Kinski recognizes that the true terror of Nosferatu lies in his weakness, his slavery to his perverse condition. Kinski's vampire whines and shuffles and writhes, sickly and listless, until his appetites get the better of him and drive him into sudden fits of violently predatory, carnal, pathetic bloodsucking. It's the gentle neighborhood junkie who nods at you politely for two months and suddenly, with thick greasy sweat and trembling hands, puts an ice pick to your neck and apologizes as he takes your wallet.

It is not difficult to imagine some part of Kinski over-identifying with this monster. The burden of the role fell to Minhoï and especially baby Nanhoï, Kinski's "redeemer," to whom Klaus clung for comfort from his own insanity during this shooting period, with a devouring, airless embrace. Kinski loved Minhoï and Nanhoï "too much," Nanhoï was quoted as saying, later. No human could stand in this gale force of desperate, consuming love and remain standing; it is a testimony to the prevailing serenity of Minhoï that Nanhoï didn't turn out to be a Dad's Ego Casualty like Christian Brando. (Nanhoï, now 27, has acted in a handful of films and, judging from the photographs on his minimal Web site, is now an apparently healthy, handsome European man, living a low-key life.)

There was no break: Shooting for "Woyzeck" began immediately. Minhoï and Nanhoï flew back to Paris, so there was, essentially, nobody around to save Klaus from himself.

"Woyzeck," in the famous play by Georg Büchner, is a powerless man driven by jealous rage to stab and kill his adulterous wife. Kinski always had a premonition that that script would destroy him, psychically. He turned the script down the first time it was presented to him -- the second time, he seemed to feel it was fated to him:

"I've totally forgotten that ten years ago I refused to play Woyzeck onstage because it's suicide, and I tossed the script into a garbage can. I don't know why I've said yes this time. It's all destiny, no doubt. It's not me who decides, it's my destiny that agrees or rejects for me. A greater power."

It was the fastest, most professional shoot of his career: 16 days. Most of the scenes were filmed in a single take, without a cut, including the climax.

Woyzeck is bullied, he is harassed, he is ridiculed. Finally, he is driven into such a state, the veins stand out in his head -- his head seems on the verge of exploding. His eyes are gone.

When Woyzeck stabs his wife, and looks up from his work, Kinski's face makes the most horrific expression I have ever seen on an actor -- frozen, gutted, insanely doomed to the darkest freefall of terror. It reminded me of Tatsuya Nakadai in Kurosawa's "Ran" when, banished from his castle by his own son, the king has a mental breakdown and is left to wander in the earthly equivalent of hell, muttering in the grasslands like a weeping ghost.

Nakadai had Kabuki makeup; pure grief alone transforms Kinski's skull into the shape of pain. Kinski did the scene in one monumental take. It cost him dearly.

You cry for Woyzeck because you see he is utterly lost -- profoundly, eternally ruined and devastated. Since the actor does not remotely spare himself -- he has sacrificed himself to the text -- it is clear that Kinski, too, is ruined. He has gone to that place of absolute, irredeemable wretchedness, and because of its abysmal depth, he is permanently savaged by his own emotional recklessness, bravado, ineluctable fate -- whatever it was. It is the most awful, heartbreaking scene I have ever witnessed on film -- you watch Kinski let go of the rope, the high end of which is happiness.

There is an emotional bend around which you cannot go if you want to continue to be reasonably sane. Sanity excludes intimacy with the feelings that motivate slaying, unless you are a morally retarded sociopath, which Klaus, for all his defects, was not. He surrendered himself to a state that was the opposite of Christ, his idol, and was unable afterward to fully retrieve himself. It was, just as Kinski had predicted, suicide. He should never have done it. It is widely held by those who knew him, and Kinski himself, that he never recovered from "Woyzeck."

But what was the ultimate result? If you are the viewer of this film, Kinski's portrayal shocks your feelings out of the vault of intellectualizing or passive observing. He forces you to feel with him, to align yourself with your buried emotions. He outs your sensitivity. Is this not something Christ-like? It is, for my money. Kinski is the pure cure for the 21st-century disease -- the numbness unto droning.

Two years later, when Jason Robards fell ill and was disallowed by his doctors from returning to Peru, Kinski filled in and rejoined Herzog in the jungle, for what many believe was the best film either of them ever had a hand in.

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