Review of Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) by Peter G — 19 Feb 2009

Kinski is astonishing - oddly enough, this film absolutely relies on his over-acting. You can't help but feel that this is both a good film in its own terms and that a lot of movies which must have seemed rather scary when they were first released have a habit of losing their power to frighten with the passage of time.

The film retains a number of features of the Bram Stoker original normally discarded in Dracula movies although its greatest interest (from a British perspective) is to see how it translates to a non-British setting. I have thought for quite a while that Stoker's Dracula is subliminally influenced by anxieties about immigration - Dracula is the foreign invader. In the Herzog movie, this seems to be transposed into something more medical - Nosferatu as a source of plague/contagion.

It's certainly worth seeing as a specimen of a Dracula movie that is refreshingly different from the Anglophone mainstream.