An unexpected fright, a scream, an obscene monstrosity. This is not the horror that brushes our soul when watching “Nosferatu” by Werner Herzog. It is not the monster itself that terrifies us (what is a monster, anyway?), but the fact that he feels emotions, is torn by doubt, can suffer and live a complexity that we consider eminently human. It is the thoughtful and suffering looks of Klaus Kinski that trouble us, because it is difficult for us to hate and detest a creature that, despite its deformed aberration, still possesses traits so frighteningly close to our own. His doubts are ours, his temptations are ours, his lustful thirst is identical to what we feel every day.
So are we the monster?
Kinski sucking Lucy's neck frightens us not so much for the violent act itself, but for its erotic connotations, for the voluptuousness that overflows from the count's lips (abominable and childlike at the same time), for the slowness of his gestures full of uncertainty, his eyes wide with the astonishment of being a demonic creature, but also human. It is the thresholds we cross that terrify us, and Werner Herzog knows this well, excessively prolonging the time leading up to the vampiric act, keeping us suspended at the pinnacle of dizziness.
Because evil in itself is not surprising, it almost bores: it is the arduous transition towards it (the passage from human to diabolical) that shakes us and makes us falter. The never fully resolved choice, the doubt, and finally the abandonment to the lust of the flesh, a lust that takes others' lives, that consumes them: this is the monstrosity that nests within each of us.
And then the bewilderment of a life now alien, the void of enduring, the nightmare of time that has lost all meaning. The where and the when. In the muteness of spaces, a horror takes shape that is almost impossible for us humans. Dracula says: “Time is an abyss, profound as long as endless nights. Centuries come and go... To not have the ability to grow old is terrible... Death is not the worst; there are things much more horrible than death. Can you imagine it? Enduring through the centuries experiencing the same futile things every day...”.
Thus, in his condition halfway between human and demonic, we find a dual condemnation: that of succumbing to temptations, of feeding on others' existence to satiate one's own appetites, and that infernal condemnation of endless spaces and superhuman silences, the condemnation to exist eternally. A film like this, with its suspended and spectral atmospheres (music by Popol Vuh), makes us perceive even this second, the universal void.
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