The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“This is a pinnacle of horror cinema: atmospheric, rhapsodic, and achingly transcendent.”

Keith Ulrich, Time Out New York

Werner Herzog’s arresting version of Nosferatu was not, he insisted, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 horror classic (“the greatest German film,” according to Herzog) but rather a tribute to it and the great German Expressionist film tradition of the silent era. Klaus Kinski (wearing make-up that replicates Max Schreck’s in Murnau’s original) plays a world-weary Count Dracula, suffering the monotony of eternal life. Bruno Ganz and Isabelle Adjani are the young couple drawn into the mysterious count’s orbit. The drama is set against the backdrop of a plague; Herzog’s breathtaking, often apocalyptic imagery includes one notorious scene involving 11,000 rats. The kinky Kinski is superbly creepy—the best movie vampire ever, Herzog now maintains! This stylish, extravagant work was the famously volatile actor’s second (of five) collaborations with the director. In English.

Restoration courtesy of Shout! Factory and the American Genre Film Archive

“One of its director’s most bizarre, resonant, and fascinating films … Herzog’s Nosferatu will scare the living daylights out of you.”

Tim Robey, The Telegraph

“Klaus Kinski is genuinely scary … This is Herzog’s journey to the heart of darkness.”

Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian