The original Nosferatu, while considered a silent classic of the genre today, was originally nearly destroyed since the movie borrowed heavily, and without permission, from the estate of Bram Stoker given it was very much based on Stoker’s Dracula with permission from the author’s estate. So, here’s a question: why did writer/director Robert Eggers opt to remake Nosferatu instead of making his own version of Dracula? I won’t pretend to know, but actor Willem Dafoe did an interview on a public radio show, and the clip advertising it had Dafoe’s claiming that the purpose was to create a genuinely scary vampire movie after years of vampires that were more cuddly, sympathetic, or even sparkly vampires. If so, remaking Nosferatu makes more sense: the vampire there is famously an inhuman-looking monster.
Anyway, I went to see it the day after Christmas. It’s the one movie I had on my theatrical watchlist before the end of 2024.
Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) in her youth seems to have made some sort of pact with a dark being that came to her in the night. But in the present day of Germany in 1938, she has other concerns when her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is dispatched to Transylvania by his employer Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to sell a run-down old house to an old nobleman looking to retire to the town. That old nobleman? One Count Orlok (horror movie mainstay Bill Skarsgård), a man who seems to live in a castle that is falling apart, a man who the locals avoid like the plague, and a man who isn’t really a man after all.
Yes, Orlok is a Nosferatu, a vampire of some kind, and he’s attached to Thomas’s wife in ways Thomas doesn’t know about or understand. Secure back in Wisborg, Ellen’s “melancholy” is back, leading to concern from friends Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) who are watching her. They call in a doctor (Ralph Ineson), who in turn calls in his old teacher, the occult-obsessed Professor Von Franz (Dafoe). With Thomas eventually on his way home, but the Count in town already, people start dying. Is there a way to defeat this old creature without leading to a tragic ending for the protagonists?
If Eggers wanted to create a scary vampire, he succeeded. Skarsgård’s Orlok is an intimidating figure, one who appears from shadows, looks something like the old images of Vlad Tepes, and whose every move seems heavy with danger. He’s a guy who scares the crap out of Thomas just for asking him to sign his name to a legal document. Rats seem to follow him everywhere, and Eggers actually used real rats for most of the movie. Eggers did seem to add elements from Stoker’s novel, and he does credit it as such, with Dafoe (who played a vampire actor in Shadow of the Vampire) as the VanHelsing, Hoult (who was Renfield in Renfield) as Jonathan Harker to Depp’s Mina, and McBurney basically the Renfield of this story.
But it does play well to Eggers’s strengths. All of his movies thus far have played with folklore or legend of some kind. The Witch used New England belief in witches to tell a scary story while The Lighthouse used the 19th century’s lighthouse superstitions to scare audiences. Even his ostensible non-horror movie The Northman is based on the legend that inspired Hamlet. Like those movies, Nosferatu plays off the folklore of its setting, though with the twist here that the “modern” thinking of 1838 is leaning more to science and forgetting the old stories that kept people alive because the nosferatu are real and dangerous. Eggers pulls out all of his camera techniques for this one, and he knows how to make things tense, where even a quiet scene at home has a level of unpredictable potential danger. It could be an invisible creature casting a shadow on some moonlit curtains. it could be a nobleman insisting on being addressed as “my lord” even as he seems to materialize on the opposite side of the table from where he’d been standing mere seconds earlier. It’s a dark world that doesn’t offer much hope, and it really plays to the director’s strengths as a result.
Grade: B+
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