Dr. Szlyk's Blog for ENGL 190: Nosferatu 1979!

Vampires are incredibly popular now. How many of you have seen the Twilight films or read the books that the films are based on? How many of you know someone who is obsessed by the series?

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu is a very different kind of vampire film. As you can see, Klaus Kinski's Nosferatu looks like an "old" man; he does not look like a teenager. His victim, Lucy, is a young married woman, not a girl. Also, as I mentioned in my entry on Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, Nosferatu came out in 1979, over thirty years ago. Therefore, it reflects a very different kind of film aesthetic from what you may be used to. Herzog did not rely on CGI, his film emphasizes image & atmosphere over plot, and his "takes" are longer than what you may be used to since the actor's reaction to situations and the buildup of atmosphere are very important in this type of film. Also, in this particular film, there are a lot of long and extremely long shots, and in some of them, the actors are *not* facing the camera. This is not to say that there is no plot or character in the movie. Instead, Lucy takes a subtler approach to rescuing her husband. She does not strap on an automatic weapon and start shooting garlic bulbs at the count...or whacking him over the head with a silver crucifix.

Below is a picture of the count's encounter with Lucy's husband, Jonathan Harker, a naive real estate agent. At this point, the two men are in the count's castle in Transylvania.

Even before we see Count Dracula, we sense that we are in a different world. (The film appears to be set during the 1800s, during the Romantic era when the Brothers Grimm were alive.) Lucy's husband's journey to Count Dracula's castle is slower and more mysterious. Lucy has premonitions of disaster--as she reveals to her husband in the scene below.

Here we see Lucy wandering throughout the city of Wisnau as she seeks to rescue her husband once he has returned from Count Dracula's castle. Do you see the rats in the background?

The rats have arrived in the city with the count and his coffin-laden ship. Naturally, all of the humans on the ship are dead...or undead. By the way, officials in Delft, the Dutch city where Herzog began filming Nosferatu, forced him to stop because of the rats. Perhaps there is something to be said for CGI.