Nosferatu (2024) ***
I find it interesting that Nosferatu has come to be seen as something distinct from Dracula. F.W. Murnau, Albin Grau, and Henrik Galeen certainly didn’t see it that way a century ago, when they made the movie that initiated the split. They just didn’t want royalty payments to Florence Stoker (who still controlled her late husband’s copyrights in 1922) to cut into their profit margin. But the changes they made in their original Nosferatu were significant enough that the finished product really does look like something all its own, especially given the completely different set of equally major revisions that crept in when Dracula was first filmed under its own title in 1931. Most subsequent Dracula movies generally followed the 1931 picture’s lead, so that by 1979, it was possible to have both a new Dracula and a new Nosferatu in circulation more or less simultaneously without audiences experiencing the slightest bit of conceptual confusion. Now we have yet a third Nosferatu, courtesy of writer-director Robert Eggers, and I find myself trying to pin down what the essential differences between these sibling stories really are.
Dracula remains extremely malleable, of course. But as a rule, I go into movies with that title expecting an elegant, debonair master vampire, or at least one who is capable of presenting as such when he wants to. I expect an ensemble of male heroes, bound together by shared affection for Dracula’s female victims, and collaborating toward his destruction under the leadership of a wise, if eccentric, patriarch. Conversely, I expect a largely passive heroine, who requires rescue from the vampire’s influence— and that influence should have at least an implicit sexual dimension. Most of all, I expect vampirism in a film called Dracula to represent the intrusion of ancient, backward, foreign irrationality into the orderly world of science and modernity (for late-Victorian values of “modernity,” of course). All of those expected characteristics are rooted prominently in the source novel, too, even if cinematic interpretations tend to render them somewhat differently, or to change their relative importance.
If we’re talking Nosferatu, however, then the defining features are either absent from Bram Stoker’s ur-text altogether, or act in direct refutation of it. In a work calling itself Nosferatu, I expect the vampire to be so obviously and unmistakably monstrous as to be incapable of passing for human even temporarily. Furthermore, I expect him to function as an apocalyptic avatar of disease, in which role he poses a far greater threat than he does from his activities as an undead bloodsucker. The “heroes,” meanwhile, are apt to be ineffectual tail-chasers, either blind to the nature of the menace they face, or incorrigibly one step behind its progress, so that the damsel in distress must take matters into her own hands with a genuinely heroic self-sacrifice. And if the story is called Nosferatu, it’s a safe bet that orderly modernity is an anesthetizing delusion, if indeed it’s in evidence at all. Nosferatu vampires are no mere atavistic intrusion, but the resurgence of the bloody-taloned chaos that has always ruled the world. All in all, it’s a much grimmer and more pessimistic breed of vampire tale. And if we take the above as our yardstick, then Eggers’s Nosferatu fully earns its title, even if it stops short of the bleakness on display in F.W. Murnau’s or Werner Herzog’s versions.
Once upon a time (1838, to be precise), there lived a German girl by the name of Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp, from Voyagers and Tusk). She was desperately lonely, with no friends, no siblings, and two distant, unloving parents, so one night she decided to pray for companionship. Her prayer was explicitly not particular, inviting not only the attention of God and all his saints and angels, but that of anyone and anything able and willing to listen. Ellen’s prayer was answered in surprisingly short order, and thus did she become a cautionary tale— although even she wouldn’t understand just how cautionary until some years later. Whatever supernatural entity awoke in response to her plea inspired in her the kind of sexual madness most certain to appall the people of her land and era, and while I do suppose that Ellen was no longer lonely once she became subject to unpredictable bouts of transdimensional coitus with who knows what, one can hardly say that this strange form of companionship ever made her any happier than she was before.
The next time we see Ellen, though, after a vaguely defined jump forward in time, she’s doing rather better in almost every respect. She’s living in the seaside town of Wisborg, far from Mom and Dad’s baleful influence. She has at least one close friend in Anna (Emma Corrin), the wife of prosperous shipping magnate Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, from Chatroom and Godzilla). And best of all, she’s newly married to an ambitious young lawyer named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, of Mad Max: Fury Road, who had a diametrically opposite relationship with a Dracula-inspired vampire in Renfield last year). She no longer finds herself banging ghosts or whatever at inopportune times, either, although she is still occasionally subject to milder disturbances like sleepwalking and premonitions. In fact, she’s having one of the latter right now, awakening with the uncanny certainty that Thomas is going to be hired today by Mr. Knock the real estate agent (Simon McBurney, from The Golden Compass and The Conjuring 2). That sounds like it ought to be very good news, since Thomas doesn’t really earn enough at whatever he used to do to support a wife properly, but for some reason the prospect of her husband’s new job fills Ellen with foreboding, and she does her damnedest to make him miss the interview.
In fact, though, Knock is not troubled to be kept waiting the fifteen minutes that are all Ellen succeeds in delaying Thomas. It happens that the firm has taken on a new client, you see, and a young go-getter like Hutter is exactly what Knock needs in order to deal with him. Far away in Transylvania, an exceedingly elderly, exceedingly rich, and exceedingly persnickety nobleman called Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård, from Barbarian and It) has become interested in purchasing a formerly grand but now utterly dilapidated chateau in Wisborg. Heaven knows why, since the old codger says he’s too feeble to travel, and the house is little better than a ruin anyway. The point is, Orlock wants a man to come out to his castle, to execute the sale in person. It’ll be a bastard of a journey, since Castle Orlock stands perched atop a mountain overlooking the Middle of Fucking Nowhere, but the commission is huge, and the sale is important enough to Knock that there could be a junior partnership in the offing for whomever can nail it down. Thomas likes the sound of that, even if Ellen emphatically does not, and he sets off for Transylvania just a few days later. While he’s away, Ellen can stay with Anna and her family. Hutter might turn right around and come home, though, if he could see the black magic ritual that Knock performs in his office that night, plainly but obscurely in connection with the lawyer’s assignment abroad.
We all know what’s waiting for Hutter in Transylvania; the visit to the castle and its immediate aftermath were the only parts of either previous Nosferatu that meaningfully resembled Dracula as Bram Stoker wrote it, and that’s true of this Nosferatu as well. Count Orlock is an ancient and powerful vampire, and Hutter’s stay at his home is a nigh-fatal ordeal of captivity by day and parasitism by night, as the undead lord builds up his strength for the journey to Wisborg. Robert Eggers has something unique up his sleeve, however, for his Orlock is also the priapic demon that Ellen conjured into her life as a teenager. When he was alive in the ordinary sense, Orlock was a sorcerer feared all over the Carpathians, and it was his diabolical magic that secured his resurrection as a vampire. Even the undead get old, though, and as the environs of his castle depopulated of the living, Orlock sank gradually into dormancy. He’d been sleeping peacefully in his sarcophagus for a century or more by the time Ellen unwittingly prayed him back to awareness of the world outside. Nor was it chance alone that led Ellen’s husband into the vampire’s clutches, but a conspiracy between a dead warlock and a living one. The contract that Orlock gives Hutter to sign— written in an archaic form of Romanian that would challenge a learned linguist, let alone a foreign real estate lawyer— not only conveys the deed to the decaying mansion in Wisborg, but also renounces Thomas’s claim to Ellen, and he unknowingly signs it not as an executor, but as one of the parties to the agreement. When Orlock ships himself to Wisborg in a week or two, packed into one of a great many crates of cursed earth from his castle grounds, he’ll be coming first and foremost for Ellen, to consummate in person the spell that she placed him under that night several years ago.
As for the object of the vampire’s scheme, she’s having the relapse of all relapses. Although it starts small, with nightmares, volatile emotions, and the intensification of her old sleepwalking habit, it doesn’t take long for Ellen to begin acting like the focal character in an Italian Exorcist knockoff. The Hardings grow increasingly alarmed as their houseguest’s symptoms worsen, and as the periods of lucidity between her episodes steadily decrease in frequency and duration. And of course it doesn’t help matters that the person legally responsible for Ellen, and empowered to make medical decisions on her behalf, is incommunicado in the wilds of the Habsburg Empire. Friedrich eventually takes it upon himself to call in Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson, from The Green Knight and The Witch) to treat the ailing woman, but the only thing the doctor knows how to do that has any effect is to keep her heavily sedated with ether. After several weeks of banging his head against the wall of Ellen’s mysterious mania, Sievers convinces Harding to let him seek the aid of a specialist. A specialist in what, you ask? Well, that’s where the convincing comes in. Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, of eXistenZ and The Northman) was Sievers’s mentor at the university where he studied medicine, but he is, to put it mildly, out of favor with his colleagues these days. Von Franz got heavily into alchemy, astrology, and all sorts of mysticism, to the point that he’s not so much a doctor anymore as a witch-doctor. But it is precisely that unorthodoxy that recommends him to Sievers now, for von Franz’s arcane studies make him the only person the younger doctor can think of who might have experience with cases like Ellen’s. Granted, Sievers never imagined that the old eccentric would diagnose her affliction as demonic possession, but it isn’t as though he has any better ideas at this point.
While Professor von Franz is getting his Lancaster Merrin on, the ship carrying Orlock to Wisborg pulls into port— or more accurately, crashes into the beach, smashing itself to flinders. The vampire, you see, wasn’t the only stowaway inside those boxes of evil dirt. The rest of Orlock’s luggage contained countless black rats, bearing countless fleas, harboring countless Yersinia pestis bacilli in their guts. Between vampire and vermin, not a single man of the crew survived to reach their destination. The rats, on the contrary, made out just fine, and they flood into the city from the crash site just as fast as their little legs can carry them. Knock, who had previously been making a pest of himself around town by going batshit insane, murders his way out of the hospital’s mental ward, and assists Orlock again by ferrying his travel coffin to his new abode. There’s a tiny bit of good news too, however, because Hutter not only escaped from Orlock’s castle, but has managed to hold himself together long enough to reach Wisborg on horseback, arriving only a trifle later than the vampire. Ellen’s possession symptoms clear up overnight once she and her husband are reunited, but that of course marks only the beginning of the real fight. As his rats spread a new Black Death throughout the city, the undead count reveals himself to Ellen, and gives her three days in which to surrender herself to him willingly. She’d be better off doing it now, though, because Orlock promises to claim someone she loves each night until she makes up her mind. And although Professor von Franz is perfectly willing both to believe in vampires and to organize whatever anti-undead efforts he can, this wouldn’t be Nosferatu if his help was worth a fart in a high wind. It was Ellen who got everybody into this fix, and one way or the other, she alone holds the power to get them out of it now.
If Nosferatu is defined by a particular set of divergences from Dracula, then it stands to reason that it also offers an open invitation to introduce even more. Eggers gets off to a promising start in that direction by positing a pre-existing connection between Ellen and Orlock. Doing so ties together several interesting loose ends from F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, creating an intelligible basis for the alliance between Knock and the vampire, building upon old German superstitions crediting sleepwalkers with unusual susceptibility to supernatural influence, and giving specific personal resonance to Ellen’s decision to offer herself up as a monster-destroying honey trap. Unfortunately, Eggers also kneecaps that very good start by hewing unnecessarily close to the Dracula-derived plot structure of the Murnau and Herzog versions. What this Nosferatu needs most is more time spent developing its radical new back-story. We should see some of Ellen’s unhappy childhood instead of just hearing about it after the fact. We ought to get a more involved treatment of her adolescent entanglement with the vampire, and maybe even an examination of her recovery under Thomas’s steadying influence. If that means shorter shrift for the familiar Dracula carryovers in Transylvania and aboard the doomed ship, then so be it. It’s 2024 (2025 even!), and we know that part of the story already.
Another thing that prevents this new Nosferatu from rising above the level of the merely good is a handicap that it shares with a lot of modern period pieces: 21st-century actors simply don’t know how to play 19th-century characters. Try as they might, their efforts always come out looking and feeling like “Downton Abbey” cosplay. Eggers has assembled an extraordinarily capable cast here, but very few of them quite manage to hit the intended mark. Bill Skarsgård, foremost among the exceptions, absolutely nails Count Orlock, fully redeeming himself from his ludicrous interpretation of Stephen King’s Pennywise some years ago— but notice that Orlock isn’t actually a 19th-century character at all, hailing originally from an even earlier era. Conversely, Willem Dafoe and Simon McBurney are old enough that they’re better thought of as 20th-century actors who’ve stuck around. They both do noticeably better at capturing the correct period flavor than their younger costars.
That said, most of the other major players do manage to be impressive in one respect or another. Lily-Rose Depp is brilliant at playing someone in badly diminished control of her actions and emotions, and her physical acting during Ellen’s seizures is by turns riveting and harrowing. Nicholas Hoult is very good at portraying Hutter’s rapidly escalating alarm at the circumstances that confront him in Transylvania. Aaron Taylor-Johnson gets close to the stretched-spring tension required as the determinedly sensible Harding reaches his lifetime exposure limit for threatening weirdness in a matter of weeks. And Ralph Ineson makes a game effort at selling how humbling an experience it must be for Dr. Sievers to face a case so baffling that he has to call for backup from a half-mad pariah, however warm his lingering personal affection for Professor von Franz might be. It’s just that none of these actors are ever really believable as the people they’re supposed to be, living in the time that they’re supposed to inhabit.
On the whole, though, I’m quite pleased with Nosferatu, which offers a welcome corrective to many of the more lamentable trends that have swept over vampire films and fiction throughout my adult life. My friend, Dave, of the Due Signori in Giallo podcast, called it the film that dares to ask, “What if Bram Stoker’s Dracula wasn’t shit?” which brought a lot of my own thinking on Nosferatu into sharper focus. Both movies, after all, are extremely revisionist reads on the same novel, proceeding in various ways from the premise that the heroine shared a mystic bond with the vampire long before he ever set foot outside of his wild Carpathian homeland. The most important factor in Nosferatu’s success despite its flaws is that Robert Eggers, unlike Francis Ford Coppola, isn’t ashamed to be making a horror movie, and isn’t afraid to acknowledge his vampire’s monstrosity. Sure, Coppola’s Dracula occasionally transforms into an estrus-crazed yeti, but most of the time, he’s just Gary Oldman with romance paperback cover-model hair. Eggers’s Orlock, on the other hand, is a rehydrated mummy with skin like a decaying leather book-binding, and eyes like rotten quail’s eggs. I’m sure someone will manage to romanticize him anyway, but at the bare minimum, this vampire is going to separate the true monster-fucking fetishists from the dilettantes!
But even more importantly, Orlock is an unambiguous moral monster, his relationship with Ellen built on a foundation of coercion, deceit, and ethically vacant legalism. Furthermore, Eggers is much clearer and more consistent about exactly how much and what kind of agency Ellen has within that relationship. True, she invited Orlock into her life with her all-points prayer for companionship way back when (note the unusual extrapolation from the tradition that vampires can’t enter one’s home without an invitation), but could there be a clearer-cut case of uninformed, and therefore invalid, consent than that? The same goes for Orlock’s contract with Hutter, written in a language that Thomas can’t read, and deliberately misrepresented as to its import. (For that matter, Eggers gives us some grounds to suspect that Orlock’s arrangement with Knock was similarly dishonest, but we’d have to know more about what the broker expected to get from the deal to be sure.) And “I’ll kill someone you love every night until you agree to be mine” should be beyond the pale of acceptable wooing strategies for even the most anti of romantic antiheroes, don’t you think?
If there’s a single moment that sums up everything Nosferatu does right, it’s this movie’s counterpart to the ludicrous “I have crossed oceans of time to find you” scene in the Coppola film. During Orlock’s first face-to-face invasion of Ellen’s dreams, she scoffs, “You can’t love!” in response to the vampire’s insistence that their coupling is ordained and inevitable. “No,” he replies, “I am only an appetite— but I can never be sated without you.” He doesn’t exactly sound happy about it, either; unfair magical bargains, it seems, cut both ways. Ellen’s spell binds Orlock to her just as inescapably as he wants it to bind her to him, and they’re stuck with each other until at least one of them dies. Given that Orlock seems unable to pass his undead condition on to his victims, his obsession with Ellen is therefore altogether darker than anything I’ve seen from a vampire movie in many a year.
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