Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (2 Disc Set)
by Werner Herzog
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Actor: Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Adjani, Klaus Kinski, Roland Topor, Walter LadengastDirector: Werner Herzog
Brand: KINSKI,KLAUS
Cinematographer: J?rg Schmidt-Reitwein
Producer: Werner Herzog
Writer: Werner Herzog
Producer: Daniel Toscan du Plantier
Producer: Michael Gruskoff
Producer: Walter Saxer
Writer: Bram Stoker
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: German (Original Language), Dolby Digital 5.1; English (Subtitled)
Format: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 107 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-07-09
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: Starz / Anchor Bay
DVD Reviews of Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (2 Disc Set)
DVD Review: HERZOG'S REMAKE IS HYPNOTIC
Summary: 4 Stars
"NOSFERATU" (1922) (1979)
See the extraodinary original and then the brilliant remake.
Filmmaker F.W. Marnau's "Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie Des Grauens" (1922) is the first in a long line of vampire films. Marnau freely adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula but Stoker's widow recognized similarities and sued Marnau and all prints of Marnau's film were ordered destroyed!
But a few copies of landmark and exquisite German expressionistic masterpiece escaped and were the inspiration for German writer-director Werner Herzog's remake "Nosferatu: The Vampyre" (1979).
Klaus Kinski's pale makeup, pointed ears, long fingernails and mannered gestures will unnerve in this atmospheric, deliberately paced, fever-dream of a movie. Isabelle Adjani co-stars as the distraught wife of Bruno Ganz's Jonathan Harker, who comes under the blood spell of Kinski's magnificent creature. The music, mood and images will reverberate long after the movie ends. The DVD includes the German language version with English subtitles as well as a full-length, but slightly different English version and a most unusual bonus commentary by Herzog himself.
Herzog's a genius and his cinema art will continue to penetrate our increasingly bifurcated self-aware and superficlal pop culture.
The beautiful box art is almost worth the cost of the DVD!
(Marnau's "Nosferatu": Not rated, full frame, 93 minutes: Herzog's "Nosferatu": PG, widescreen, 107 minutes)
DVD Review: A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia
Summary: 4 Stars
Werner Herzog's Nosferatu (1979) is less a film about the struggle between good and evil than it is a film about the triumph of all-consuming Eros over theology. Each of the film's personages-Count Dracula, Lucy, Jonathan Harker-are seized by a destructively violent passion. Their desires are one. They are victims of a violent desire that exists on the other side of mortality, on the other side of good and evil.
All three characters mirror each other at certain crucial points.
Kinski's Nosferatu is He-Who-Desires: an incarnation which is curiously effeminate but also strangely virile, virtually androgynous, neither man nor woman. His vampire is leechlike, parasitical, much frailer and sicklier than other, more robust screen vampires (Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, etc.). When Jonathan eats his dinner, Nosferatu stares at his quarry's neck like a hound in rut. He has no existence outside of the living beings upon whom he feeds. So intensely enamored of Lucy's neck is Nosferatu that he is willing to leave his castle in Transylvania just to be near her. And when Nosferatu comes to Bremen, he brings the plague with him. His untrammeled desire for Lucy is pestilential, a cloud of rats. His all-enveloping love, his polymorphic attraction, is what brings the pestilence. Sexual desire is the plague. In this film, desire is figured as disease. A plague that ends in the "festive" destruction of Western civilization, a round-dance in which animals and humans mingle, a joyful plague of "perverse" sexuality.
Jonathan Harker is Nosferatu's double-willing to give up everything, willing to risk death, to go any extreme for the sake of his beloved, Lucy. And at the eerily open-ended conclusion of the film (and this is Herzog's most drastic departure from the original), Jonathan assumes the vampire's role completely. He effectively becomes his nemesis. There are no end-credits; the film continues infinitely. The final image is of a spreading desolation, the reign of negativity and the annihilation of civilization (which, as usual in Herzog, is affirmed as a joyous event---from what we see of civilization in this film, it doesn't appear worth saving; the annihilation of all social laws is here seen as something positive). Nosferatu nowhere dies in the space of the film. Indeed, Nosferatu's tragedy is not death but the impossibility of death.
In her conversation with Nosferatu, Lucy makes a startling proclamation: She is willing to refuse to God the love that she gives to Jonathan. Her unreserved (unholy?) desire for Jonathan surmounts her piety, her faith in God. Does this not bind her intimately with Nosferatu, the force of entropic negativity? By refusing God the love she gives to her man, she migrates to the country of darkness. With her spectral pallor, she is uncannily resemblant of Nosferatu. When he visits her in the bedroom, she embraces him, her dark lover, pulling him to her neck. Is this a self-sacrifice for the sake of the people of Bremen? For Jonathan's sake? Perhaps. But after Nosferatu is vanquished, why does the blood rush to her cheeks? And why, after Nosferatu has sapped her blood, why does she bask in what seems to be a post-coital glow?
Each of these characters are victims of the suicidal character of all sexual desire.
There are so many details in this film that will haunt your mind... Kinski's ghastly rat-like features. The way in which the camera makes you his victim, fresh for vampirization. The way in which all relations are inverted. Sickness surmounts health. Survival surmounts both death and life.
Unlike F.W. Murnau's 1922 original, the images in Herzog's film are not symbolic--that is, they do not subserve character or language. As in all of Herzog's cinema, the images are restored to their purity and form a pre-conceptual, pre-rational, pre-critical visual language all their own.
Dr. Joseph Suglia
DVD Review: Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (1979)-Excellent Remake!
Summary: 5 Stars
Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (1979) was a great remake which I rate a five star production. This film really captured the essence of the famous original and allowed me to see what the original film maker might have captured on the film if he were making the movie today. The film appears to have been filmed on location in Europe (the castle looks very credible and perhaps found on location??) and this adds to the charm, and in some cases otherworldly effect of the movie which was a shear pleasure to watch.DVD Review: CHEESY!
Summary: 1 Stars
THE MOVIE STARTS OUT RATHER CREEPY AND INTERESTING. JUST WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR. IT THEN EVOLVES INTO A CHEESY AND CORNY PIECE OF RUBBISH. THE APPARANT HEROINE AT THE END DECIDES TO LET THE DISGUSTING VAMPIRE INTO HER ROOM TO SUCK HER BLOOD. SO SHE WILL NOW BECOME A VAMPIRE AND THUS TRICK DRACULA INTO FORGETTING IT IS DAWN AND THUS BE DESTROYED. AT ONE POINT IN THE SHOW RATS ARE EVERYWHERE AND PEOPLE ARE DYING OF THE PLAGUE AND WALKING AROUND LIKE ZOMBIES. WHY NOY MAKE IT MORE REALISTIC AND SHOW THE POPULATION ATTEMPTING TO ERADICATE THE RATS. NO, INSTEAD THEY ALLOW THE RATS EVERYWHERE. DVD Review: magnificently dark and believable
Summary: 5 Stars
As one would expect from Herzog, this is a version of the Dracula story that is turned upside down: the hero is Lucy (the sister who is turned into a vampire in other versions), who understands what the count really is and seeks to destroy him all alone. Van Helsing in this version must be dragged along to see the truth, as he is a doddering old man at the end of his career and capacities to think. Indeed, he is a useless scientist. The time is also earlier, pre-industrial and with echos of the Middle Ages, even though it must be the 17C.
Kinsky is absolutely brilliant as Dracula, in one of his best performances. Rather than the sexual magnetism that Lugosi or Oldham exuded with such charisma, he is pathetically aware that he can only prey on love and humanity, from a distance. But he is compelled by blood lust. Kinski really doesn't look at all human, but a true creature of the night. Adjani was never more beautiful and depressed.
Dracula's arrival in Germany brings a far greater evil than just himself, again portrayed as the breakdown of all order and decency. Adjani walks through the town center, deserted except for those accepting death as a celebration, in a stunning reflection of medieval images of plague. They grab her, want her to dance with them, but she pursues her higher purpose.
The most shocking part is the end, totally unexpected and ominous, yet without overt horror. Again, perfectly done: not hollywood slick, but projecting the horror and its power into the unknown future. Only Herzog can do this so effectively.
Recommended warmly. It is poetry of horror.
Description of Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (2 Disc Set)
THE ENGLISH AND GERMAN VERSIONS OF THE MODERN HORROR MASTERPIECE In 1979, award-winning director Werner Herzog and his volatile star Klaus Kinski embarked on a milestone in international cinema: a dual-language remake of F.W. Murnau's legendary 1922 horror classic NOSFERATU. The film starred Kinski in the performance of a lifetime as the predatory vampire Dracula, with Isabelle Adjani (THE TENANT) as his beloved Lucy and Bruno Ganz (WINGS OF DESIRE) as the doomed Jonathan Harker. Filmed on breathtaking locations throughout Europe and simultaneously shot in both German and English-speaking versions that create fascinating differences in tone and texture, Werner Herzog's NOSFERATU has since become recognized worldwide as the definitive version of the Dracula legend as well as one of the most extraordinarily haunting horror films ever made. Includes a 4-Page Collector's Booklet.Werner Herzog's remake of F.W. Murnau's original vampire classic is at once a generous tribute to the great German director and a distinctly unique vision by one of cinema's most idiosyncratic filmmakers. Though Murnau's Nosferatu was actually an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Herzog based his film largely on Murnau's conceptions--at times directly quoting Murnau's images--but manages to slip in a few references to Tod Browning's famous version (at one point the vampire comments on the howling wolves: "Listen, the children of the night make their music."). Longtime Herzog star Klaus Kinski is both hideous and melancholy as Nosferatu (renamed Count Dracula in the English language version). As in Murnau's film, he's a veritable gargoyle with his bald pate and sunken eyes, and his talon-like fingernails and two snaggly fangs give him a distinctly feral quality. But Kinski's haunting eyes also communicate a gloomy loneliness--the curse of his undead immortality--and his yearning for Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) becomes a melancholy desire for love. Bruno Ganz's sincere but foolish Jonathan is doomed to the vampire's will and his wife, Lucy, a holy innocent whose deathly pallor and nocturnal visions link her with the ghoulish Nosferatu, becomes the only hope against the monster's plague-like curse. Herzog's dreamy, delicate images and languid pacing create a stunningly beautiful film of otherworldly mood, a faithful reinterpretation that by the conclusion has been shaped into a quintessentially Herzog vision. --Sean Axmaker
Stills from Nosferatu: The Vampyre/Phantom Der Nacht (Click for larger image)
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