Film

Vampires be damned: As you might expect from the future maker of Grizzly Man, Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre is a lot more interested in the brutal glories of the natural world than in any of Bram Stoker’s mythmaking. Estate agent Jonathan Harker (Ganz) heads off into the bluish horizon—Transylvania, you gather—as Richard Wagner’s prelude to Das Rheingold blooms into sublimity. (Terrence Malick used the same piece of music for The New World.) Once there, he does some business with Dracula (Kinski, in elbowy homage to Max Schreck’s turn for Murnau), who subsequently brings back to Germany a plague of white rats. Herzog likes his rats.

You can love this movie without having to admit it’s merely an okay version of Dracula. Kinski, normally a volcanic presence (the bugged-out eyes weren’t just an affectation for this role), is vocally subdued and seems to eschew a lot of the character’s charming exoticism, a bad call. But as far as chompable necks go, Isabelle Adjani’s pale expanse of nape stands as the most delectable to grace the horror genre. Herzog includes shots of actual bats in the movie, but it’s Kinski’s slurpathon of the stunned Adjani that delivers the most authentically animal magnetism.