When George A. Romero first started work on 1968’s Night of the Living Dead he very nearly ended up making an apocalyptic vampire movie. Something wasn’t quite right, however: vampire movies were a little bit… obvious? Indeed, Hammer’s Dracula cycle was still in mid flow, and the poor Count had been reduced to fighting Billy the Kid and Batman in sundry rip-off movies. By having his reanimated corpses ferociously gorge on the raw flesh and vital organs of the living instead of genteelly sucking their blood, Romero made an inspired move, patenting a genre that, even now, shows no signs of slowing down.
Meanwhile, attempts to (re)resurrect the O.G. of the vampire movie has resulted in a series of high-profile flops, ranging from attempted blockbusters (Van Helsing, 2004), to indie cult wannabes (Dracula 2000) and even spoofs (Dracula: Dead and Loving It, 1995, which was swiftly laid to rest by some of the most sharpened reviews of Mel Brooks’ career). Peculiarly, the most ingenious fruits of Bram Stoker’s famous novel are the bootleg versions, like Count Yorga, Vampire (1970), Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974), and even Carl Dreyer’s 1932 Vampyr, which (presumably) eluded the author’s beady-eyed estate by drawing on the works of his inspiration, Dublin writer Sheridan Le Fanu.
F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was the first of them all, miraculously escaping destruction at the hands of philistine copyright lawyers to cast a long shadow — literally — over horror cinema. Practically trolling viewers with its unmissable similarities to Stoker’s book, Murnau nevertheless took his story in a strikingly different, down-and-dirty direction — the title allegedly comes from a Romanian word (nesuferit, which translates as “insufferable”) — and his version of Count Dracula, Count Orlok (Max Shreck), is far from the seductive, stylized and urbane personification of vampire aristocracy that was initiated by Bela Lugosi and reprised by the tall, dark and gruesome Christopher Lee.
This dark, feral concept of the prince of darkness — the foul-smelling, putrescent incarnation of death, literally rotting and bringing with it vermin, plague and pestilence — is the bedrock of Robert Eggers’ very modern update. It’s adult in its themes and concept, but at the same time it’s also a surprisingly enjoyable Christmas treat for goths graduating from Tim Burton and looking for a drop of the harder stuff. It’s only Eggers’ fourth film in a highly idiosyncratic and so-far somewhat niche career, but Nosferatu might be the best showcase for his dark obsessions yet, and it’s certainly the most commercial.
Egger has made one crucial difference to Murnau’s film, which is to give some back story to Count Orlok, which is where he opens the film. We hear the sound of a music box and a woman sobbing. This is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a newly married German woman who, in her lonely youth, reached out for “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort… anything”. That failure to specify has opened the door to an evil spirit (Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård) that has become obsessed with her. “You are not for the living,” it tells her. “You are not for humankind.” Time passes, but we don’t know how much; the title card that brings us to 1838 simply says it is now “years later”.
This prelude explains why Ellen is terrified to be on her own when her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent away on business to the Carpathian Alps. There he is to do business with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), an ailing nobleman looking to buy a new home in Hutter’s neighborhood. The estate he is eyeing up, Grunewald Manor, is a rundown wreck, but Hutter thinks nothing of it, just as he bats away Ellen’s recollection of a hideous nightmare in which she claims to have married death. “Never speak these things aloud,” he snaps. “It portends something awful for us,” she argues. Nevertheless, Thomas takes the trip, leaving Ellen with her pregnant best friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), her husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and their two little girls.
On his way to Orlok’s castle, Thomas stops off at a tavern, where the locals warn him to abandon his journey. During the night he dreams, or thinks he dreams, of witnessing a vampire hunt in the woods, but even the mud on his boots don’t stop him walking the final few miles to his destination, finally getting a ride from Orlok’s carriage (a perfectly creepy nod to Victor Sjöström’s silent classic The Phantom Carriage, which preceded Murnau’s film by a year). He finds Orlok in a bad mood, having dispensed with his staff. “The witching hour has passed,” he complains with a slow, stentorian, subwoofer delivery, insisting on being addressed by his title (“I will be honored as my blood demands it”).
In Murnau’s film, this is where Orlok finds a locket given to Thomas by Ellen (“A maiden’s token!”) and falls in love with her image. In Eggers’ version, however, there is a broader conspiracy at play, which is why Orlok — a near-ringer for 15th-century despot Vlad the Impaler — proffers a deceptive foreign-language contract, locks Thomas in his empty, decaying home and sets sail to be reunited with Ellen.
What’s smart about Eggers’ reimagining of Nosferatu is that it raises new questions about what will happen when Ellen and Orlok actually meet, rather than simply rehashing horror tropes in which the prey will simply be the Final Girl. Orlok’s evil is a given, but Ellen’s unfathomable capacity for darkness is where the film is focused (the others call it her “melancholy”, but it is much, much more complicated than that). Dr. Sievers (played by Eggers regular Ralph Ineson) tries to treat her with regular medicine, but it takes controversial scientist Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) to get to the heart of the matter.
It’s a long shot, but there’s a glimmer of chance that Nosferatu could lead to a renaissance of interest in the vampire genre. Zombie movies tend to paint a picture of society as a mob, but Eggers’ film is about the individual (“Does evil come from within us,” it asks, “or does it come from beyond?”). There is also the beguiling treatment of Orlok’s power; Thomas claims that he feels as though he is “awake but in a dream”, and in a funny way that sentiment encapsulates the strange sensation of watching a film based on a film that was itself clearly based on a very famous book while pretending not to be.
Nosferatu may not click instantly, but, aside from the technical brilliance that superbly renders the late-19th century, there’s a baked-in longevity in its thinking that will surely keep people coming back. Just as they returned to Murnau’s original (which, for years on scruffy VHS copies, must have looked like a supernatural snuff movie), they’ll be drawn to something not much seen in mainstream horror, a tango with death that is perverse but strangely compelling and, in some quarters, possibly — dare one even imagine it? — quite disgustingly erotic. It will stay with you a long time, possibly more than you’d like it to.
Title: Nosferatu
Distributor: Focus Features
Release date: 25 December 2024Director/screenwriter: Robert Eggers
Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney
Rating: R
Running time: 2 hr 12 mins
