The images found in vampire films have a quality beyond our usual experiences in the cinema. For me genre means an intensive, almost dreamlike, stylization on screen, and I feel the vampire genre is one of the richest and more fertile cinema has to offer. There is fantasy, hallucination, dreams and nightmares, visions, fear and, of course, mythology.
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In Murnau’s film the creature is frightening because he is without a soul and looks like an insect. But from Kinski’s vampire you get real existential anguish. I tried to ‘humanize’ him. I wanted to endow him with human suffering and solitude, with a true longing for love and, importantly, the one essential capacity of human beings: mortality.
Werner Herzog in Cronin/Herzog
THE NORTH RIDING PROJECT 
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