Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

"All my films, maybe if you’ve seen any, come out from pain."

Werner Herzog once called Nosferatu the Vampyre his first real movie. 

I mean, in so many words. Like many statements of this sort, he speaks seemingly from a vacuum, from a world of his own. This is how he can mention that the film follows commonly understood “movie” grammar, which is new for him, and casually assert that it is shorter than his other films when Nosferatu is, up until that point, one of his longest. A dreamy 107 minutes. Maybe he intended it to be bite-sized and then the finished product ended up being something protracted in the edit. Maybe it’s his shorthand for Hollywood product, for 80-to-90-minute genre fare, for real movies, as most people understand them. Maybe he’s just relaying a “fact” off the dome that is one more manipulation in a career thus far—this would have been his 18th film at the age of 35—of overt manipulations.

We find Herzog explaining his feelings about the industry and his place in it on set in Delft, in the Netherlands, which is supposed to stand in for Wismar, Germany. He’s speaking to a camera, held by who knows, as part of a short making-of documentary, which you can watch here:

Herzog’s tone is commanding and maybe even a little ominous, familiar to anyone who’s heard him muse prophet-like of the base violence of the world in Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, which depicts Herzog only a few years after this. He is so serious you can’t help but think he’s joking. He describes how “stylized” Delft is, the canal-limned and “idyllical” town well-suited to represent a Germany in the death throes of industrialization. Herzog says as much in A Guide for the Perplexed:

I was looking for a northern German or Baltic town with boats and canals. A Dutch friend of mine suggested Delft, which has remained unchanged for centuries, and as soon as I saw the town I was fascinated by it. Delft is so tranquil, bourgeois, self-assured and solid, so tidy and well ordered; it looks like a stylised film set, and I knew it would be the perfect place to shoot this story.

An attempt to connect the defining German film of the early 20th century—F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, from 1922—with the New German Cinema movement of which Herzog was both an obvious part and a reluctant ally, Nosferatu the Vampyre is one of the director’s most blatantly beautiful films. Herzog’s regular cinematographer Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein takes cues from German expressionism, but siphons meticulous visions of death and decay through Herzog’s need to capture the world as it’s experienced, rather than how it’s prepared. Which may be why he brings up “movies” like he’s leveling up; there is some cognitive dissonance in watching the making-of and catching a glimpse of blocking tape carefully choreographing how Kinski glacially slinks down a gangplank. One knows there was no blocking tape in the Amazon when they were barely surviving the making of Aguirre. 

But the effect is seductive. From contradiction comes a kind of frightening hyper-reality where Death is real and God has retreated and no one is safe. Silhouettes feel as if they emerge from the landscape, canted angles the only natural way to film such outgrowths, but artificial too, backlit like paper cut-outs but obviously not. Herzog would never dream of it.

As is the case in several films before, Popul Vuh’s score both careens fascinatingly against and cradles Herzog’s images, carefully constructed but improvisational too. We know this must be a rigorously controlled reality, but Herzog’s whole filmography is so indebted to navigating truth that when Ebert calls out the georgeousness of the world Herzog so often captures (in a 2011 review of the film, revisiting it more than 30 years after its premiere), he must relate that reality to the fantasy at its core:

One striking quality of the film is its beauty. Herzog’s pictorial eye is not often enough credited. His films always upstage it with their themes. We are focused on what happens, and there are few “beauty shots.” Look here at his control of the color palate, his off-center compositions, of the dramatic counterpoint of light and dark. Here is a film that does honor to the seriousness of vampires. No, I don’t believe in them. But if they were real, here is how they must look.

It’s easy to mistake Herzog’s brand of rogue filmmaking as an offshoot of vérité, because he’s so attached to his vocation as an “athletic” endeavor, an art that is tactile and sympathetic. “I don’t like to shoot in an open space that I have not experienced with my body,” he says in the Nosferatu doc, then piles on the visceral drama: “All my films, maybe if you’ve seen any, come out from pain. That’s the source. That’s where they come from. Not from pleasure.”

This is something of a steep contrast from the older, genial, Weird Grandpa Werner meme that’s consumed Herzog’s persona in the past 20 years. The man who made Fata Morgana and Aguirre was surely not devoid of joy, but he was an awfully earnest person who was willing to do whatever it took to make his films, who felt like he was bearing witness to dreams in his work, transcending flesh, encouraged as he was to take up the responsibility assigned him in the long post-war rebuilding of German culture.

“I think it is necessary since we are a fatherless generation to have some sort of a continuity in film history,” he’s said. While Lotte Eisner apparently saw Herzog’s first film, Signs of Life, and crowned him the definitive “sign of life” in movie making for a country whose culture had all but died during the war, Herzog has gone to great lengths to distance himself from his contemporaries, like Wim Wenders and Rainer Werner Fassbinder, not because he disliked their films or even disliked them, but because he has this idea of himself as both a filmmaker and something else entirely. As he tends to say, his fiction films are documentaries and his documentaries are fiction, after all. 

But on set for Nosferatu, Herzog muses on his aspirations like he is very much in the slipstream of German cultural history, a shared commodity. At 35, he is still only starting, for the first time doing an adaptation and a remake—both of Murnau’s Nosferatu and Bram Stoker’s novel, which entered the public domain in most countries in 1962—pulling obviously from popular culture. “I’m not on the other side of the river yet. I want to make a film as good as Murnau’s film, or one film like Griffith has done, or one film like Zemlya by Dovzhenko,” he says. Early in Nosferatu, Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) asks the increasingly desperately creeped-out Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) what is in “the soul of a hunter.” Herzog sees himself as a hunter—for rare images, or new languages, but always in defiance of death. What is in the soul of a hunter but a hunger that never ends? An all-consuming drive that’s never satisfied?

Herzog clearly identifies with Dracula. “For me, the absence of love is the most abject pain,” Dracula croaks. Herzog says in Guide for the Perplexed:

I tried to humanise him by presenting the vampire as an agonised, sad and lonely creature, desperately thirsty for love, but terrifying at the same time. I wanted to endow him with human suffering, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality. …The vampire isn’t realistic, but he is human.

Like a shadow of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Herzog’s Nosferatu is about how Count Dracula’s investment in German real estate brings evil to a small innocent European town. The infiltration is preceded by Jonathan Harker’s trip to Transylvania, where he’s transformed into a vampire by the Count, and proceeded by Lucy Harker’s (Isabelle Adjani) attempt to convince the people of Wismar that she knows from where all this evil comes, ultimately taking action where others, including Dr. Van Helsing (Walter Landegast, who plays the kindly doctor in The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser), could not. In between these incidents come waves of plague rats, thousands of them accompanying Dracula on his sojourn aboard the Demeter and infesting Wismar, decimating villagers and plunging the survivors into a kind of oneiric chaos. The centerpiece of the film is a bacchanalia in the town square with revelers circling a steady stream of coffins and pallbearers while Lucy wanders among the detritus, resisting invitations to join in the feast. A horse, motionless in the street, reeks of callousness. “Death is overwhelming,” Lucy cries. As rats crowd Herzog’s frames, one must agree. 

About those rats. When asked about the 10,000 animals he loosed in Delft, Herzog said this in A Guide for the Perplexed:

When we bought the rats [from a laboratory in Hungary], they were snow white, so I decided to have them all dyed grey. There was a huge factory in Germany that produced shampoo and hair dye, and they always tested their products on rats because the texture of rat hair is similar to that of humans… After talking to the people at this factory, Cornelius [Siegel, “a special effects expert”] designed a massive conveyer belt. We put the rats into wire cages, dipped each cage into the dye for a second, washed every rat with lukewarm water, then dried them all using a system of hair dryers, otherwise they would have caught pneumonia. Even today there are claims floating around that the rats were mistreated and that some died while being transported to Delft, even resorting to cannibalism because they were so hungry. The fact is that we ended up with about five hundred more than when we started. There were also allegations that we submerged each rat into a bucket of boiling grey paint. I hereby offer the even wilder truth of the matter: we boiled the rats for such a long time that they volunteered to turn grey.

Even taking Herzog completely at his word, and overlooking the extremely nonsensical joke he’s attempting to make, there is enough here to read between the lines and ask further questions, like: Were there any biologists on hand to remind Herzog and producer Walter Saxer that the rate at which rats reproduce would almost definitely lead to too many animals in even the time it takes to ship them from Hungary to Delft? Or that maybe trusting a factory that does animal testing with facilitating humane processes for dying thousands of rats is perhaps not the most humane way of going about that? 

This is all to address the lack at the heart of Herzog’s accounts. The one person I have yet to find Herzog mention is Maarten ‘t Hart, a Dutch biologist and artist who trained in zoology and ethnography before becoming a full-time writer in the 1980s. According to a piece he wrote for Granta in 2004, ‘t Hart was the rat handler on Nosferatu; those “claims” of mistreatment Herzog mentions seem to have come wholly from him. 

Rats is not a pleasant read, mostly laying out with believable clarity the process by which Saxer recruited ‘t Hart to help with the increasing rat crisis the Nosferatu crew was facing and then, providing very little information about what was expected of him, abandoned him to the thrall of Herzog’s process. At first, ‘t Hart was supposed to talk to the City Council of Delft to convince them that releasing 10,000 rats into the streets would not make for a public debacle, that in fact the film crew wouldn’t let one rat escape (which ‘t Hart told Saxer and Herzog wasn’t possible). Eventually, though, as the rats arrived in the region from Hungary, and ‘t Hart saw first-hand the deplorable conditions that drove the rats to cannibalism in transit, he became more and more convinced that he had to stay on the film if only to take care of the rats himself as best he could.

In fact, ‘t Hart’s telling corroborates what we see of Herzog in that making-of, a man who would accept nothing more than his vision of rats consuming a small town square become manifest. ‘t Hart writes about first meeting the director:

Everybody stopped talking. Along the corridor came a man who, though no taller than I am, had an air about him of being, as the Bible says of King Saul, ‘higher than any of the people from his shoulders and upward’; a man with that unmistakable hint of Christ in his face, even though no one knows what Christ looked like. It was Werner Herzog. He began to tell me at once that the rats were ‘ausserordentlich wichtig’, extraordinarily important to him, and something dramatic entered his voice, something that convinced me that I had to help him because it was almost a matter of life and death for him.

‘t Hart respects the realism he finds in Herzog, a man whose art thrives on honesty and whose drive is viciously pure. ‘t Hart explains how easily he can be taken out of a film by obvious fabrication:

…Or you see—in a Woody Allen film—a girl with long blonde hair that looks like it hasn’t been washed for three days. Less than a second later, while the girl is still sitting next to Allen, her hair has suddenly been washed. Such things happen so often in films that I’m quite unable to watch them without feeling irritated.

Ironic, maybe, that on Herzog’s most self-proclaimed stylized film, ‘t Hart would be drawn to the director’s unmitigated sense of reality. After all, Herzog takes great pains to point out, in the making-of short doc, that he hired actual laborers to play laborers loading Dracula’s ship up with his many coffins. “Because extras always look like extras,” Herzog said. “This way they look like people who work.” Soon, though, ‘t Hart starts seeing the seams of manipulation. On set for the film’s centerpiece in the town square, ‘t Hart focuses on the aforementioned sedated horse, which you only catch a glimpse of ever briefly:

…It was just as if the horse had waited for that signal to come to. It suddenly kicked its legs, lifted up its head, and snorted. Three young men ran up to it. One of them sat down on its head with a thud, as if it were a bar stool, the second fell on its body, and the third rammed a syringe into its rump. A gaunt man emerged from the crowd of spectators, walked up to me and said, ‘If they treat a horse this way, how will they treat ten thousand rats?’ He vanished, like a prophet in a biblical story, and the horse once again lay there as if dead. The turtle doves almost drowned out Isabelle’s line, ‘I know the reason for all this evil.’ The pall-bearers carried the coffins in such a way that you knew for certain they were empty and that diminished my respect for Herzog. Everybody was acting, except for the horse and the turtle doves. And yet it should be possible to teach a horse to lie motionless in a square without resorting to injections.

You thought this was going to be a screengrab of the sedated horse, didn’t you.

As ‘t Hart tells it, when later he went to see the newly arrived 13,000 (not 10,500 as Herzog claimed) white rats in a barn just outside of Delft owned by a surly farmer demanding more payment for all the extra creatures, he found what he expected: tens of thousands of severely dehydrated rats cruelly shipped from Hungary, on the verge of death and eating each other, some already escaping small holes in the crowded cages, looking for any drop of liquid, blood or otherwise. 

…The rats’ escape underlined my powerlessness. What could I accomplish here? I know the reason for all this evil, I thought: it’s a film. A film about the Black Death in Europe, set in a time when no one had a clue that black rats were responsible for spreading the bubonic plague. And for the sake of this film 13,000 white rats were gathered here in two groups: those who were eating and those who were being eaten.

In desperation, ‘t Hart has production pay for two of his students from the lab where he teaches to skip their spring Whitsuntide holidays and tackle the massive project of taking care of these rats until they’re needed on set. Later, ‘t Hart confirmed a grim fate for many:

…from Marga and Yolanda, the two students I had recommended because they were fond of rats and because they were tough and persistent in unfavourable conditions. For fifteen guilders per hour, a princely wage in their view, they tried to save as many animals as they could. As a result, at the end of the weekend rather more than 8,000 rats survived of the 13,000 that had been hauled along Hungarian, Austrian, German and Dutch roads on a flatbed truck, covered only with canvas.

To call this description a conflict with Herzog’s version is an understatement, especially when in A Guide for the Perplexed he describes filming as a complete success: “We never lost a single one, and I sold them once filming was over.”

Of course, ‘t Hart argues for a much different history:

I heard what happened from my students who couldn’t bring themselves to abandon the animals. The municipality of Delft continued to refuse permission for the rats to be released in the city so Herzog moved to Schiedam where the authorities were more flexible. While he was filming there, the rats were allowed to move around freely on a quay. Afterwards, they were recaptured but around a thousand rats turned out to have escaped, whereupon Schiedam, too, put an end to filming. Herzog still needed a few more shots using the rats and finally completed filming in Hamburg. The rats were now redundant. Nobody cared for them. Three and a half thousand tame rats were left to wander the streets of Hamburg until they were eaten by cats or dogs or died from lack of food and water.

‘t Hart never saw any of this. Instead he was on board the ship where Herzog’s crew—as well as Bruno Ganz and the actor who played the captain, Jacques Delfino—would film Nosferatu’s Demeter scenes, requiring ‘t Hart to wrangle a few of his own rats around the doomed vessel. As the day passed slowly floating through dense mist on the Haringvliet inlet, heading for the Dutch town of Hellevoetsluis, ‘t Hart grew increasingly concerned about ever making it to their destination. Herzog, filming what they can, at one point convinces Ganz to jump into the water for a scene, ignoring the actor’s complaints about the water’s freezing temps and instead joining him the drink as a brazen sign of solidarity. The crew runs out of food as night descends. It gets piercingly cold, and only a few have seemed to pack requisite coats and clothes. ‘t Hart begins to believe Herzog thrives on this physical pain: “No one needed to act any longer, the script had become reality. We were lost at sea, we were seasick and miserable, and that was exactly what Herzog needed for his film.”

The story becomes increasingly dire from here, and throughout ‘t Hart casts Herzog as less a leader and more a zealot pushing people into action through sheer, unbridled fanaticism. In between fits of sleep, once it’s clear they won’t make it to land before dawn, ‘t Hart hears Herzog:

Yet Herzog was still talking, preaching almost, to Ganz in the semi-darkness, surrounded by people who were dozing on the mattresses and getting up occasionally to be sick. ‘…And only then you’ll discover what you’re worth. To go on to the end to find out whether you’re brave enough, to determine your limits. That’s what it was about, that was the point of our leap into the sea. It’s not about the film, it’s not about achievements, it’s only about learning to be brave and to know who you are and what you’re capable of.’

‘Yes,’ said Ganz, ‘but it was too cold to find that out.’

‘Mut muss’ du haben und nicht feige sein,’—you must have courage and not be a coward—Herzog snarled suddenly.

I suppose we allow solipsism for genius to thrive. I get there has to be some megalomania inside you to steer such an unruly animal, to harness monsters like Klaus Kinski in such exquisite stillness and cajole a peaceful village into letting you infest their streets with rats.

But what do we do with this ugliness? It is suffused into this great work of art.  Like energy, trauma and suffering don’t disappear, but are transferred, transformed. When I watch Nosferatu next, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stop thinking about all the animal abuse, about Herzog demanding bravery from everyone in his orbit. Still, what ravishing sights he collected like stars from the night’s abyss.

What do we do with this ugliness? We compartmentalize, then compromise. We’re not even to Fitzcarraldo yet, and people died on that set. There is little else to do but accept the burden of dreams, even if we don’t carry it, even if those who carry that burden are not the dreamer, but those the dreamer commands—the weak, the vulnerable, the cowardly. 

Sources:

Ebert, Roger. (2011, October 24). “Herzog’s vampire movie, haunted by Murnau’s”. RogerEbert.com. https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-nosferatu-the-vampyre-1979

Herzog, Werner, and Paul Cronin. Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed. London, Faber & Faber, 2014.

‘t Hart, Maarten. (2004, July 1). “Rats”. Granta. https://granta.com/rats

"The Making of Nosferatu (1979) dir. Werner Herzog." YouTube, uploaded by Łukasz Turek, 12 January 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=FixweXs8dwM.