Nosferatu in Venice, also released as Vampire in Venice and Prince of the Night, is a 1988 Italian supernatural horror film starring Klaus Kinski, Christopher Plummer, Donald Pleasence and Barbara De Rossi. Conceived as a loose follow-up to Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), the film follows Professor Paris Catalano as he travels to Venice to investigate the last known appearance of Nosferatu during the Carnival of 1786. The vampire is presented less as a conventional monster than as an immortal being exhausted by existence, searching for a way to die. The film is also notorious for its chaotic production, including changes of director, heavy rewrites and Kinski’s difficult behaviour on set, which has become almost as famous as the finished film itself.
The film is deeply tied to Venice and uses the city’s decaying beauty, fog, canals and old palaces to create a gothic atmosphere that feels both romantic and diseased. Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal appears as the Canins family residence, while Lazzaretto Vecchio, once a plague quarantine island, gives Nosferatu a fittingly morbid refuge. San Michele in Isola, Venice’s cemetery island, is used for funeral imagery, and other Venetian locations include Piazza San Marco, Riva degli Schiavoni, Ponte della Paglia and the area around the Accademia Bridge. Rather than treating Venice as a picturesque tourist setting, Nosferatu in Venice turns the city into a haunted labyrinth of water, stone, mist and death, where the vampire seems less like an intruder than something that naturally belongs to the city’s darker history.
Palazzo Barbaro
Palazzo Barbaro has appeared in Brideshead Revisited, Nosferatu in Venice, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, In Love and War, The Wings of the Dove and more.
Park Hotel Villa Grazioli
Park Hotel Villa Grazioli has appeared in Kill, Baby, Kill, The Marquis of Grillo, Nosferatu in Venice, The Dew Point and The Long Night.
St Mark’s Campanile
St Mark’s Campanile often appears in films as part of the wider San Marco skyline, its most direct use as a filming location is in "Nosferatu in Venice" (1988).
St. Mark’s Square
Films associated with St. Mark’s Square are Summertime, Death in Venice, A Little Romance, Moonraker, The Tourist, Inferno and Spider-Man: Far From Home.
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