Whenever I think of Werner Herzog's masterpiece Nosferatu, I am immediately reminded of the dreamlike scene where Lucy (Isabelle Adjani) roams the village square, amid a plague of rats and dancing villagers, with that strange, haunting music obliterating all human sounds.
Werner once commented that this scene would have been common in the Middle Ages during the plague, and its poignancy is one reason which makes its mark felt. Amidst death and destruction, people are feasting, blindly ignoring the death knell, and like those whom "the Gods make mad," they die, as Lucy, a symbolic Cassandra, winds her way through the crowd, watching death and destruction fall about her, who's knowledge of the evil which has infested the once peaceful and beautifully kept town, is unduly ignored.
When I think of Nosferatu, I also see the vampire's (played by Klaus Kinski) dark, hollowed, haunted eyes within an emaciated, pale, and totally repellent visage, yet something about the intensity of his gaze, haunted by his lonely exile and hunger for love, is oddly interesting. He cannot love, in fact, he cannot even experience human emotions, and yet he needs to know Lucy's love, even if that means her destruction in the end.
Besides these two strong characters, the beauty of this film is so mesmerizing, that no other to date can compare. Its magnificent landscapes of ruined castle walls, mist-covered mountains of the Carpathians, the ship sailing across the ominous sea, all are very beautiful images. Not to forget the haunting foreshadowing in the beginning . . . corpses, mummies, showing us what waits for us in the end, not feasting, not dancing, but death . . . death which makes any man humble, or should, except for Count Dracula; his inability to die separates his soul from all others. Death indeed is a very strong symbol in this film, and should remind us of our mortality.
Reviewer: Wendy Koenigsmann
Nosferatu on DVD: Nosferatu the Vampyre