Nosferatu
Anxious Fear
Remaking F. W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Werner Herzog wasn’t only returning to a film recognised as one of the masterworks of German expressionist cinema, he was also passing through the Dracula myth, as the film was released the same year as John Badham’s Dracula, far from the first adaptation onto film, and so obviously so that, the same year Badham and Herzog’s films came out, there was also a spoof, Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite. Earlier Herzog works were sui generis: Aguirre, Wrath of God, Heart of Glass, and Stroszek showed no generic predecessors, and of the three best-known directors who came out of the German New Wave (the others, Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder), Herzog seemed the least interested in or aware of the established codes of filmmaking. Pauline Kael noted that Herzog’s ‘‘technique owes little to previous commercial films; it doesn’t owe very much to previous films of any sort.’’ (When the Lights Go Down) David Thomson extended this to his characters, and the man himself: For more than thirty years he has been obsessed with those figures who stand upright, make noise, but do not seem fully aware of the pedantic human code – thus from Kaspar Hauser to Klaus Kinski to Grizzly Man. One can’t help feeling that Herzog, a most amiable man, is secretly wistful that he came into the world complete: unflawed and unburdened.’’ (Have You Seen…?) James Franklin noted that Herzog had ‘‘a skeptical view of the study of structures and signs in his films [and it] is based on a conviction that the scholarly, intellectual analysis of images robs them of their purity and power.’’ (New German Cinema)
Genre cinema is largely about understanding signs, comprehending commercial cinema, and creating characters who fit more into a generic structure than reflect personal preoccupations. Many a genre film has been made in a personal way, but rarely so idiosyncratically as Herzog’s approach to the Dracula story. One can recognise the characters – Jonathan Harker, Lucy, Von Helsing, and the Count – but they have all passed through Herzog’s dramaturgical passivity, his stubborn reluctance to generate fast-paced set-pieces and his determination instead to focus on images. As the director tells the story of Harker travelling to Pennsylvania on his assistant Renfield’s recommendation to sell Nosferatu a house in his home town, so it is more the images than the story that become paramount.
It is as though Herzog expects us to dream his film and to awaken with the remnants of it in our minds, which will never quite leave us. There is a potential paradox in Herzog’s work: the viewer could at any moment potentially leave the cinema, but the images won’t quite leave them. When Kael proposed that in The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, ‘‘the hour and fifty minutes of this film is a trial for anyone of a restless disposition...You fight to keep your eyes open’’ (When the Lights Go Down), she isn’t wrong. But she isn’t quite right either. Herzog seeks not narrative engagement but instead imagistic mesmerism, which is partly why Kael can speak of his films resembling nobody’s work before him, and why it would seem antithetical to generic demand.
Yet many of the best horror films aren’t only about the codes that are knowingly adopted and occasionally mockingly applied, they are also aware underpinning them is a fear that is only manifest in the horror that contains them. People go to horror films because they are fearful, and they expect the horror film to both dramatise that fear and resolve it. Even when trick endings became popular in films like Carrie and A Nightmare on Elm Street, this wasn’t so much that fear was no longer cathartically released, more that it came with a trick all the better to throw you into the arms of whoever you were sitting next to in the cinema. It was as if the filmmaker were saying that the whole film has been an engineered exercise, and here was just one more to remind you that you were watching a fiction. It became part of the generic expectation, no matter how well administered in the case of Carrie. As for Nightmare on Elm Street, director Wes Craven was moving towards ever-greater self-reflexivity. While his first film Last House on the Left carried the tagline ‘it’s only a movie’ as a warning to the viewer in case they were going to faint, which was of course a gimmick, by the time of Scream, 24 years later, it became a post-modern insistence the viewer be well aware of the tropes being deployed. Whether the horror film wished us to take it straight, no matter the marketing gambits, or make us aware of the devices used in the film itself, the work still saw fear as a punctuated feeling that the horror movie would control and eradicate.
In Nosferatu, Herzog takes fear to be something else, closer to anxiety perhaps, a word that kept cropping up in remarks about New German Cinema. Though the English titles often adopted the word fear, in the German, they all used angst instead. The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty Kick; Fear of Fear, Fear East the Soul. Gilles Deleuze reckoned, ‘‘the German passion has become fear’’, in the sense of angst, and sees in it a ‘‘result of the war.’’ (Cinema 2: The Time Image) Herzog, speaking of Hitler, noted, ‘‘I, like most Germans, am very conscious of my country’s history. I am even apprehensive about insecticide commercials, and know there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.’’ (Herzog on Herzog) This is potentially a facetious comment, but perhaps not: Nazi propaganda often portrayed people persecuted by the regime as vermin, parasites, or diseases. Nazi Ideology focused on the idea that Germany’s "racial purity" was under attack from the "blood of weaker peoples," and described ‘‘Jews, political opponents, and others as parasites that threatened the overall health of the so-called ‘national community.’’ (Holocaust Sources in Context) If Herzog’s Aguirre, Wrath of God was often read as an allegory on the rise of Hitler (which Herzog insisted wasn’t the case), then some might insist that Nosferatu is an allegory of Germany during the Nazi regime that showed Jews as vermin, and use the numerous rats Herzog deploys in the film as evidence of its allegorical intent, no matter if the film is set in 1850.
One needn’t be so allegorically specific, reducing the complexity of Herzog’s work to the straitjacket of categorical interpretation. It is more a permeation, a feeling one might have while watching Nosferatu, and other German films of the period, that an atmosphere underpinned the work, recognising an anxiety far greater than the one horror generates and alleviates. It is as though the horror isn’t momentarily frightening (the jump scare) or situationally horrific (the lakeside cabin; the haunted house), but quietly part of the human condition as Herzog opens on mummified bodies from the Mexican town of Guanajuato. According to Reel Streets. ‘‘Herzog saw them on a trip the previous decade and wanted to include them,’’ even though they have nothing directly to do with his story, or with the locations he uses in Holland (where Delft stands in for Harker’s home town of Wismar and Czechoslovakia for Transylvania). These mummified bodies offer terrible images, but they aren’t undead ones and part of the film’s anxiety rests less on the fear of dying than of being unable to do so. Shortly after Harker arrives at the Count’s home, Nosferatu says, Time is an abyss, profound as a thousand nights. Centuries come and go. To be unable to grow old is terrible. That is not the worst. There are things more horrible than that.’’ The film isn’t about surviving the terrors of the Count, but the horrors of the Count surviving well beyond a human lifespan.
This is a temporal horror far greater than the spatial horror proposing, when a person escapes a given environment, they have freed themselves of the terror they have been confronted by. Most versions of the Dracula story are in keeping with Bram Stoker’s novel and hold to the spatial element, freeing the characters into a post-Dracula world of relative happiness. Herzog instead allows Lucy to die as she sacrifices herself to kill the Count by keeping him occupied with her until daylight, and then showing us that Jonathan Harker is now Nosferatu. While the 2024 remake was bleaker than many a Dracula story, it didn’t propose that the lead female character’s sacrifice was useless. She dies, but her husband survives, and the plague has retreated.
Herzog offers no such palliation, as if he wanted from the genre an ongoing terror that anybody who chooses to inflict upon themselves a genre that calls itself horror should accept that its purpose isn’t to alleviate anxiety but acknowledge it, and accept it. If it made sense that many horror films started to incorporate comedy (Evil Dead 2, Reanimator, Fright Night), it rested partly on them both functioning as liberatory genres: as outlets for screams or laughter, which could then be contained by screaming with laughter. The trick ending of Carrie may have elicited sheer terror, but by A Nightmare on Elm Street, it was closer to blasé expectation. By proposing that horror isn’t about punctuated release but contained despair, Herzog may not understand horror very well as a genre, but he does seem to understand an aspect of the human condition. The director said he wanted to endow Nosferatu ‘’with human suffering and solitude, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality.‘’ (Herzog on Herzog) The horror genre usually attends to fear of the undead and the fear of dying. Herzog proposes the greatest fear is of undeadness itself, to which the only escape is, if you are lucky, to find someone who will keep you awake through the night in bliss, and then put a stake through your heart to make sure you are properly killed. Herzog might propose the film has a happy ending, from the perspective of a Count who seemed unable to die, but not a happy one from the perspective of Lucy, who is dead, and Jonathan, who is now terrifyingly immortal.
Yet this would be all very well as a countervailing force to generic demand, but it isn’t that Herzog is a genre contrarian who wants to mess with horror. It is more that he has consistently shown an interest in what we might call cinematic deep time. Deep time geologically is the study of life’s existence going back billions of years, with the human a newbie trying to understand what is going on while doing more than a little to mess things up. Herzog’s project might be seen as a variation of it, as he often wants to put characters in environments that perspectivise their smallness. Films usually emphasise a person’s largeness - who is the hero or heroine, and what do they want, and how can they get it? The images that contain them chiefly focus on those needed to show how they do so. It isn’t only that Herzog’s characters often fail in the various quests as Harker does here when he becomes the very thing that he would wish to conquer, it is that Herzog frames them as if their success or failure in the broader scheme of things really doesn’t matter.
In this sense, many a film and certainly most horror films emphasise the narrower scheme of things, no matter how great the bowels of hell that might have been released by someone opening a crypt, letting themselves into a haunted house, or playing with a Ouija board. The story is narrow enough to allow both for the frame to play up the importance of the characters, and the story closed off enough for us to believe it can be contained by the parameters of the action, no matter the occasional ending that seems to throw the story open all over again. In both the frame and the narrative, Herzog plays up the sense that time is much deeper than the story he tells. Numerous shots might be deemed superfluous from a generic point of view. The journey to the Count’s castle takes up about fourteen minutes of screen time, with only a few of those minutes proving narratively necessary. When he arrives at a tavern in Transylvania, he asks the staff to hurry up; he has to go and meet Count Dracula. The one later in An American Werewolf in London might be a more famous example of strangers entering an establishment that is hardly welcoming. But this is an amusing moment of absurd naivety, as the clueless Harker is given a bit of a clue about what he is getting himself into when crockery gets dropped and all the locals turn and stare at him. The inn owner tells him that the castle isn’t a safe place, spirits come out at night, and people disappear. Afterwards, around a fire outdoors, they tell him more. Back in the inn for the night, he reads about vampires. But most of the time, he is seen journeying as Herzog offers magnificent landscape shots initially of Jonathan on horseback and later on foot. While it would make sense dramatically to build up the last stage of Jonathan’s journey all the better to play on the foreboding, this isn’t quite what Herzog does. He proposes that Harker’s journey isn’t only into Nosferatu’s lair, but into layers of time that the count occupies. As he passes mountains and waterfalls, Herzog dwells on these landscape shots as he does in Aguirre, Wrath of God and Heart of Glass. Their purpose isn’t so much to dislocate the viewer from the story, but locate characters with environments that are much greater than their purpose and individuality.
It wouldn’t quite be fair to claim Herzog starts with an environment and then finds a character to occupy it, but he is certainly very far away from the notion that a film is a story exemplified in spaces that illustrate its development. The latter idea is why for many years Hollywood had no need to leave the confines of its studios in California and was happy to use back projection when someone would be seen driving a car around a city, for example. Though by the 1960s this became untenable, no matter Hitchcock’s use of matte shots and back projection in 1964’s Marnie, most films still respected the balance between telling the story and showing the environment. The locations may have become actual, but they didn’t become paramount, no matter if they were no longer shot at Paramount. Establishing shots and long shots still focused on moving the character along the storyline. Yet in different ways, Herzog, Pasolini, Antonioni, and Roeg could see that if filmmakers were often going to such arduous lengths to shoot in various parts of the world, then the mesmerising quality of these spaces needed to be given shape and purpose on screen beyond narrative exigencies.
For many filmmakers, it was no doubt an unnecessary evil that viewers required greater verisimilitude and directors had to leave the comfort of Burbank for the hassles of New York, Chicago, and other cities where they needed permits to clear streets. Yet for others, it was a liberation, an opportunity to envisage the world in cinematic form. Herzog took this to mean that he didn’t have to venture into Africa, Australia, South America and elsewhere because he had to match locale to the tales he was telling; he could equally attach to his adventures stories that would give an alibi to his wanderlust. In this sense, Nosferatu could seem his most constrained work – a retelling of the famous Stoker tale, and also a remake of Murnau’s 1922 film. Yet he gives it a peripatetic mystery he offers in most of his work by insisting on extending Harker’s trip to the castle so that he can include along the way mountains and waterfalls, can open on corpses in Guadalajara and dawdle over the streets, canals, and squares of Delft. He wants the locations he uses to ‘speak’ the story, assuming they possess an atmosphere he can find that will bring out the necessary horror he might feel generic expectation would show in too conventional a form. If one finds Nosferatu ‘spooky’ it is less because of what Herzog does with his story, than how he hauntingly imbues places with an ambience that makes everything and everywhere capable of containing dread.
It would be too easy to say this is a terror that came out of Nazi Germany and that filmmakers of Herzog’s generation wanted to confront it in manifold ways. Yet just as Wenders could explore aspects of the Nazi past going along the east/West German border in Kings of the Road, while Fassbinder confronted what critics called everyday fascism and abuse in Fear Eats the Soul, Fox and his Friends and Martha, and Volker Schlondorff used a magic realist form with The Tin Drum as he explored Gunter Grass’s vision of Germany before, during and after the war, Herzog finds a Teutonic fearfulness after the event by exploring a moment in time long before it. Nosferatu is the ultimate in xenophobic fear, a figure who comes to an idyllic German town and brings with him not only his vampiric urges but a plague of rats, a version of the Great Replacement Theory in literal vermin form. As Herzog claims, ‘‘I have always felt that rats possess a kind of fantasy element in that they are the only mammals whose number surpasses that of man. The figure is something like three to one, and our fear of the creatures stems in part from this fact.’’ (Herzog on Herzog) However, this fear isn’t simply expelled; it becomes incorporated as Jonathan becomes the new Nosferatu. Yet rather than insisting on metaphorical application, all we need to propose is that Herzog manages to find a Germanic over a generic horror that can incorporate locations from elsewhere (almost nothing in the film was actually shot in the GDR), but is contained by Herzog’s insistent sensibility. In all his work, one senses a magnitude greater than narrative and characterisational realisation so that when he comes along and makes a horror film, it becomes permeatingly horrifying as though saturating all the images with a terror it cannot hope to release in punctuated tension. This could make Herzog a genius of mood or a generic incompetent, and maybe some horror devotees will see a fumbler who doesn’t know what to do with a good jump scare when he sees one. Others will recognise a film that foregoes the immediacy of frightening the life out of us all the better to leave the viewer with images that are more inclined to enter our dreams and become subtle nightmares. Herzog may have said that what he ‘‘sought to do was connect my Nosferatu with our true German cultural heritage, the silent films of the Weimar era.’’(Herzog on Herzog) He does indeed do this, but he also creates an echo of Germany’s more recent past that was for Murnau Germany’s near future. If the theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed that twenties German cinema was about exploring the era From Caligari to Hitler, Herzog’s film indicates, perhaps, that his take on German expressionism passes from Hitler to Nosferatu.
© Tony McKibbin