The 1922 silent film Nosferatu holds a fascinating and unique place in film history. Directed by German innovator F.W. Murnau, the film was essentially a knockoff adaptation of Bram Stoker’s groundbreaking 1897 novel Dracula. The unauthorized adaptation brought a copyright suit from Stoker’s estate, with a German court ruling that all copies of Nosferatu be destroyed. They weren’t, and Nosferatu went on to become one of the most influential horror films in cinema history.
Writer-director Robert Eggers’ decision to remake Nosferatu — not Dracula — is an interesting one. In his early 30s, Eggers burst into cinema with his 2015 debut feature The Witch, a transfixing folk-horror masterwork featuring Anya Taylor-Joy in her first leading role. While Eggers has stuck exclusively to dark historical fiction, his approach has shifted in the past decade. The 2019 two-hander The Lighthouse was something of an absurdist comedy, while 2022’s The Northman — a riff on the Scandinavian legendary character that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet — was an action-packed revenge epic. Nosferatu, then, is a return to the form Eggers established with The Witch: grotesque, horrifying and spellbinding.
Set in late-1830s Germany, Nosferatu opens on real estate agent Thomas Hutter (a fully committed Nicholas Hoult, perpetually drenched in flop sweat and panicked about the eyes) being given a seemingly innocuous task by his employer. He’s to deliver a contract to Count Orlock, a very old and very reclusive nobleman living in Transylvania, a small country “isolated in the Carpathian Alps.” Despite the protestations of his loving but distressed new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) — who, unbeknownst to Thomas, already has some sort of dark psychic connection to Orlock — he heads eastward to fulfill his duty.
Orlock is, of course, an unequivocally nasty old freak. He’s played to the absolute hilt by Bill Skarsgård (no stranger to transformative prosthetic makeup and costuming, as we’ve seen in It and The Crow), his face and vampiric status withheld from us by Eggers and DP Jarin Blaschke until the timing is just right, his voice deep and thunderous as he commands Thomas and reaches out to Ellen in her dreams. A film this sinister and unrelenting would of course be nothing without committed performances, and Skarsgård isn’t alone in that regard. Simon McBurney, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and past Eggers collaborators Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson are all completely immersed and convincing. As Thomas’ friend Friedrich, Taylor-Johnson is riddled with consternation at the existence of something as preposterous as a vampire. As idiosyncratic, occult-obsessed professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, Dafoe offers possibly the closest thing to comedic relief Nosferatu has. And if you aren’t sold on Depp in Act 1, you will be by the time her performance hits its most intensely physical in Act 3.
Nosferatu
The entire film rides on Eggers’ skill with tension and release, drifting between color and black-and-white as Orlock enters and exits the frame. And when the time comes for Orlock to drain his victims of their blood — and don’t you worry, the time will come — it is a deeply visceral affair. This isn’t an elegant, Anne Rice-styled glamour vampire, caressing a victim’s neck before delicately attaching his lips to the flesh. Skarsgård’s Orlock is more akin to a ravenous predator — part lion, part lamprey — draining the life force from his victims’ chests in pulsing, convulsing throes. It is dark, creepy, nasty stuff.
Though The Lighthouse was somewhat divisive, and The Northman not the box-office success it should’ve been, Eggers really doesn’t miss. He is an all-in sort of director, spending years on research, penning his own scripts and — understandably, given his background as a production designer — developing a distinctive visual style. This is not a filmmaker who’s going to approach a remake without something of his own to offer.
Nosferatu has much to offer.
