It was 1896 when George Méliès, in "Le Manoir du Diable," introduced the figure of the vampire to the big cinema screen. More than a century has passed, and the undead is still here, inspiring directors and producers, continually resurrecting from its own corpse, adapting to the environment surrounding it and donning narrative garments always different and directed toward a progressive homogenization within the world that welcomes it and, paradoxically, preserves it.
Much has been said on the subject of the vampire in cinema, but it has been said almost exclusively in relation to the vampire of tradition, whether painted with the expressionist tints of Murnau or with the seductive charm of Bela Lugosi or with the gothic daring of Fisher and Christopher Lee. Subsequently, criticism, limiting ourselves at this moment to horror cinema, has dedicated its attention to other figures, to other monstrosities, to other artificial creations that have transformed the imaginary of horror traveling without interruption from the expressive and hedonistic wickedness of the early feature films of Wes Craven and Tobe Hooper to the corrupting and definitive miasmas of splatter-gore to the media heroes who in the 1980s/1990s forcefully entered the favor of consumption especially among adolescents (Freddy Krueger and Michael Myers only to cite the leaders of the movement).
Little has been said instead of the modern and contemporary vampire, as the common opinion has spread that it had nothing more to say, neither at the ideological level nor in the figurative dimension. Regardless of agreement or disagreement with this trend of thought, the vampire was relegated to the already seen and the useless perhaps a bit too hastily. In reality, instead, the immortal demon has biologically and mentally evolved, and in filming it something new and different was written (in the screenplay phase) and was seen (in the profilmic), was intuited and was understood, and for this reason it seems to me fascinating (and, I hope, useful) to carry out the analysis of how in the last twenty-five years the cinematic topos of the vampire has gradually reconstructed and redesigned itself according to new analytical and interpretive categories.
It was 1979 when Werner Herzog, master of cinema painted with nature, of the cinema of silence, of cinema of the image as an instrument of emotional self-identification and as an effective corollary of the lack of spectacularity, concluded the realization of "Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht" (Nosferatu, Prince of the Night), a remake of Murnau's seminal expressionist masterpiece, revisited through the eyes and heart of an artist close to the master of silent cinema in placing before the spectator's attention the vampire as a suffering creature and far more human than the Stoker iconography had transmitted to the collective imagination.
There was discussion, and it continues to this day, about the alleged uselessness of remakes of great film-manifestos of the past, inevitably carriers of different eras and different mental approaches to filmic reality, precisely in a period when Hollywood, having perhaps definitively lost the light of creativity inherent to the object-cinema, floods the market with more or less valid remakes (or presumed such) often constructed with the intent of making the young spectator know stories and images of the past not possessed in the genetic baggage of the modern cinematographic consumer lobotomized by advertising guerrilla and the hypnotic hegemony of marketing.
Masked pedagogical intent, pleonastic attempt to bring about positive feedback that brings to light the most just and profound significance of cinema as an instrument of visual fascination, wise use of the technological medium as supreme arranger ready to fill every defective note within the filmic score. Intent that often fails, miserably, unconditionally. Even in horror.
Yet Herzog's "Nosferatu" went beyond, beyond the remake in its precise meaning and beyond the filmic work understood as subjective expressivity of the author's ideology. It went beyond because it elevated itself to a new legend, or rather to a new vision of a legend rooted in time and never dormant in the consciousness of genre lovers and beyond.
"Nosferatu, Phantom der Nacht" is a complete film, in its essence and in its existence, complete in its ideology and in the unbridled symbolism that pervades it, complete in the objective of emphasizing the melodramatic and infinitely sad component of the vampire, now finally a creature similar to all of us in feelings and in the disastrous emotional upheaval brought about by the pleasure of flesh and blood not only as an instrument of nourishment but also as a rediscovered desire for life.
Herzog's "Nosferatu" drives away the nebulous gothic vampire of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, as well as the ephemeral bearer of death of which Bela Lugosi had made himself the personification and example, entering into us as the last, magnificent and desperate example of romantic vampire, not in the literary sense (Anne Rice will take care of that and consequently Neil Jordan in "Interview with the Vampire"), but instead especially in the purely synonymous sense of the adjective: romantic that is sentimental, melancholic, passionate, poetic and dreamy.
A work of great fascination and extreme melancholy, pervaded by a sense of imminent apocalypse and mortal paralysis, difficult to understand for the average spectator in its deliberate lack of rhythm yet rich in images of splendid optical effect, in which every single profilmic element has its own reason for being and expresses meanings that go beyond the intrinsic nature of the narration, in which the figure of the vampire distances itself from the dimension of the horrific to drag us, deliberately or not, to suffering.
The face of Klaus Kinski expresses the last vampire capable of confessing itself, looking toward the camera to speak to all of us from the depths of its ineptitude, capable of rising as a bulwark of narration while cultivating no sign of strength and domination within itself, capable of entering and exiting at will from the field of every frame crawling fearfully before our eye still capable of judging and expressing an opinion (a procedure still alive in Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," although in that case the choice is guided by hand from the screenplay and thus almost obligatory).
Herzog uses silences, images, the skeletons of the first devastating sequence and the small man (Bruno Ganz), in a solitary initiatory journey toward the Count's castle, astounded and lost without words in the immensity of what surrounds him. The skeletons that open the film come to represent Death itself, an elusive entity and multiform in its meanings, an instrument of offense and reflection that will assume a predominant role throughout the narration. And together with it Time, which flows inexorably consuming the mind and body of the individual, which dominates escaping human control, which gradually deforms reality until it assumes grotesque and unknown contours, which terrifies for its own inevitability.
Death and Time, in a dialectical and narrative confrontation that at the end of the staging will see the latter place itself as absolute victor, because Time is able to survive even Death, from which instead no one, not even the Vampire par excellence, can escape. At the end of the film the Nosferatu is killed by the light of the sun and by its own greed. But nothing is concluded, because Jonathan Harker, contaminated and ready to assume the role of his master, departs on horseback, toward Transylvania and toward Hell. The camera is still, immobile and glacial, and we see the new King of the undead moving away, ever further, until disappearing from our field of vision. With him also disappears the vampire subject of a cinema that perhaps no longer exists today.
From the Herzogian silences thus begins an incessant metamorphosis that has extended to the present day. Metamorphosis that perhaps had already begun. Someone who knows a thing or two about revolutions in the field of horror had thought of it, namely George Romero, coining a figure perhaps imperfect but already important for the years that would follow in his "Wampyr" ("Martin," 1978), he who is not a vampire but believes himself to be, he who is convinced of his presumed state of immortality by the bleak ignorance of those around him, he who has the sole fault of loving the taste of human blood and is for this reason destined to convince himself of his own inhumanity and his own monstrosity as a founding element of a life destined for defeat given the impossibility of the other to accept him as a human being.
Popular superstition, religious belief that distorts every boundary of rationality, the physical place home as a hotbed of desperation and prison that annihilates every hope of escape, all elements that will lay the seeds for the mutation of the vampire in cinema in the last twenty years of the past century.
The vampire will be reborn from its ashes, will resurrect in new guise, and will exploit every technological progress to adapt and keep pace with the stressed times of our age. In the eighties he will seize the importance and achieved omnipotence of the television medium ("Fright Night," 1984, by Tom Holland), then make way for the wave of viscera and the screaming dissolution of the body of splatter cinema and return stronger than ever attempting to recover his ancient beauty and his undisputed literary dwelling ("Interview with the Vampire," 1994, by Neil Jordan), and beginning to explore the city as a new source of entertainment and wonder, to rise as a manifesto also of modern cinema ("Bram Stoker's Dracula" by Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), a masterpiece in which in showing us the tragedy of a monster that then is not so much a monster Coppola gives us a work of 360-degree cinema, in which modern special effects mix with techniques typical of silent cinema and unused by filmmakers for decades, all illuminated by a set of scenography, costumes and photography at a level of perfection that no film on the subject had ever touched.
Love as a source of love and death, the visual apology of a narration that can even border on the ridiculous but that fascinates even the most skeptical spectator, the splendid face of Mina Harker (Wynona Ryder) that embodies the sublimation of beauty as a source of corruption, blood and tears mixed in a pictorial frame of rare beauty, and the severed head of the Count in the final sequence that marks the return to God and the achieved goal of inner peace that the undead finds after centuries of suffered wanderings in a world that painted him as a monster without even attempting to understand his true essence. The vampire in these years thus learns to know the city (and TV), but it is not enough, and can do nothing but resign itself, not without a hint of pleasure, to unite and mix with the human being in order to merge with it, all as the only possibility of surviving the modern homogenization of a world now unknowable.
It will do so first with timidity, hiding away in well-defined congregations perhaps situated in locales lost in the middle of the desert ("From Dusk Till Dawn," 1995, by Robert Rodriguez, that is the paroxystic mockery of cinema and the abandonment of every narrative commitment to make way for pure entertainment, and "Vampires," by John Carpenter, 1997), and subsequently will break every spatio-temporal barrier to fully enter the metropolis, in its frenzy and its lack of individual breath, becoming anthropomorphic mass vampire ("The Addiction," 1996, by Abel Ferrara, a philosophical reflection steeped in metaphysics on the condition of vampire, being carrier of an irrenunciable Evil but also desirous of a salvific grace that can redeem it from its own sins but above all making it conscious of the extreme truth of its own curse. The horror of monstrosity confronted with the horror of the human race by its nature evil, shown through images of Nazi extermination camps and massacres committed during the war in Bosnia), and fighting with martial arts and the teachings of the oriental action-movie for the nocturnal streets and in discotheques ("Blade," by Stephen Norrington, 1998), until intoxicating itself and closing the circle seeking, with disastrous results, to return tautologically to the past ("Dracula's Legacy," by Patrick Lussier, 2000).
The process is however irreversible, the vampire has been atrophied and suffocated, closed in asphyxiating limbs and in iconographies far from the genuineness of a time that was. But, being immortal, in legend as in cinema, continues to wander in theaters and inspire directors and producers.
Because the vampire cannot die, and remains myth and daily presence in all of us, in horror and in poetry.
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