Spoiler alert: Nosferatu has a mustache.
Now that we have that out of the way, we can talk about what we talk about when we talk about Nosferatu.
Isn’t it strange how an illicitly made film that, if not for some intrepid German film lovers, would have been lost forever has become this cult-ish Dracula subfranchise? I’ve known Nosferatu as “the scarier version of Dracula” since I was little, when Max Schreck’s visage popped up in a particularly scary episode of Nickelodeon’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? But between general cultural osmosis and two classics of cinema (F.W. Murnau’s “Made without Permission” original and Werner Herzog’s remake of the same), Count Orlok somehow became his own animal fully divorced from the very source material he was liberally ripped off from. There’s even an excellent movie about the making of the movie.
One can credit good creature design, and yes, it’s very good. Still, it’s the combination of everything on screen: powerful Impressionist imagery, Shreck’s performance, cutting Bram Stoker’s novel down to the bone, the terror invoked in silence – these elements combine to create something that wipes the floor with basically every sanctioned iteration of Dracula. The bloodsucker we generally know from Halloween decorations, costumes, and other paraphernalia is generally some combo of Christopher Lee’s visage with Bela Lugosi’s voice. But not even their considerable powers combined can put the chill into something the way that Orlok looking into the camera can. That’s a kind of immortality so few achieve, and they did it on a shoestring budget.
Enter Robert Eggers, the great hope of horror filmmaking from a crop that emerged in the mid-2010s. Most of the rest of that class, Jennifer Kent, David Robert Mitchell, and even Ari Aster, have dropped out of the genre to explore (and flail for the most part) elsewhere. But Eggers, one quick detour into Scandinavian folklore aside, has been a true blue believer in what goes bump in the night. His version of Nosferatu has percolated for years, to the point where his original heroic lead was recast as Orlok. Now it’s finally here and geared up for the holiday season as Christmas Day counterprogramming to whatever more seasonally appropriate schmaltz is acting as the reprieve you need from chatty family gatherings.
I don’t know how it’ll fare at the box office against usual Christmas programming, but I do know this new Nosferatu rocks. Though, to be honest, I didn’t think so at first.
When the credits rolled the night of our screening, I had that sinking feeling of disappointment—not in what Eggers and crew offered, but in what I didn’t get. Expectations are tricky things, a little devil that sits on your shoulder and pumps you full of possibilities for what could be instead of what is. When the ending came, I thought to myself, “Jeez, I don’t know, I guess I expected something different.” That sounds awful when I put it that way, but when you’ve watched as many versions of Stoker’s tale as I have and have a fairly intimate familiarity with the text, the broad strokes are indeed going to be exactly what you expect them to be. Take it or leave it.
And look, I’m not going to relitigate Dracula here. On paper, Nosferatu is Dracula with German names and set a few decades earlier. More the era of Jane Austen than Jack the Ripper. Perhaps my memory is faulty, but the story beats here are actually closer to the novel than any other film named Nosferatu. There’s a more specific male trio of Harker, Seward, and Holmwood analogues (played by Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Ineson, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson – once again, no Quincey, sorry), a fascinatingly conceived take on Van Helsing (Willem Dafoe), and your Lucy and Mina stand-ins (Emma Corin and a vivid Lily-Rose Depp). It’s more Dracula than a lot of Dracula adaptations.
But what makes Eggers’s stand out? For one, this is the first time in a long time that I again felt the menace of the central vampire. Bill Skarsgard‘s Orlok is an undead sorcerer perpetually hidden by shadow, more of a rotting Rasputin than the slinking hairless vermin we’ve come to expect. Yet, when his presence is felt, it’s no less chilling. Though much of that can be credited to Depp, who, along with Eggers, has provided another clarification for one of Stoker’s big plot entanglements: why is this immortal vampire so into this gal anyway? There’s a fairy tale element that permeates every aspect of Nosferatu, and it’s driven by this central conceit, which is too delicious to give away. The possession elements that this connection produces are striking and set this telling apart on their own merits.
The relationship between the hero (Hoult’s Thomas), Ellen, and Orlok is another point of interest that drives the twisted storybook conventions further. However, it also brings a bit of subtext blaring to the forefront in the cuckoldry theme that’s always been there, though never as blatant as now. Having dewey-eyed Hoult (who is so omnipresent now, I’ve seen him more times this year than members of my own family) as the wounded, yet striving for better husband, was another stroke of excellence from a filmmaker who simply can do no wrong.
Other aspects make for fun trivia, such as Dafoe’s Von Franz, who was directly inspired by an active occultist who was one of the producers of the Murnau film. In addition, my partner pointed out to me the numerous allusions to the holiday season, from the Dickensian atmosphere by which Thomas and Ellen are surrounded (his employer is very Scrooge-coded) to the outwardly stated “three days” warning that serve as the timeline for Orlok’s own visits to Ellen. None of it is subtle, but it gives way to a greater mythical power and dread than I thought could be possible in this old tome.
For fear of understating it, though, I have to again highlight Depp, who vacillates between quietly battling back the powerful hold Orlok has on her and full-on demonic outbursts of the orgasmic variety. This is genuinely one of the best performances of the year, and Eggers’ instincts in anchoring the film around its heroine instead of its hapless male trio makes for a refreshing evolution that even Coppola hedged on in his equally excellent rendition.
And I haven’t even touched on his expansion of the plague aspects!
What can I say? I came away a little letdown, and now I think it’s one of the best things he’s done (second only to The Lighthouse). Maybe after another watch, I’ll think it’s the best. For whatever it’s worth, it’s the Eggers movie I think can bear the most revisits, and that in and of itself is new to me. Bravo.