O Crepúsculo da Humanidade em Nosferatu, de F.W. Murnau e Werner Herzog

Resumo

Dracula’s career in literature and cinema is already long: he was born or reborn in 1897 in a novel by Bram Stoker, in Victorian Ireland. In 1922, Murnau adapted Dracula to the cinema and named it Nosferatu, modifying its contours and context. In 1979 Herzog wanted to pay tribute to Murnau and rewrote Nosferatu, but the 1970s film is much more than a remake. Herzog actualized Dracula’s story according to the viewers’ memories and his own. Murnau’s Nosferatu was born out of a traumatic context, in Germany, which was still mourning the Great War and was as decimated by it as it was by the Spanish flu. Herzog’s Vampire was also born in a post-war context, seemingly already distant in time, but always present – and born of an orphaned generation, which had lost everything in the War. This war is not explicit in Herzog, but a black plague is present in the form of a vampire – as devastating as war – and for which neither religion nor science constituted a remedy or solution. In this work I propose to follow the tracks of Nosferatu, which seems to have returned, but to a non-fictional setting, once again unleashing fear, devastation and death.