This article contains spoiler content.
After reading Bram Stoker’s chilling classic Dracula at a dangerously young age, I’ve been on a mission to consume all things vampire. This eventually led me to F. K. Murnau’s silent classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, a film that was released more than a century ago now, but still managed to spook my teenage self watching the film alone in my darkened room. The original Nosferatu largely borrowed material from Dracula – so much so that Stoker’s widow sued the filmmakers, and a court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. It’s a miracle the film survived.
And to exploit that miracle, we’ve already done our fair share of remaking it, most famously in 1979 by German auteur Werner Herzog, alongside all the other variously unfaithful adaptations of Dracula. Robert Eggers’ newest remake, Nosferatu, has a whole host of films to judge it against. But rather than viewing all of these films as competition, it seems that Eggers has instead opted to view them as familial brothers and sisters.
Let’s start at the beginning. Jonathan Hark – I mean, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) has been called by his employer, Herr Knock (the Nosferatan version of Stoker’s Renfield), to travel to Transylvania to meet with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a member of the Transylvanian nobility who seeks a house in Germany. Unbeknownst to Thomas, however, is that Orlok, a bloodsucking vampire, intends to use his new residence to reconnect with Thomas’ wife, a strange woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) who had romantically bound herself to Orlok several years ago.
For those familiar with previous adaptations of Dracula, or versions of Nosferatu, this will all seem familiar, if not identical, to other incarnations of the Transylvanian count. While the original film introduced the idea of the estate agent’s wife being the object of the count’s romantic interests, it was Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (a terribly named film, given how far it strays from Stoker’s text) that depicted Mina Harker (Ellen’s counterpart) as Dracula’s reincarnated lover, presenting their connection as something already established by the time the film takes place.
Coppola’s film was majorly concerned with the Mina-Dracula relationship and it is from this (and the generally sexy vibe present in Coppola’s film) that I’d guess Nosferatu‘s tangled web of desire is majorly derived from.
What’s interesting about Eggers’ take on this relationship, however, is a newfound focus on Ellen’s character. Previous incarnations of the Ellen/Mina character were always interesting; it was she in Murnau’s Nosferatu who took it upon herself to kill the vampire, and her version in Stoker’s novel was virtually the leader of the Dracula kill-squad, ready to rescue her poor ailing husband. However, Ellen/Mina was often stuck behind her male counterparts and rarely had her own desires explored. Her sacrifice at the end of Murnau’s Nosferatu is certainly a selfless act, but it’s hard to feel too sad about witnessing the death of a character you hardly know.
In Eggers’ film, Ellen is a major viewpoint character, and one whose agency and wants are repeatedly emphasised. Many of the film’s male figures characterise Ellen as hysterical, only to realise she was in the right all along. Much of this film’s marketing has largely been focussed on her, rightly interpreting Ellen as the film’s most important character – even more so than its eponymous villain. Accordingly, Ellen is a demanding role to play, with a number of scenes depicting violent possession and the far reaches of perverse desire. Yet Depp, whose haunted eyes and pallid, Victorian complexion suit the role to a tee, manages to rise to the occasion.
A more challenging skill was Skarsgård’s impression of an ancient bloodsucker, a role that required him to wear heavy makeup and facial prosthetics (although you have to wonder why cast Skarsgård at all if he’s going to be unrecognisable?).
While more recent depictions of vampires in cinema often depict them as being youthful and handsome, the oldest versions of the vampire (derived from how Eastern Europe envisioned vampires) portrayed them as upright corpses with a hungry look behind their expired eyes. Eggers is clearly more interested in this version of the vampire with regard to aesthetics; his count speaks in a heavy Romanian accent, and, when his coffin is exhumed, is visibly covered in maggots and insects consuming his deceased flesh.
This version of the Transylvanian count is very effective, and probably my favourite featured in a film to date. His long fingers, emphasised in certain close-ups, are large, swollen, and bony; his pale eyes are beady and hungry for blood. His breathing is heavy and guttural, as if it were unnatural to his current self: simply put, Count Orlok is dreadful to behold.
Much of the film obscures his appearance, either depicting him in his silhouette or in darkness, as if the camera itself can’t bear to look upon him. Elsewhere, he appears only in shadows, an obvious reference to Murnau’s film. His heavy Romanian accent, I have to imagine, is also a nod to Bela Lugosi’s famed performance as Dracula in his own Hungarian accent.
The count is his most mysterious during Thomas’ visit to the count’s castle in the film’s first third, which was also by far the film’s best section. The weighted cinematography, atmospheric setting of the icy, desolate castle, intensity of tone, and performances by Skarsgård and Hoult (whose job is mainly to express varying states of distress and discomfort) all mesh wonderfully to create an almost-dreamlike sequence, somewhat akin to a dark fairy-tale. While it’s not all entirely the same narratively, it’s this sequence that most closely reminds me of the potent dread I felt when reading Dracula for the first time.
That’s not to say that the rest of the film is incompetent. I mentioned the cinematography, which proved to be a particular favourite for me: the camera work is delicate, yet deliberate, and always feels very intentional. Shots are often allowed to last for longer without cutting, allowing the actors’ performances and the film’s gorgeously uncanny scenery to shine.
The lighting was another standout. The cold moonlight streams through the windows, uncovering the characters’ horrified faces and leaving other, more horrible things in a mysterious silhouette. Other scenes are atmospherically lit only by candlelight, a feat that was achieved through the use of hundreds of concealed candles.
Out of the other performances, I was particularly fond of Willem Dafoe as Albert Von Franz, this film’s version of Van Helsing. Dafoe has portrayed Max Schreck, the actor who played Orlok in the original Nosferatu, in a fictionalised account of the making of the film. His casting allows the film to once again express an awareness of historic vampire cinema and while it might be a bit of an obvious choice, it’s one I nevertheless enjoyed.
Dafoe never fails to be entertaining, capering about in his little frilly coat and staunchly insisting on the existence of demons to the other characters. He even underpins some of the more heartfelt scenes with Depp’s character, treating Ellen with the kindness that she sorely needs from the rest of the world.
The other actors aren’t all so lucky. By far the film’s most bafflingly underutilised characters were those of Friedrick (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin) Harding, friends of the Hutters who house Ellen while Thomas is away. Despite casting A-listers in their roles, neither one is given much to do other than stand in the background and look mildly concerned in a large amount of unnecessary screen time. Friedrick’s character stands out as being particularly underwritten and (dare I say?) poorly acted, stammering his objections to the film’s events in an overly-posh accent that would make anyone unfamiliar with Taylor-Johnson think that he isn’t actually English.
There is, nevertheless, a beauty to this film that other, lesser pieces of vampire fiction can only dream of attaining. It’s a delicate tightrope to walk, balancing startling beauty and deep perversion, but I think Eggers and co. navigate it with expert footing. The film even manages to bring in a touch of dark humour without it ever feeling jarring; Ellen’s proclamations of trusting and loving her husband being followed by a smash cut to Thomas passed out, face down on the floor, had my sister and me cackling in the cinema.
Just as the count proclaims that he has been expecting Thomas, in that guttural Romanian drawl, so too have I. As a long-time fan of Eggers’ filmmaking, I have been expecting Nosferatu for a long time now, and have found it to be pretty much what I wanted it to be. It is, of course, very like the original film it’s remaking, but Eggers manages to acknowledge other pieces of vampiric cinema without it ever feeling as though he’s copying too much from someone else’s homework.
With the events of the What We Do in the Shadows and Interview with the Vampire TV series, the recent uptick in interest for the Twilight film series, and, now, the release of Nosferatu, there is something of a renaissance happening right now in vampire fiction. I for one couldn’t be happier.
