Tuesday, June 19

A Tale of Two Vampyres

My latest piece at Spectrum Culture is a comparison between F.W. Murnau's seminal Nosferatu and Werner Herzog's 1979 remake starring his greatest on-screen collaborator, Klaus Kinski. Murnau's film is justifiably one of the hallmarks of silent cinema, a masterpiece of editing and framing in which the mere setup and execution of a shot can be as thrilling as the actual monster. But I also confess to preferring Herzog's more laid-back, spiritual take on the same material, replicating much of the original but stretching everything until it emerges vastly different in tone.

My full comparison is up now at Spectrum Culture.