A few days ago I recommended The Historian, a long and elegantly intelligent modern reworking of the Dracula story with lots of well-tuned Balkan detail: 

Here for those who want More is a gripping look by Andrew Stuttaford at one of my favourite films, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre: 

Stuttaford describes how Herzog develops the ideas and imagery of a 1922 expressionist classic film by Friedrich Murnau but ingeniously echoes contemporary oppressiveness and evil:

So it’s perhaps fitting that the consequences of that evil resonate in the very locations where Herzog’s movie was shot. The sequences filmed in then-Communist Czechoslovakia were a reminder of an Eastern Europe torn apart and cut off by the catastrophes of the 1930s and 1940s.

In 1979, this region seemed irrevocably lost as, in a different way, so much of the Lübeck and Wismar of Murnau’s Nosferatu were; many of those cities’ centuries-old buildings had been devastated by Allied bombing and, in Wismar’s case, the malice of the East German state. Despite one notable sequence featuring the same row of Lübeck buildings that Murnau had, Herzog’s Wismar (he dropped the idea of “Wisborg”) was largely represented by the Dutch city of Delft — gorgeous, intact, and, by its very architectural survival, a pointed comment on all that Germany had lost.

But destruction isn’t only physical. When Dracula brings an army of rats (Herzog imported 11,000 of them from Hungary, painting each of them gray) and, with them, plague, into Wismar, its buildings endure as the city empties out. Among the most striking characteristics of Herzog’s Nosferatu is the way the director uses images of great beauty to tell a story of great horror. This is never more so than in the film’s depiction of Wismar’s losing its elegance as its people lose their lives; the shreds of their civilization are shown unraveling in astounding, merciless sequences of ravishing desolation…

Dracula himself is soft-spoken, his words slow, deliberate, and almost hesitant, his voice sometimes caressing, sometimes menacing, and always weary. He comes across as an exhausted figure, still powerful, yes, but tired of his own power.

He is at the crossroads of human, demon, animal, and even insect, but he is still painfully conscious of the traces of humanity within him; he is alienated, isolated, lonely, envious, and resentful.

Check out the scene in a night-struck Wismar where Dracula (illuminated an almost electric blue) peers through a window that reveals a cozy, candle-lit domestic scene: Satan gazing at a Vermeer interior, and mourning, and wanting and craving. To watch Kinski’s evocative face for just those few moments is to understand how the loneliness that envelops Dracula will lead this iron-willed predator into vulnerability and danger

What beautiful writing. Read the whole thing.

And, for less than £4.00 from Amazon.co.uk, this DVD is a bargain to sink one’s teeth into.

Even if that means ending a sentence with a preposition.