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. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022 and is widely considered one of the most distinctive remakes in cinema history. Herzog made the film as a reverent reimagining of F. W. Murnau's 1922 silent Nosferatu, with substantial fidelity to the original's visual register and structural commitments.

Klaus Kinski plays Count Dracula in one of the most committed of his Herzog collaborations — the prosthetic makeup is closely modelled on Max Schreck's 1922 Schreck-original — sliding through the dust of the Wismar setting as the most terminally lonely Dracula ever filmed. Bruno Ganz plays Jonathan Harker, the young estate agent dispatched to the Carpathian Mountains to negotiate the property purchase; Isabelle Adjani plays Lucy Harker, in a luminous central performance. Roland Topor, the French illustrator and writer, plays Renfield in supporting capacity.

Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein's photography of Wismar exteriors (the medieval north-German town the production used as the setting), Carpathian-mountain interiors, and the famous Lübeck-Hamburg ship sequence anchored a film whose visual register has continuously been cited as among the most distinctive in 1970s European horror. Popol Vuh's score is among the most beloved in the broader Herzog filmography. The film operates simultaneously as horror, tribute to the Murnau original, and meditation on the broader European Gothic tradition.