Nosferatu the Vampyre

Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht) opened in 1979 and won the Silver Bear for Outstanding Artistic Achievement at the Berlin Film Festival. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, and it is one of the most distinctive remakes cinema has produced. Herzog made it as a reverent reimagining of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent Nosferatu, faithful to much of the original's look and structure.

Klaus Kinski plays Count Dracula, in one of the most committed of his collaborations with Herzog, under prosthetic makeup closely modelled on Max Schreck's in 1922. He slides through the dust of Wismar as the most terminally lonely Dracula ever filmed. Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Harker, the young estate agent sent to the Carpathian Mountains to negotiate the property purchase, and Isabelle Adjani is luminous as Lucy Harker. The French illustrator and writer Roland Topor plays Renfield.

Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein shot the exteriors in Wismar (the medieval north German town the production used as its setting), the Carpathian interiors and the famous Lübeck-Hamburg ship sequence, and the result is one of the most distinctive-looking European horror films of the 1970s. Popol Vuh's score is among the best loved in all of Herzog's work. He plays the material as horror and as homage to Murnau, and through both as a meditation on the European Gothic tradition.