Review #245: Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

This review was originally written in October 2022.

Gabe's 100 Bucket List Horror Films Review #99: Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht (1979)

So, this is the fourth adaptation of Dracula I've seen this month. I'm not going to lament that fact as much as I did for Horror of Dracula (despite that being a better film overall I was a lot less frustrated with having to watch this one) but I am going to compare it to 1922's Nosferatu, of which this is a direct (almost shot-for-shot) remake.

Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht is a German film that follows Jonathan Harker, an estate agent, who travels to a remote part of Transylvania under orders to arrange a property deal with Count Dracula, who plans to move to Jonathan's town of Wismar. The locals warn him of the legends and superstitions that surround the count's castle, but he soldiers on and meets the bizarre, monstrous count. Once the deal has been made Dracula seemingly becomes infatuated with a cameo of Johnathan's wife Lucy, and he travels to Wismar, leaving a sick and debilitated Jonathan behind. Jonathan chases after him, but by the time he arrives, Dracula has spread a plague among the city and Jonathan himself is becoming quite ill. Lucy learns of Dracula's abilities and weaknesses from some writings in Jonathan's belongings, and she sacrifices herself to lure the count to his doom. However, with Dracula out of the way, Jonathan rises as the new count and rides off into the night.

First, the good: I think this movie is a lot more easily-watchable than the 1922 silent film (and apparently there's even a version that's dubbed in English, mostly by the same actors, but the version I watched was in German with subtitles). I appreciated how they changed the characters' names back to the Bram Stoker names (though they still flipped the roles of Lucy and Mina for whatever reason). There's some interesting worldbuilding in this story, with all of the legends and rumors told about Dracula's domain (like the suggestion that it's not a real place, and only exists in the mind of those who travel there). And the final five minutes of this film are by and large some of the best Dracula-based content I've seen all year, though that primarily came from my expectations being subverted since I had no idea it was going to end like that.

All that being said, though, this movie is still pretty bad. It managed to tell the exact same story as the silent film, while taking quite a bit longer to do so. There's a ton of slow pans over scenery in here, some of which works and a lot of which doesn't. Dracula's appearance and behavior is so bizarre and offputting that I couldn't take it seriously; in the original it's easy to view it all through the lens of "this is a silent film, of course it's all going to be exaggerated because all they know is stage theater" but when the (semi-)modern remake is just as exaggerated if not moreso, it just looks and sounds silly. No person, in any time period, no matter how much they were getting paid, would take a single look at this movie's Count Dracula without saying out loud "Oh, that guy's some kind of hideous monster". In the original film Hutter was a sort of hapless, absentminded nobody (because, again, exaggeration to tell a broad story in a very unfamiliar medium) but in here they have him do the same things despite ostensibly being portrayed as a real person.

I still don't understand how or why Renfield became Dracula's thrall, considering how any correspondence between them would have taken weeks and it's absolutely established that the two of them never had close contact before the film. I think it's incredibly interesting that this movie seems to be saying that Dracula actually isn't killed by sunlight- multiple times he laments wanting to die but being unable to, which wouldn't be the case if he could just look out a window any morning to take his own life- but rather, his "death" (more on that in a moment) at the end of the film isn't because of some innate vulnerability to sunlight, but rather the result of a prophecy or ritual that Lucy completes by distracting him from the crow of the cock. But I think it's VERY weird how we're told "the first ray of sunlight will obliterate him", yet all the light does is slowly make him fall unconscious (at which point Van Helsing has to go kill him with a stake). Like, how is that different from what happens to him EVERY MORNING when he climbs inside his coffin? What did Lucy actually accomplish by her sacrifice except making him stay up late? It seems like a very sloppy change to the end of the story in order to shoehorn in the last-minute twist that Jonathan has become a vampire (by letting him accuse Van Helsing of murdering a new resident of the town)- which, to be fair, I think was the best part of the movie- but it makes NO sense given the context and what we've been told so far. I think it's neat how Dracula ultimately accomplishes everything he wants in this movie- he spreads plague, he gets to feed on Lucy's "beautiful throat", and most of all, he gets to finally die- I just wish more liberties had been taken with the rest of the story, so it didn't feel like a hundred-year-old-narrative being retold for the twentieth time.

I wanted to give this movie several extra points because it had a lot of cute pet rats in it, but reading the trivia it seems that the rats were very severely mistreated before and during filming. So I had to take points away for that.

Overall Rating: 3/10 Inexplicable Violin Boys

Rats Are The Best (Please Don't Mistreat Them): It has been stated by Werner Herzog [the director] that the rats that appear in the film behaved better than Klaus Kinski [the actor that played Dracula, known for his poor temperament] during the shoot.