We at EV know that Herzog’s masterful vampire tale starring Klaus Kinski as the emulsion-faced undead parasite is the best vampire film ever! This homage to FW Murnau’s 1922 film is conceived and executed with passionate connoisseurship; Herzog keeps some original locations and images, and approximates the operatic visual language of Murnau with a new kind of primitivism: strange tableaux, eerie wordless scenes, and juxtaposed, grainy images of bats that directly reference silent moviemaking. Kinski carries it all off with glassy-eyed fervor and fathomless agony, as his Count prepares to carry his anti-enlightenment into the heart of 19th-century Germany. Kinski really is scary!