24/05/2026
https://www.institut-image.org/programme/horaires/
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (Nosferatu the Vampyre, 1979) dir. Werner Herzog
A reinterpretation of Nosferatu by F. W. Murnau and inspired by Dracula by Bram Stoker, the film follows Jonathan Harker as he travels to a remote Transylvanian castle to meet the mysterious Count Dracula, unknowingly unleashing plague, death, and spiritual decay upon Europe.
Rather than emphasizing horror spectacle, Werner Herzog transforms the vampire myth into a melancholic meditation on loneliness, mortality, and existential despair.
At the center, Klaus Kinski gives Dracula a profoundly tragic dimension, portraying him not simply as a monster but as a cursed and isolated being condemned to eternal existence without love or human connection. Isabelle Adjani brings Lucy an ethereal fragility and emotional purity that contrasts with the surrounding atmosphere of death.
The visual style combines gothic landscapes, candlelit interiors, ruins, mist-covered mountains, and painterly compositions reminiscent of German Romanticism. Herzog fills the film with silence, slowness, and hypnotic imagery that transform horror into metaphysical sadness.
The film reflects on disease, solitude, spiritual emptiness, and humanity’s attraction toward destruction and death. Dracula becomes less a predator than the embodiment of eternal isolation.
Featuring music by Popol Vuh, the film remains one of the most poetic and emotionally haunting reinterpretations of vampire mythology in modern cinema.
Production Companies
Werner Herzog Filmproduktion
Gaumont
