With the release of Robert Eggers’ apparently very good remake of the most seminal of horror films, let’s look at the last time they also, somehow, managed to do it right.

Remaking one of the seminal films of the 20^th century isn’t likely to win you any critical favors. However, for Werner Herzog, a filmmaker of unnatural receptivity to the world and general skepticism to the people who inhabit it, the film seems to have called to him nonetheless. Faced with the unenviable task of divining the original Nosferatu’s spirit rather than merely upholstering it for a new era, of being a necromancer rather than a cryptkeeper, Herzog seems to have done neither. Beckoned not by the surface or the soul of the original film itself but an unclarified possibility latent within it, his film is neither a remake nor even really a re-envisioning but, rather, a malevolent force that vibrates to an entirely different frequency, a tone poem that stalks the corridors of the unknown only to finally implore us to recognize our very selves.

Herzog is no stranger to films about men on strange journeys, impelled by the delusional hopes of a soul haunted by the belief that they can test the mettle of the cosmos and emerge unscathed. In his most famous, and best, film, Aguirre the Wrath of God,Klaus Kinski’s impenetrable and monomaniacal explorer believed he heard the siren song of a divine, heavenly order that was, finally, merely his own desire for control. Here, this film’s version of Jonathan Harker (Bruno Ganz) is not an impossible id but a bourgeois bastion of modernity attempting to colonize the world, to partition it into parcels of private property that attempt to compartmentalize the cosmos. In doing so, Herzog fears, the world invites its own destruction in the process.

Yet it is not the bland Harker, finally, who captures the film’s soul, but, rather, its melancholy, banal Dracula. If Herzog worried, with Melville-esque apprehension about the fate of modernity, Klaus Kinski was, of course, his Ahab, a once-in-a-lifetime conduit for Herzog’s divine and demonic sorcery, his own doomed attempts to channel and best the world with monomaniacal monstrousness. Casting Kinski, an actor who seemed to barely be able to bear the weight of the cosmic flux around him, as the creature would seem to finally set him up as the very force of nature he so desperately wanted to be, to become a literal embodiment of the quest for containing the universe that tortured him. When he sets off for the East to sell a home to Dracula, we are immediately cast into the realm of Herzog’s “ecstatic truth,” a portal of exquisite otherness that the man-creature is, nominally, the corporealization of. It’d be as though he had finally broken open his mortal shell and achieved an ecstatic sublimity of sheer resonance. The physical instability of the world, the very thing that had exposed Kinski’s cavernous ego in the stiflingly humid air of his own excessively imperialistic self-importance in Aguirre, now seems to warp around him as he wields the darkness of a world where reason long ago failed to extend to the depths and explore the breadth it promised to.

However, if Herzog’s Nosferatu exposes forces beyond our human recognition, redirecting us to the limits of our consciousness, it also presents a vision of human limitation and existential finitude that even Kinski’s Dracula stumbles and cowers before. Kinski’s is an all-too-human creature, a film of monstrous mundanity who, in casting us into the abyss of our uncertainty, only brings us back to ourselves. If Max Schreck’s unnatural wraith was a spellbinding specter of impossible strangeness, Kinski’s is a fell beast, a fallen poet whose humanity reminds us of ourselves. While Murnau’s revenant warped the darkness around him, commanding the creatures of the night, this being seems to excrete from its pores, to uneasily slide into the space between absolute difference and total similarity. This Dracula seems less like a cosmic being of universal potency than an uncomfortable parody of a holy man, a lone soul divorced from the world who prowls the halls of sanctity. He’s a sad echo of Harker’s own pathetic waywardness, and as Harker increasingly mutates into a ghostly, white-caked parody of Kinski’s monster, the film expresses how the narcotic pull of achieving self-actualization culminates in locating a darker self that was always there but you cannot even recognize. This is not our other, but a hallucinatory reminder of our own strangeness to ourself.

At times, Herzog teases us with a display of Dracula’s unholy potency only to further demarcate the bounds of his power. The mid-film ghost ship, a voyage of the damned which Dracula disfigures off-screen, seems to take the form of an automaton floating along the tide of history, haunted by this domineering ghostly puppeteer. Yet the creature, still and ephemeral in the frame, seems isolated and devitalized by his frustrated, impotent rage, controlled by the very feral manna he seems to channel. When Dracula arrives in Western Europe, and we first see him scurrying about the back alleys of the city of Wismar, Harker’s hometown, in search of a suitable resting place for his coffin, his crawling fear reveals an all too human quest for a home.

Soon enough, when we see a close-up of the confused creature skittering into the frame, we confront a thing, call him “man,” hopelessly unable to make sense of its own actions. Later shots that might have suggested a nasty voyeur in other films here imply a blighted, ruminative soul cast adrift in a world he does not understand. He is also a creature prey to internal energies that he is pitifully unable to manage, a cruel, malnourished totem of terrified masculinity ingratiating itself into a woman’s life. Rather than an antediluvian manifestation of cosmic forces brought to bear on unsuspecting humans, he is a vision of a sad outsider who also casts the shadow of our most abject self. Like any worthwhile horror film, Phantom der Nacht asks us to encounter the unfathomable only so it can teach us something about the apparently monotonous.

Even when this Dracula does seem to control the fate of the world, he simply commands his servant Renfield, here figured as a mad showman by Roland Topor, to do his bidding while he looks on passively, trapped in a rigor mortis parody of genteel manners that denies him the humanity he so desperately craves. The actual devastation he apparently wreaks upon Europe is compressed into ellipses and obfuscated in the background, either because the film is recoiling from its own terror or because it is simply playing out a horror written in the stars, a vision of cosmic futility it cannot change, or because it has simply given up. The monster, the thing we are supposed to fear and run from or want to vanquish, is, instead, a lonely, post-modern pestilence of a malformed man who seems repulsed by the way that the world’s contradictions have clarified themselves in him. As Jack White said, it’s rough on the rats.

Score: 10/10