Nosferatu the Vampyre · reception & legacy

1979 · Werner Herzog

How Nosferatu the Vampyre has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

In 1979 it drew respectful but divided notices — a Silver Bear at Berlin, yet plenty of critics called it a slow, sacrilegious retread of Murnau. Today it's canonised as one of the great vampire films and a peak of the Herzog–Kinski partnership, with the 2024 Eggers remake sending a fresh wave of viewers back to it.

What's debated

The eternal cinephile debate: which Nosferatu reigns — Murnau's 1922 original, Herzog's, or Eggers' 2024 version — with Herzog partisans insisting his is the most haunting and detractors calling it beautiful but inert.

Its footprint

Kinski's pallid, rat-fanged Count is one of horror's most reproduced faces, and the film is a fixture of every 'greatest vampire movies' list; every new Nosferatu or Dracula adaptation gets measured against its images.

Where it stands

A load-bearing pillar of the Herzog–Kinski canon and a Letterboxd horror-cinephile rite of passage — the arthouse vampire film you're expected to have seen.

★ Did you know? Herzog shot the film twice, scene by scene, in German and English — two complete versions with the same cast — and famously imported thousands of white lab rats that had to be dyed grey for the plague scenes.

Named by the director

Influences Werner Herzog has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Nosferatu (1922) — Herzog called Murnau's original the greatest film ever made in Germany and conceived his version as a direct homage to it.
F.W. Murnau — Herzog repeatedly cited Murnau as the ancestor he was reaching back to, framing the remake as reconnecting postwar German cinema with its Weimar-era legacy.