall their relationship – to protect him when the Count arrives. In a different kind of fairy tale, this selfless sacrifice would be rewarded, but instead, only tragedy lies ahead for Lucy.  

Herzog writes the Count as a tragic character in keeping with the tradition of the original but also honoring the greater tradition of creatures in stories to have exaggerated elements of humanity. Kinski, behind the makeup and prosthetics, delivers a surprisingly grounded performance. The notoriously catalytic actor brings tenderness to the performance which still allows the actor to examine themes of self-destructive obsession as with many of his collaborations with Herzog, but somehow, he feels the most human while playing an immortal resulting in a high note, not just for his work with Herzog but for his overall career. Like Adjani, Kinski’s role is also greatly inspired by his predecessor, Max Schreck as Graf Orlok. Not to discredit the immense artistry that went into silent films, there is always something lost when separating the dialogue from the actors, and while Herzog’s script does show a tendency for some flowery language, Kinski maintains mastery over the speeches about the impossibility of love and how it deflates his existence. 

Herzog’s work, like many of his narrative features, offers so much to the audience. Visually stunning and with a unique angle into the story, there are always new details to be discovered upon repeat viewings. The performances across the board are all sublime, and while it was surely a punishing and meticulous shoot, Herzog manages to achieve a stunning naturalism with his supporting cast. The homage to Murnau’s work, considered by Herzog to be one of the finest films to come out of Germany, expands wonderfully on the source material and capitalizes on the advances in filmmaking at the time. It is an undeniably affecting story, eventually remade again by Francis Ford Coppola in 1992 and with a fourth upcoming project from notorious period-stickler Robert Eggers eying an ealry 2023 shoot in Prauge which speaks to the timelessness of Stoker’s novel, Herzog’s style suits this tale in an unmatched way, and while audiences cannot go wrong with any of the three iterations that graced the silver screen, it will be no easy task to improve on or add to this legend as the balance struck here by Herzog is the perfect intersection which reflects on the traditions of the past while still allowing the filmmaker to blaze forward as a pioneer in the craft.