WSB x Moving Picture Review: Nosferatu

 In each of his first three films, Robert Eggers has increasingly solidified his position as a “day-one director” for me—one of those who, come hell or high water, I will find myself sitting in the theater on the first day of his movie’s release, if not earlier. When rumors began swirling in 2016 (just months following the release of his first film, The Witch) about his wanting to bring the legendary silent film Nosferatu (1922) back to the screen, a film that has long fascinated horror fans, myself very much included, I was locked in. The production faced numerous delays and recasts, including the addition of Bill Skarsgård as the evil Count Orlok, Willem Dafoe as Professor von Franz, among others. Yet, our faith in its completion never wavered, and now, on Christmas day, our patience has been handsomely rewarded. 

How Nosferatu Came to Be

F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu is the infamously unauthorized retelling of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, with names and settings changed, less to avoid detection (the opening credits brazenly acknowledge its being adapted from the novel) than to make it more palatable to the German audience for whom it was made. If not for at least one brave soul who defied the court order to destroy all existing prints of the film following the copyright suit brought by Bram Stoker’s widow, Nosferatu might have become nothing more than a footnote in cinematic history, rather than one of the flagship examples of German Expressionist film. While Dracula remains an iconic literary cornerstone, it’s Nosferatu we have to thank for the richness of a text that so acutely reflects the anxieties of a post-pandemic, post-Great War German society, not to mention the foreshadowing of a (widely considered subconscious or at least incidental) anti-Semitic sentiment in Northern Europe. 

Because of this, there are precious few directors I’d have trusted with reviving this story, particularly given the general disdain moviegoers have for the modern “Hollywood Reboot Machine.” Eggers though, with his meticulous attention to detail and his well-documented passion for Murnau’s film, would have been my first, if not only, choice. The biggest challenge he’d have would be in keeping the spirit of the source material, but updating the context for a modern audience.

Almost immediately, Eggers’s vision for his version of the tale is felt. In the very first scene, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) is seen awakening from a nightmare and calling out in desperation for a spirit—any spirit—to draw her out from the terrible melancholy that afflicts her. To her horror, one such spirit answers. With this introduction, Eggers pulls the point of view away from Thomas Hutter (played in this version by Nicholas Hoult) and onto Ellen, his wife. While Ellen had always been the key to the salvation of the fictional town of Wisborg, Eggers’s film gives her role purpose beyond the “innocent maiden [that] maketh the vampyre heed not the first crowing of the cock,” as intertitles say in the 1922 film, but as the inadvertent cause of Orlok’s casting his eyes toward Wisborg in the first place.

Another shift comes in the source of the most terrifying parts of the film. While the most lasting images of Murnau’s original are of Count Orlok’s devilish face, his long, claw-like fingers, as well as the brilliant use of shadow to punctuate his ephemerality, and though Eggers stated that one of his primary goals with this film was to “make vampires scary again,” referring to Orlok’s iconic look and calling back to European folkloric roots when belief in the repugnant creatures was very much still widespread, the horrors in this Nosferatu find more in common with tales of cosmic horror, or, more particularly, cosmic bliss—an inversion of the genre of weird fiction made popular by H.P. Lovecraft. This isn’t a new concept: Stories like The City of the Singing Flame (1931) by Clark Ashton Smith and Clive Barker’s In the Hills, The Cities (1984), and more recently in books like Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation (2014) (all of which are touched on in a wonderful video essay on the topic by Tale Foundry) have long drawn readers in by the sublime terror of being so rapturously consumed by desire that even one’s own death means little by comparison—but it’s a fear that, perhaps because it coincides so well with religious zealotry, feels ever-relevant, and its increased use among horror writers proves its resonance with readers. In 2024’s Nosferatu, the same feeling of cosmic bliss seems to be another tool in Orlok’s belt. Just as he is able to inspire such abject terror in Hutter's presence in his Transylvanian castle, so too can he seemingly bring about an almost opiatic devotion in characters like Ellen and Mr. Knock (Simon McBurney). The thought of being so helpless to the euphoria inspired by such a vile creature is truly one of the most frightening things I can imagine, and Eggers wields it with razor-sharp perfection.

Where to watch Nosferatu (2024):

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Perhaps one of the most significant changes from the original though, is the aforementioned appearance of Count Orlok, himself. Kept secret throughout the entire marketing campaign (and much of the movie) Bill Skarsgård’s transformation into the Count is as complete as it is grotesque. Departing from the spindly, rat-like look in the original version, this Orlok, heavily coated in furs and shrouded in darkness, has an inhuman quality that heavily emphasizes the dead in undead. Cosmetically, he also sports a thick mustache—certainly a nod to Romanian style at the time, but perhaps more fittingly, bringing him more in line with Count Dracula’s description in Stoker’s novel, as well as with one of Dracula’s reported inspirations, Vlad III of Wallachia. And though this film doesn’t detail Orlok’s origins, his “Vlad Drăculea” visage does thread the needle nicely with an intertitle from the silent film, which states that, “From the seed of Belial sprang the Vampyre Nosferatu who liveth and feedeth on human bloode,” a cryptic message that most tie to his enrollment in the Solomonărie—the fabled Transylvanian school of the occult “where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due,” according to the novel.

In Nosferatu, we are treated to the best that remakes have to offer. Sure, the makeup and effects are much improved, but Robert Eggers could never be satisfied with just giving one of his favorite films a modern-day makeover, and neither should we. Nosferatu (2024) works alongside its predecessor, opening a conversation across more than a century of film, inviting a new generation of film lovers to seek out a movie and character that until now, they might only have known by way of a cameo in Spongebob Squarepants. Nosferatu is a terrifying and beautiful tribute to what is, to this day, one of the greatest and most influential horror films ever made, and as can only be expected of its director, it demands to be seen on as big a screen as you can manage.

WSB x Moving Picture Reviews is sponsored by the Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival. The Pittsburgh Moving Picture Festival celebrates both the art of cinema and the rich motion picture exhibition tradition of the City of Pittsburgh. Our goal in this series is to highlight new and upcoming genre films and, wherever possible, to support local, independent movie theaters in the process.

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Article Written by Ande Thomas

Ande loves the intersection of sci-fi and horror, where our understanding of the natural world clashes with our fear of the new and unknown. He is an independent member of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and a supporting member of the Horror Writers Association. He writes about monsters and foreign horror and can also be found over on Letterboxd.

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