The other masterstroke of casting is Roland Topor, as the Bremen realtor. Topor did a fair amount of acting, but was principally an author and artist, the co-founder of the Panic Movement with Alejandro Jodorowsky's ("El Topo"). Herzog recalls watching a trivial German TV show on which Topor's weird high-pitched giggle seemed to evoke perfect madness. Here it is used to suggest the unwholesome nature of his relationship with Dracula.
"Nosferatu the Vampyre" cannot be confined to the category of "horror film." It is about dread itself, and how easily the unwary can fall into evil. Bruno Ganz makes an ideal Harker because he sidesteps any temptation to play a hero, and plays a devoted husband who naively dismisses alarming warnings. He is loving, then resolute, then uncertain, then fearful, then desperate, and finally mad -- lost.
Although I don't believe "Nosferatu" had a particularly large budget, its historical detail looks unfaked and convincing. Herzog travels much in search of arresting imagery; the mummies at the start are from Mexico, the mountains are the Carpathian, the castles and castle ruins are in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany, and I believe the city with canals is in the Netherlands.
That said, Herzog told me that some shots were set up to use the same locations that Murnau used, and often had similar compositions. Once I asked him why he took a crew far into the South American rain forests to shoot "Aguirre" and "Fitzcarraldo," and he said he believed in "the voodoo of locations." A rain forest forty miles away from a city would have felt wrong. The actors would project a different energy if they knew they truly were buried in a wilderness. We would be able to sense it. In the same spirit, I suppose, Kinski standing where Murnau's actor Max Schreck stood would generate an energy. This film is haunted by the earlier one.
I wonder if Kinski himself believed this was a role he was born to play. Famously temperamental, his emotions on a hair trigger, he endured four hours of makeup daily without complaining. The bat ears had to be destroyed in removal, and constructed again every morning. It's as if he regarded Schreck's performance and wanted to step in and claim the character as partly his own.
One striking quality of the film is its beauty. Herzog's pictorial eye is not often enough credited. His films always upstage it with their themes. We are focused on what happens, and there are few "beauty shots." Look here at his control of the color palate, his off-center compositions, of the dramatic counterpoint of light and dark. Here is a film that does honor to the seriousness of vampires. No, I don't believe in them. But if they were real, here is how they must look.
A review of Murnau's "Nosferatu" is in my Great Movies Collection. Also included: "Aguirre, the Wrath of God," "Fitzcarraldo," "Heart of Glass," "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser," and "Stroszek."
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