Nosferatu (1979)

One could say lots of things about Werner Herzog's take on Nosferatu. One could, for example, say that it is more sexist than almost any other movie (the vampire can only be killed by a woman with a pure heart, or how it was: oh look at the true self-sacrifice of a beautiful woman!). The second thing to be said is that it is a brilliant film, one of Herzog's best, a stylistically marvellous show-off that needs no particular technical devices. Bruno Ganz, who is always good, plays Jonathan, the decent bourgeois man with a beutiful wife. He is sent on a business trip to the strange land of werewolves and old tales, in which Dracula resides. Kinski plays Dracula, and of course he adds both drama and strangeness to the role. You know the rest of the story. The only thing Herzog has added is his usual tirade about science and how we are misled by scientific thinking. The film features countless striking scenes (even small ones, as a little girl coughing in a harbor filled with rats, people and a boat). The film is shamelessly pessimistic and the message is: evil will - pervade! The film is a mix of funny and sad. We see a doomed world, and even the Dracula figure itself lacks all marks of 'evil', he is more a tragic figure. On the other hand, Herzog's coy humor is expressed in many places, for example in the character of van Helsing, a scholarly doctor-cum-vampire hunter. Nosferatu, thankfully, has very little of the proneness for blood&guts of traditional horror movies; it opts for aesthetics and atmosphere more than sensation.