Review of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) by Loris R — 04 Jun 2010

The film looks - LOOKS - very low on budget, just above amateurish; I suspect they didn't do everything possible to tidy up the location for Wismar, which JUST LOOKS 20TH-CENTURY. Count Dracula's castle doesn't even look like one (even a dilapidated one).

However, it is otherwise fantastically creepy. Not the type that will give you nightmares, but a ravishing kind of gothic macabre. I'll just single out two things that grabbed my attention: the script and Lucy. The script does not try very hard for realism: literary is the best adjective there is I think. The plot is rather predictable and very spare, but with such a script this feels like a fairy-tale experience and I became just drawn into its surreal universe. Its closest kin still alive is probably classical theatre script. Lucy I will not presume to decide whether she is a beauty, but she reminds me of those pre-Raphaelite females, which is very apt given the vaguely 19th-Century setting (and that Victorian hairbun!). That makes her into "a woman pure of heart" who "could makes [vampires] forget the first crow of the cock"; absolutely ethereal in spite of all the downbeatness of it all.