Nosferatu the Vampyre

by J †Johnson

“Nosferatu the Vampyre” was composed circa 2010 as we watched and rewatched F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog’s versions (1922 and 1979, respectively) of Nosferatu while noting dialog, title card text, sense impressions, and associations in open-field notebook spreads. It was part of a set of poems that had at their heart the film collaborations between Herzog and Klaus Kinski, which branched out to other examples of cinematic monstering—11 films in all. Our method was to compose longhand in a shapely poetics notation that we would later restage as typeset poems. The poems were indexed with a page numbering system to tag each film, and the poems were then crosscut to create a hybrid sequence. The resulting manuscript is called F I L M O G R A P H Y, which carried a crawl of subtitles, foremost of which were Three Films & Other Poems / &/or Breathless Fiend / A Translation. “Nosferatu the Vampyre” was a centerpiece that remained relatively uninterrupted by elements of other poems. Here we extract that section of the manuscript and preserve the page index (lowercase roman numerals marked with an N) as a gesture toward the whole. The poem is best viewed in spreads established by the bat-winged title pages (N1/Nii). 

F I L M O G R A P H Y remains unpublished, but it also remains a key development in what we would come to see as our horror poetics. We share it in the wake of Nosferatu’s 2024 reappearance, which a later poem in the manuscript anticipated at a reiterated interval of 57 years: “Dracula, come // And get it! In 2036 we’re due another / Return, punctured under stars.”

J †Johnson
January 6, 2025