An 'Innocent' Dracula: Myth Rather than Melodrama
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen AN INNOCENT' DRACULA MYTH RATHER THAN MELODRAMA T THERE'S a certain irony in the fact that when F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu was released in 1922, die publishers of Bram Stoker's Dracula...
...Like locusts, visitations from Dracula seem to come in twenty-year cycles...
...His treatment of it is "innocent," as^he himself has said...
...For example, a glimpse of rats in one of Murnau's scenes becomes in Herzog's film an epidemic of the plague...
...He has even costumed his star, Klaus Kinski, in the same talons, pointy ears, shaved head, and white skin that Max Schreck has in the original...
...All the numerous versions of Dracula made since the sound era began have followed from Stoker's novel and the popular John BalderstonHamilton Deane play based on it...
...Nevertheless, the representatives of Stoker's rights prevailed and had the film removed from distribution...
...Langella leaps from the top of a stair, and a bat lands at the bottom...
...The second of three parts) COLIN L WESTERBECK...
...Plunging a finger he has dipped in the puddle into his mouth, Lorre exclaims, "Raspberry jam...
...Herzog makes almost no use of them...
...He is always feared to be lurking about somewhere outside, but is seldom seen...
...In the climactic scene when Lucy Harker (Adjani) seduces him, he rakes up her dress and gropes her crotch with a human lust Murnau's Dracula is not permitted...
...In the movie version, Langella plays his role with a suave eroticism...
...Murnau's Nosferatu was released in 1922, die publishers of Bram Stoker's Dracula sued for copyright infringement...
...He is no longer the chameleon character of the Hollywood tradition, the oily, familiar villain in a Victorian melodrama...
...When it was allowed back in circulation again, only mutilated versions of it had survived...
...and as the man enters one side of the casement, a wolf emerges from the other...
...Despite the fact that half this ridiculous shooting schedule was nearly useless, because it would still be dark, Herzog got all the scenes done...
...I think the low point in the use subsequent horror films have made of Murnau comes in Roger Corman's The Raven (1963) when Peter Loire wins a sorcerer's contest with Boris Karloff by decimating him in a lightning bolt...
...His body remains on the bedroom floor, an awkward remnant of his curse which the mortal characters will, to their chagrin and distaste, have to clean up...
...It is to rescue Dracula from the defilements of high camp that Werner Herzog has now made his own Nosferatu...
...Since the silent era was over by then, it remained something of a lost film, a cult favorite which movie history had, unfortunately, passed by...
...Although Herzog assured them that the several thousand rats he released were sterile, the city fathers of Delft were not pleased...
...Where Stoker's novel turns Dracula into Jack the Ripper, movie adaptations have gone further, turning him into Jekyll and Hyde...
...They are conventionally understood as a dramatization of Jack the Ripper anyhow, so deepening the split which the novel created in Dracula's personality was the next logical step...
...Once Dracula has transported himself from the'Carpathians to England, which happens within the first fifth of the novel, he pretty much disappears from the story...
...And from his point of view the rats and the almost physical feeling of plague they impart to the film are necessary...
...He is not the mere ghost that Murnau's film sometimes makes him...
...The over-use of special effects and trick photography in Dracula films came after Murnau, who employed them only to a limited extent...
...Unlike other recent filmmakers, Herzog feels no need to make a spoof out of the Dracula legend, to show his modem superiority to it...
...He is in fact a kind of demon who will do whatever is necessary to get a film made...
...Commonweal- 18...
...At the end of Murnau's film, Dracula has been vanquished forever...
...Veteran effects man Albert Whitlock illustrates the split personality of the Hollywood Dracula at every opportunity...
...As the film's heroine, Isabelle Adjani is at times literally wading through the rats which Herzog let loose in Delft, where most of the film was shot...
...He is Dracula, the only Dracula we have known since...
...This is not to say that Herzog has no ideas of his own...
...In Murnau's film we know the minute we lay eyes on him that he is not just a creepy eccentric, even by English Commonweal: 16 standards...
...We understand his premonition that, because he will live on in a modern world with an insufficient sense of evil, he will outlive his own glory...
...At the same time that he is trying to revive the Dracula legend, Herzog is trying to make us sense its lost power...
...When he makes an entrance in his opera cape, the impression is of a Bela Lugosi softened by the influence of Fred Astaire...
...At moments like these Herzog succeeds in making Dracula a richly paradoxical creature...
...His Dracula is someone about whom other characters are apprehensive not because he is frightening, but because he is too attractive...
...Herzog has naturalized Murnau's Dracula in other ways, too...
...It isn't embarrassed by him...
...Traces of the mannered egregiousness which Lugosi lent to the role are still apparent in Frank Langella's performance today...
...The last notable revival of the role, before Langella's, was Christopher Lee's in a series of British Dracula films which began in the 1950s and also followed Lugosi's lead...
...Schizophrenia makes available a side of Dracula that plays well in drawing-room scenes, and that side has taken over the whole character little by little, until now Dracula has become a part suited to Frank Langella...
...Actor Max Schreck was made up for the role with a shaved head, pointed ears, his skin pigmented white and his fingernails extended into six-inch talons...
...The bolt comes through the window like the beam that kills Dracula, and reduces Karloff to a smoldering puddle on the floor...
...Even when he is descending a castle wall upside down, he remains poised, impeccable, debonair...
...He has taken up Dracula's eternal wanderings...
...In the novel, when Dracula makes an appearance in polite society—playing host to the story's hero, Jonathan Harker, for instance—he seems a sinister character but nothing worse...
...Again there is a suggestion that Dracula is somehow human, his immortality the result of a process of death and renewal...
...Where his film departs from Murnau's, it is in the direction of naturalizing, even humanizing, the Dracula character...
...At the end of Herzog's, Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) has turned pale and grown long teeth and nails as Dracula dies...
...When Bela Lugosi introduces himself in the Hollywood version of 1935 with the line, "I am Drahkoolah," he isn't just whistling in the dark...
...They 18 January 1980: 17 curtailed his privileges so that for scenes in a public square which should have taken four days to shoot, he was allowed only four hours, from four to eight A.M...
...On the one hand, Herzog's film restores the immutable otherness of Dracula as Murnau conceived him...
...one Sunday...
...On the other hand, he is not quite the ethereal being that Murnau made him either...
...But in widescreen Technicolor it is too rich a confection...
...In the final shot Jonathan gallops across tidal flats where he and Lucy used to walk...
...The beauty of Herzog's film is that it makes no apology for Dracula...
...It doesn't cringe when the figure he cuts becomes a ridiculous and laughable one...
...He is worldweary...
...Done on the stage amidst the spare, spindly line and dry humor of Edward Gorey's sets, the lushness of Langella's performance may have had its appeal...
...He is in his strangeness a more pathetic figure...
...The modern tradition of the horror film has acknowledged Murnau's classic only by mocking it...
...By writing the novel as if it were a composite of the journals of various characters in it, Stoker purposely made it necessary for Dracula to be absaent, to be known only by inference, much of the time...
...And when the dawn light kills Dracula, he does not evaporate into it as in the Murnau film...
...The other side of Dracula's personality—the original side, which is the only one the imagination can really feed upon— has become so atrophied that it is now left to the special effects people...
...As I mentioned before, he's somewhat obsessive about filmmaking...
...Herzog wants to restore Murnau's film to its rightful place in movie history, so he has remade the Murnau version scene by scene...
...The book turns the Dracula legend into the sort of Victorian novel that is half novel of manners, half Gothic romance...
...The intention of Murnau's film is to make the Count once again into the immutable presence that he had been in ancient legend...
...In a moment that is a brilliant stroke on Herzog's part, we hear Dracula slurping at Lucy's throat, as if satisifying his eternal thirst for blood provided only the most casual physical pleasure, like sucking up the dregs of a chocolate malt, through a straw...
...As a consequence his Dracula seems, though always a creature separate and distinct from human beings, still subject to the world in which they live...
...He bolts through a window...
...The irony is that Mumau's film is an attempt to get away from Stoker's novel, not imitate it...
...The first time we see him Dracula emerges from the darkness as if he were materializing before our eyes, and he retains his alien quality, his absolute otherworldliness, throughout the film...
...The result is that he has made the best Dracula film since Murnau, and maybe the best ever...
...Published in 1898, it turns Dracula into an upper-class Jack the Ripper...
...Having materialized out of darkness originally, Dracula fades away in a beam of sunlight at the end of Murnau's version, leaving only a wisp of smoke on the carpet...
...We should be able to understand, he is suggesting, how compelling a figure Dracula was in a world where death could take such an inexplicable and irresistible form as the plague.Dracula answered a human need which we may have yet, but no longer recognize...
...I think Herzog got carried away here with an inspiration provided by the monkeys let loose on the raft at the end of his first film with Kinski, Aguirre, the Wrath of God...
Vol. 107 • January 1980 • No. 1
