A traveler who enters into that land of phantoms is lost and can never return.
I'm kicking off the Halloween season in style with Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre, which he made in 1979 as a tribute to F.W. Murnau's silent classic. Filmed simultaneously in English and German (the last time I saw this, it was the German version, which goes by the title Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht), Herzog's Nosferatu stars Klaus Kinski as Count Dracula, who shares the deathly pale, rat-like countenance of Max Schreck's Count Orlok (not to mention the bald head and long fingernails), but also has the power of speech. I'm not sure whether this was Herzog's intention or not, but hearing him speak turns him into more of a pathetic and pitiable character (especially when he expresses the desire to know what it's like to age and die) and less of an out-and-out monster. (Of course, Kinski's great performance may also have something to do with that.)
Long before Kinski appears on the scene, Isabelle Adjani's Lucy Harker is unnerved by her dream of a bat flying in slow motion, which she takes for a premonition and urges her husband Jonathan (Bruno Ganz) not to go away on business. He does so anyway, at the behest of his boss, an extremely giggly Renfield (Roland Topor) who's already most of the way to being completely mad right from the start. For his part, Ganz ignores the warnings of the superstitious locals and sets out on foot to Dracula's maze-like castle, where he narrowly avoids being sucked dry by the Count and is left behind while Kinski loads up a bunch of black coffins with soil and plague-carrying rats. Once they arrive in Ganz's hometown, Herzog conjures up some eerie imagery as Dracula's black coffins are answered by the wooden ones containing the victims of the plague he has brought with him. And while this film does feature a Dr. Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast), he's so slow to catch on to what's happening that his staking of the bloodsucker is a textbook example of too little, too late.