Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu 2024 breathes new life into the century-old tale, blending Expressionist roots with modern dread for a haunting cinematic experience, writes CHRIS NEWTON
TITLE: Nosferatu
RELEASED: 25 December 2024
DIRECTOR: Robert Eggers
CAST: Bill Skarsgard, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe
Review of Nosferatu 2024
F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in which Count Dracula became Count Orlok, Jonathan Harker and his wife Mina became Thomas and Ellen Hutter, Renfield became Knock, and Van Helsing became Professor Bulwer.
Despite the low-budget film acknowledging Dracula as its source, Bram Stoker’s widow, Florence, ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Fortunately, Nosferatu survived, and the rest is horror movie history.
The film was remade in 1979 as Nosferatu the Vampyre, with Klaus Kinski starring as the titular vampire- named Dracula in this outing. Likewise, the other characters reverted to the Stoker versions. Otherwise, it was a faithful reworking of the silent version. Like in the novel, a young solicitor travels to the Carpathians to discuss the sale of an ancient property with a mysterious and ancient count, who has designs on the solicitor’s wife.
However, in both of these tellings, it is Wisborg/Wismar, Germany in the 1830s, not London, England in the 1890s, to which the vampire travels, bringing pestilence in his wake as he arrives aboard the Empusa/Demeter with a swarm of plague rats.
As such, Nosferatu exists in its own private universe, apart from other Dracula adaptations. Robert Eggers’ latest interpretation of this tale, starring Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, is no exception.
In many ways, it is incredibly faithful to Murnau’s original. This remake reverts to the original character names: Orlok, Hutter, and so on. And whilst it is technically not a black-and-white film, the palette is so washed out that the world of Thomas and Ellen Hutter feels decidedly monochrome.
The most remarkable thing about Eggers’ Nosferatu is that he has taken a 103-year-old piece of Expressionist cinema and turned it into a horror movie for modern audiences. It somehow manages to be (more or less) mainstream whilst preserving the atmosphere and tone of the original.
As I was leaving the cinema, the usher asked, “Is it scary?”
“Not as such. It’s…” I fumbled for the right word. “Doom-laden!”
Don’t get me wrong, there are jump scares, gore, and some gruesome killings (this vampire doesn’t so much want to suck your blood as tear out your jugular). But from the very beginning, what strikes you about the 2024 Nosferatu is its oppressive sense of dread, helped in no small part by the incredible score from Robin Carolan.
The trailers and promotional images for this movie have somehow managed to avoid showing the titular Nosferatu (an archaic Romanian word for vampire, which is actually used a couple of times in Stoker’s novel). The film plays on keeping Skarsgård’s Orlok in the shadows, but his presence pervades everything.
Eggers has taken the iconic shot of Max Schreck’s shadow from the original and expanded upon the concept, with this film’s most memorable scene featuring the Count’s claw-like silhouette stretching out across all of Wisborg.
Whereas both Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski played Orlok/Dracula as somewhat tragic figures- almost pathetic, plague-carrying creatures – Eggers’ take on the “vampire as death” is more akin to Peter Jackson’s depiction of Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: an all-seeing evil spreading its shadow across the world.
Probably the most interesting thing about the Nosferatu version of the Dracula story is the connection between Ellen Hutter and the Count.
In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire finds Mina through Jonathan. In every Nosferatu, however, there is an implied psychic link between Mrs Hutter and Orlok from the very beginning. Eggers embraces this, and the trauma-bonded relationship between Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and the vampire is at the heart of this reimagining.
The film opens with a younger Ellen communing with a sinister entity, a “demon”, which retains its hold over her into her married life with Thomas.
Another element uniting the Nosferatu movies is that they all eschew the (let’s be honest) slightly flat ending of Dracula. In the original novel, Arthur Holmwood, Quincey Morris, and Jack Seward track down the Count in a boy’s-own-adventure and stab him through the heart.
With the exception of Seward (whose analogue is arguably the character of Dr Sievers), Holmwood and Morris are excised. It is Ellen who has the final confrontation with the vampire. Eggers’ film honours this tradition.
Depp’s Ellen may be damned from the beginning, but she takes control of her own destiny, just as Greta Schröder and Isabelle Adjani’s versions of the character did before her.
Nosferatu’s denouement – which presumably will be familiar to all, but I shan’t spoil it here just in case – honours both the iconography of the original and the eroticism of the ’79 version. However, it doesn’t quite touch those earlier versions on either score.
Elsewhere, Nicholas Hoult does a remarkable job of taking the inherently dull Hutter/Harker character and making him quite likeable and, dare I even say, heroic.
Even Hoult’s recent outing as Renfield (in 2023’s somewhat sillier vampire movie starring Nicolas Cage as Dracula) does not detract from his sombre performance as the husband of a loving yet doomed wife.
Speaking of Renfield, Simon McBurney’s performance as Herr Knock- Hutter’s nefarious employer, driven mad under the sway of Orlok – is wonderful. He channels every incarnation of the zoophagous lunatic, from Alexander Granach to Tom Waits.
I must also mention Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz — the Van Helsing of the movie.
Interestingly, in the 1922 Nosferatu, the Van Helsing character is named Bulwer. His name here is a nod to Albin Grau, the German occultist who was also an artist and the producer and production designer of the ’22 film.
I had expected Dafoe to play the “vampire hunter” character with a kind of mania akin to Anthony Hopkins in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but Von Franz is wonderfully understated and even tender at times, especially in his understanding of Ellen’s bond with Orlok.
Can Skarsgård touch Max Schreck’s performance as Count Orlok? No.
But to the actor and the director’s credit, he doesn’t even try to emulate or imitate Schreck’s iconic vampire. If anything, his moustachioed, heavily accented count owes more to Gary Oldman’s Dracula than to any other portrayal.
Whilst this film shares DNA with previous Nosferatu movies, it is very much its own version. Eggers spurns the tortured romantic vampire in favour of something that is accursed and reeking of the grave. One cannot imagine Skarsgård’s Orlok lamenting that “the absence of love is the most abject pain”, or that “time is an abyss… profound as a thousand nights”, as Kinski did in ’79.
For me, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Thomas Hutter arrives in Transylvania and witnesses local Romani vampire superstitions up close.
It’s pure Stoker – the peasant woman insisting Jonathan Harker take her crucifix “for your mother’s sake” – but told through the folk horror lens of the director who gave us The VVitch.
It’s interesting that the Nosferatu story in all its guises is set a good 50 years before Dracula.
Dracula is a contemporary tale embracing modernity, while Nosferatu avoids taking place in a major city. Whilst it is an adaptation of Stoker’s novel, official or otherwise, it is also something much older, rustic, and more primal.
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