There has not been a bad NOSFERATU to date, let’s get that out of the way. In fact, there’s never been anything short of a great NOSFERATU. Murnau’s film is THE silent horror classic, a nightmare about a shadowy, spindly demon plucked directly from the subconscious, like an actual recording of a real-life ghoul. That movie is so stylized and surreal and yet its monster feels so real that they made an entire fictitious, tongue in cheek movie (SHADOW OF THE VAMPIRE, starring Willem Dafoe before his second go-round with NOSFERATU) about that actually being the case.
Yet out of Murnau’s, Herzog’s and Eggers’ takes on the tale, Werner Herzog’s remains my favorite, and one of my favorite vampire movies and DRACULA adaptations of all time. Werner Herzog remade NOSFERATU, and it stars the notoriously difficult, even unhinged Klaus Kinski and it's both a total surprise and exactly the movie you'd expect it to be at the same time. This is one of the great DRACULA adaptations. NOSFERATU is Herzog's meditation on death and disease, about society crumbling under the grip of a plague, but it's also just a melancholy mood piece that is Pure Gothic. One of the most gorgeous movies ever made. It has moments of frantic, frenzied lunacy and then long stretches of quiet stillness. It is so perfect for the Halloween season, it's almost like a Halloween yule log. Every time you look up at the screen, there's a castle or a cemetery or a bat or a feral vampire creeping among the shadows.
This might not sound like a compliment to some, but Herzog’s NOSFERATU is just a meal of dread and sadness, with occasional flourishes of quirky gallows humor thrown in for spice. There’s a bit at the end that is so funny and so bleak all at once, where a character is demanded to be arrested, but there are no police left to arrest him, no juries left to convict him, and no guards left at the prisons. Everyone is dead. Everything is gone. And the expectation is still for business to function as usual, without question and without complaint.