Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is a sumptuous and spine-tingling gothic horror
You know the story of Dracula. A Transylvanian count wants to buy land in the west, a young real estate agent visits him to finalise the sale and has a bad time. The count travels to the west to wreak havoc (and to seduce its good women) but is foiled by a band of men (and one woman).
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu, is an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. As such, the names and locations are not those that readers will expect: Count Dracula is Count Orlok, the real estate agent Jonathan Harker is Thomas Hutter and his young wife is not Mina Harker, but Ellen Hutter. The tale is also transposed from London at the turn of the century to the fictional German town of Wisborg in the late 1830s.
The changes were, however, not enough, and Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement. She won, and a court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Thankfully many survived, and now Nosferatu is considered a masterpiece of cinema and a template for horror films.
American director Robert Eggers has taken on the tale, bringing his unique approach to sound and colour to the silent tale. The result is a beautiful film brimming with slow terror and unease.
The latest in a long line of horror movies marketed as alternative Christmas classics (“succumb to the darkness Christmas 2024”, reads one teaser poster), Nosferatu is pitched as an antidote to the relentless brightness and cheer that otherwise permeates seasonal media. It delivers on this promise. Chilly, desolately beautiful sets and costumes (courtesy of designers Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir) are lit, shadowed and shot to bleak perfection (credit to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke).
The preference for close-ups and reaction shots over wide shots and direct action, and the use of light and darkness (typical of Eggers’s aesthetic) to selectively hide and reveal portions of the scene, creates a real sense of claustrophobia and dread as tension builds. These choices ensure that the film’s strong acting performances are centre stage.
Robin Carolan’s score is its own living, breathing character in the film. It blurs score and sound design, full of gusting winds and shivering strings.
All in all, Nosferatu is a spectacularly horrifying treat for the senses.
It is also rather long (133 minutes), self-indulgent and over the top. This left some cinema viewers cold, but I feel that the film walks the line between terror, self-indulgence and excess well. Admittedly, this is what I went into the cinema expecting. I am a fan of overlong, self-indulgent gothic films more generally. Films like Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Neil Jordan’s Interview With the Vampire (1994) and Alex Proyas’ The Crow (1994) come to mind, for instance.
Complaints that Nosferatu is all style no subtext are not wholly unfounded – the film is not subtle, its subtext is very much text – but it is also difficult to imagine what additional subtext could be layered on in the current cultural and political climate without becoming didactic, competing with the blunt terror and dread the film works so hard to curate.
If zombies are the metaphorical working stiffs, vampires are monsters of exploitation and excess.
In many contemporary vampire stories, particularly those of the Anne Rice or Buffy the Vampire Slayer vein, this class metaphor is abstracted and made subtle, leaving space for the vampire to be tragic and romantic in a way that turns villains into Byronic heroes. Consider how many of film and TV’s sexiest vampires are also Confederate soldiers and slave owners, and the way some fans jump to their defence when this choice is questioned.
Nosferatu is a vampire film for our times, when wealthy autocrats literally want to remake the world (and other worlds) in their image, to control women’s bodies and to spin illusions around these desires that dismiss objections as fantastical or hysterical. There is no space here for subtlety or both-sidesism. There is no doubt in Eggers’ film that Count Orlok must be stopped – however horny the leading lady may be for him.
Nosferatu does not take itself too seriously, but it is a very sincere film. If it makes eccentric decisions, it commits to them fully and unironically. The resulting performances sometimes verge into welcome moments of camp. Highlights include the wheezing and heavily moustachioed Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), swooning and convulsing Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) and the gleefully melodramatic Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (the film’s Van Helsing character, played by Willem Dafoe).
These camp moments make the film all the more memorable and eminently memeable. TikTok is full of influencers reacting to Nosferatu’s ending and central romance, hotly debating whether this earns Bill Skarsgård a place in the sexy Skarsgård vampire canon. Others offer their best Count Orlok impersonations (“It is a black omen to journey in poor health…” insert strained breathing noises).
There is no real way to remake Nosferatu “originally”, or even ironically, in this day and age. We are too familiar with the Dracula myth, and originality is not the point here, or in gothic horror more generally. The point is the ways the same things keep coming back. “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” asks Ellen. The horror, the film suggests, is not in the uncertainty, but in the fact that we already know both the answer and the solution.
Does it replicate the strange and darkly delicious heights of Eggers’ The Witch (2015)? No, but this is not what Nosferatu is aiming at. I will most certainly be returning to it again, on a long, dark, self-indulgent winter’s night.
Megen de Bruin-Molé does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.