Nosferatu
There have been countless movies featuring Bram Stoker’s most famous creation, Count Dracula, but only a handful that use the word, Nosferatu - which is allegedly what Romanian peasants called vampires. “Does this word not sound to you like the midnight cry of the deathbird?” asks F.W. Murnau in the most famous vampire feature of all time – his silent, expressionist masterpiece of 1922, Nosferatu: Symphony of Horror. The film was given a memorable remake by Werner Herzog in Nosferatu the Vampire (1979) – a title that equates to saying “vampire the vampire”, although the original German language release was called Nosferatu - Phantom der Nacht.
Herzog made a genuinely poetic movie from this lurid material, filled with images that stay lodged in the mind long after one has left the cinema. It was also a faithful homage to Murnau’s Nosferatu, following Henrik Galeen’s screenplay rather than Stoker’s novel. This screenplay was almost the undoing of the original movie because Bram Stoker’s widow sued the filmmakers for the unauthorised use of his story, and the courts ruled the film should be destroyed. We owe the existence of Nosferatu, and the versions that have followed, to the imperfect way that order was carried out.
Like Herzog, Robert Eggers has made a tribute to Murnau and Galeen in his new Nosferatu. It’s more visceral and sexually charged than previous versions, but comparatively restrained alongside his last film, The Northman (2022) - a brutal take on the Middle Ages.
Murnau made great use of music in his “symphony” which employed an original score by composer, Hans Erdmann, and the doom-laden score Robin Carolan has created for the new film is a worthy successor.
For his backdrops Murnau drew inspiration from the paintings of German Romantics, such as Caspar David Friedrich (landscapes) and Georg Kersting (interiors), and Eggers has done the same. The first part of this movie is full of breathtaking visuals, the most striking scenes being set in the inn where Thomas Hutter spends a night while en route to the Count’s castle. In previous films this inn has been portrayed as a rustic hostelry, but Eggers makes it into a Tartar camp, swarming with gypsies. Thomas can’t understand a word they say, but we, the audience, get the benefit of subtitles. The golden-brown haze of the interior could have been designed by Rembrandt, and the old lady that tries to warn Thomas looks as if she has been borrowed from one of the Dutch master’s paintings. For good measure, Eggers adds a highly unlikely scene that Thomas witnesses from his window, as the peasants, equipped with a naked virgin on a horse, disinter and destroy a vampire who seems to have been buried – ill-advisedly – next to the inn.
To get to this point, we have to negotiate an opening sequence in which Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), has a nightmare encounter with the vampire in her teenage dreams. We jump to the present, set in the town of Wisburg (a fictional alter ego of Wismar, in Northern Germany). It’s 1838, and Ellen is newly wedded to Thomas, a young man trying to make his way as an estate agent. In Murnau’s film, Thomas was a swaggering fool, but Eggers employs the terminally diffident Nicholas Hoult (fast becoming the new Hugh Grant), to provide a picture of a man who loves his wife and has grave concerns about the assignment his boss has just given him.
The boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), is a dabbler in the occult who has fallen under the spell of a distant demon. By sending Thomas off to Transylvania with the title deeds for a rundown property in Wismar, he is merely following his master’s orders.
Six weeks of hard slog gets Thomas to Transylvania, where – against the entreaties of the villagers - he makes his way to Orlok’s castle. Where Murnau’s Thomas was full of bravado, the new Thomas is petrified. The journey to the castle is another celebrated sequence. Murnau shot part of it in negative, to get the effect of a white forest, but Eggers has the technology and the vision to create an atmosphere laden with beauty and menace.
The Count is a tall, stiff-limbed figure with a moustache that would make Merv Hughes envious. Mercifully silent in Murnau’s film, he now speaks in a guttural voice with a thick, halting accent. Bill Skarsgård makes for a tremendously creepy, dangerous-looking Count, although he is no match for Max Schreck in the 1922 film. With his oversized bald head; bushy eyebrows; pointy ears; long, sharp fingernails, and a jumble of rapier-like teeth, Schreck’s vampire set a standard for creepiness that has never been equalled.
As soon as the papers are signed, Thomas feels he’s had enough of the Count’s dubious hospitality but finds it impossible to leave. When Orlok asks you to stay for drink it’s hard to say no. As Thomas searches for a way to escape, his host has settled into a travelling coffin and is soon on a sailing ship bound for Wisburg, where he intends to pay a visit to Ellen.
The scenes surrounding the cargo ship are also justly famous, as the crew fall prey to Orlok’s hunger and the plague, spread by the rats he brings with him. Upon arrival in Wisburg, the black death is set loose upon the city, while Herr Knock, who has freed himself from the mental institution to which his bestial excesses had condemned him, helps his master settle into his new home. Murnau achieved a lot with only a small number of rats, but Eggers had a more generous rat budget.
While all this has been going on, we have spent most of our time with the highly-strung Ellen, who is staying with Thomas’s friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), and their small twin girls. Not the ideal houseguest, she has been having terrible nightmares, bouts of sleepwalking, and attacks of hysteria. Whatever bond she established with the demonic Count in her teenage fantasies, is now coming back to haunt her. Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), decides the case is serious enough to call in his former mentor, the eccentric Albin Everhart von Frantz (Willem Dafoe), who has lost his university post because of his obsessive interest in alchemy and the paranormal.
Von Frantz can diagnose the problem but cannot slow the spread of the plague which is sweeping through the city, or say with any certainty how Count Orlok may be vanquished. Or rather, he does know but understands that only Ellen can put the cure into practice. It’s all downhill for Wisburg and the lead characters until the fateful last act.
The vampire’s passion for Ellen is crucial to this story, and Eggers makes her the very centre of this film, adding the peculiar secret relationship that preceded her marriage. This remains a mysterious episode, supposedly based on her teenage need for affection and her natural susceptibility to supernatural forces. It is never made clear whether her earlier encounter with Orlok was pure fantasy or something more physical.
Ellen’s psychic bond with the Count threatens her marriage and her sanity, but Orlok’s libidinous urges are just as manic. Eggers has taken the sexual undercurrents of the original film and brought them to the surface. It would be easy to pathologise this connection – seeing Orlok as a stalker, or an older man who grooms the younger woman. Ellen had an unhappy relationship with her father, and the hideous Count may be viewed as a father substitute. Either way, it's hard not to notice the deeply perverse streak in Ellen’s character, no matter how much she wails and protests. In Murnau’s film Ellen has to be “wholly innocent”, but in this movie she confesses her salacious “secret” to Thomas, begging for forgiveness.
Count Orlok, needless to say, is not exactly the stuff of most sexual fantasies. At one point he says: “I am appetite!” - summing up his brutal need for blood. We might even assume that rather than conventional sex, he finds satisfaction only in plunging his teeth into a victim’s throat or chest.
It's been noted many times, most fully in books such as Nina Auerbach’s Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995), that our popular, never-diminishing preoccupation with these blood-suckers reflects the changing patterns of our fears and desires over time. The vampire is the perpetual Other who breaks all the rules, who is ruled by instinct and contemptuous of morality. He is both a threat to society and a source of private envy. In recent decades we’ve met every possible kind of vampire – female, gay, black, teenage heartthrob. In this new Nosferatu, Orlok may be a figure of evil, but he is also the embodiment of sexual obsession. As such, he challenges all the puritanical attitudes that have found their way into our culture, but he is a shock weapon, not an alternative. Resurfacing today, the Count feels like a symbol of all those deep, dark fears and hungers that threaten to overwhelm our fragile social order and plunge us into chaos. To solve this problem, we’re not going to be able to rely on one disturbed young woman, determined to embrace the evil within in order to defeat it.
Nosferatu
Directed by Robert Eggers
Written by Robert Eggers, after the screenplay for Nosferatu (1922) by Henrik Galeen, and by Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Starring: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Willem Dafoe, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, Adéla Hesová, Milena Konstantinova
USA/UK/Hungary, M, 131 mins