Prologue: Nosferatu Meets Nosfer-Asshole
Some horror films are cursed. Others are haunted. Vampire in Venice is both, but the ghost is Klaus Kinski, and the curse is that nobody on Earth had the spine to kick him off set and toss him into the Grand Canal where he belonged.
Marketed as a sequel to Werner Herzog’s haunting Nosferatu the Vampyre, this Italian production is less “artful meditation on immortality” and more “Kinski wandering around Venice at dawn while the crew quietly contemplates suicide.” Imagine a movie being beaten to death with its own script pages, and you have Vampire in Venice.
The Plot: Or, What Little There Is
Christopher Plummer plays Professor Paris Catalano, a scholar summoned to Venice to investigate rumors of Nosferatu’s last appearance during Carnival in 1786. Alongside Princess Helietta Canins (Barbara De Rossi), he learns through a séance that the vampire (Kinski) is looking not for blood, but for eternal death.
Sounds Gothic, right? Wrong. Because after that, Nosferatu wakes up, tosses a woman off a balcony, and spends the rest of the movie stalking Venice canals like a drunken tourist in an opera cape.
The script, rewritten endlessly after directors fled, is a patchwork of half-baked scenes: séances, seductions, a priest flailing with a cross, and Kinski generally refusing to act like a vampire. He doesn’t wear fangs. He doesn’t shave his head. He doesn’t hiss or haunt. Instead, he looks like Klaus Kinski after a three-day bender, staggering around Venice pawing at actresses. Which, in fairness, is probably the most honest performance of his career.
The Characters: Walking Corpses (and Not the Fun Kind)
-
Nosferatu (Klaus Kinski): Instead of the terrifying rat-faced monster Herzog gave us, we get Kinski in his natural state: unkempt, unhinged, and unwanted. He doesn’t play Nosferatu so much as loiter onscreen like a creep at a bus stop.
-
Professor Catalano (Christopher Plummer): Plummer looks like a man who took the job for a free vacation to Venice and regretted it immediately. His main contribution is grimacing and muttering lines about “eternal death” as if he’s trying to talk himself into walking off set.
-
Father Don Alvise (Donald Pleasence): Pleasence does what he always does in Italian horror films: stare into the middle distance and collect a paycheck.
-
Helietta (Barbara De Rossi): Cast against her will, groped against her will, assaulted against her will. Her performance is one long scream for help that the audience can unfortunately hear.
-
Maria (Anne Knecht): Inserted into the script because Kinski demanded that his co-star’s girlfriend be promoted. Which says everything you need to know about the professionalism of this production.
Behind the Scenes: A Horror Greater Than the Film
The real nightmare isn’t Nosferatu—it’s Kinski. The man terrorized the set like the world’s worst vampire LARP. He refused to follow blocking, forced lighting resets every take, had actresses replaced mid-production, and even insisted on directing random scenes himself. What did those scenes consist of? Ten hours of footage of Kinski wandering Venice at dawn. No dialogue. No plot. Just Klaus Kinski taking a moody stroll like a drunk philosophy major.
Worse, he assaulted multiple actresses on set. Barbara De Rossi said he groped and hurt her during filming. Elvire Audray fled the set in tears after he physically and sexually attacked her during a “seduction” scene. The crew at one point walked out en masse until Kinski half-heartedly apologized. That alone should’ve been the end of production. Instead, the producers caved, because apparently the vampire wasn’t the only bloodsucker on set.
By the time Caminito, the producer-turned-director, tried to stitch together the chaos, he had half a movie and no story. What we got was a jumbled, incomplete mess masquerading as Gothic art.
The Visuals: Venice, Wasted
On paper, Vampire in Venice had a killer hook: shoot a vampire film in the most Gothic city on Earth. Venice, with its canals, crumbling palazzi, and Carnival masks, should have dripped atmosphere. Instead, it drips boredom.
The cinematography, sabotaged by Kinski’s constant meddling, is all over the place. Some shots are beautiful — mist over the canals, candlelit crypts — but they’re wasted on sequences that go nowhere. It’s like filming a perfume commercial, then splicing in random shots of Klaus Kinski assaulting people.
The Tone: Deathly Earnest, Unintentionally Comic
The movie insists it’s about existential despair, the torment of immortality, the longing for death. But Kinski stomps through every scene like Nosferatu just found out his favorite restaurant stopped serving schnitzel.
Christopher Plummer tries to sell the gravitas, but it’s like watching Shakespeare performed next to a man flashing bystanders on a gondola. Donald Pleasence doesn’t even try; he just smokes and waits for his flight home.
The result is a movie that aims for high tragedy but plays like parody. Imagine Interview with the Vampire rewritten by a drunk toddler with a crush on Klaus Kinski, and you’re close.
The Pacing: Eternal Death by Runtime
Vampire in Venice moves slower than Nosferatu after three bottles of wine. Scenes drag on endlessly: a séance that feels longer than Lent, Nosferatu wandering canals like he’s lost his hotel key, endless shots of characters staring into the mist.
At one point, Maria offers herself to Nosferatu so he can finally die. Instead of being moving, it’s interminable. You don’t sympathize with Nosferatu’s torment. You sympathize with yourself, stuck in a chair, wondering if eternal death would be preferable to finishing the film.
The Ending: Into the Mist, Into Oblivion
The film ends with Nosferatu carrying a nude Maria through Venice, muttering about how turning her into a vampire would be cruel. They vanish into the morning fog, leaving their fates a mystery.
It should be poetic. Instead, it looks like Klaus Kinski kidnapped an actress and wandered off set while the crew decided, “Screw it, roll credits.”
Final Verdict: Drive a Stake Through It
Vampire in Venice isn’t just a bad movie. It’s a cinematic crime scene. The production was plagued by a tyrannical star who should’ve been fired (or better yet, staked through the heart) on day one. The story is incoherent, the pacing funereal, the tone muddled, and the visuals squandered.
Yes, Venice is beautiful. Yes, Christopher Plummer and Donald Pleasence are icons. None of that matters when Klaus Kinski is on screen, sucking the life out of everything — not like a vampire, but like a narcissistic black hole.
This movie doesn’t deserve to be remembered as a sequel to Herzog’s Nosferatu. It deserves to be remembered as Exhibit A in “Why Nobody Should Have Ever Worked with Klaus Kinski.”
Some directors harness chaos. This one drowned in it. Vampire in Venice is the rare film that manages to kill art, atmosphere, and any goodwill toward its lead in one fell swoop. Nosferatu wanted eternal death. After sitting through this mess, so will you.
