Review: Robert Eggers Remakes Nosferatu for the Horny Generation

The long-awaited remake of the legendary silent horror is prime Eggers.

Nosferatu is the greatest piece of plagiarism of the 20^th century. F.W. Murnau’s legendary and ground-breaking silent horror was a Dracula adaptation made without permission from Bram Stoker’s estate. When Stoker’s widow sued for copyright infringement and won, all copies of the film were ordered destroyed. Fortunately for us, one copy survived and Nosferatu was able to survive as one of the most important pieces of filmmaking ever created. There have been many Dracula adaptations over the decades, most of which borrow heavily from Murnau’s iconography and take on the vampire lore, meaning that the idea of a Nosferatu remake felt somewhat redundant. Werner Herzog made one in the ‘70s, which is a fascinating tragedy, but Count Orlok largely remained an image and inspiration from thereon out. Robert Eggers, one of the leading figures in 21^st-century “elevated horror”, had wanted to make his own Nosferatu for years. The final product justifies his ambition, even if it doesn’t reach the peaks of his earlier work.

Ellen Hutter (Lily Rose Depp) is haunted by the spectre of a dark but alluring spirit from her past. When her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is sent across the continent to broker a property deal for the eccentric Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), she knows that something terrible will occur. The Count is planning a move and he has his sight set on Ellen.

Eggers’ greatest skill lies in his deftness in blending modern horror with vintage inspirations and achingly detailed historical settings. The dialogue, the faces (shot in beautiful close-ups), the costumes: it all paints a rich and lived-in picture of a world that exists well beyond the confines of the movie’s running time. The Germany of Nosferatu is a world trying to drag itself into a civilized future, full of men in top hats trying to navigate streets full of livestock and butchers. Orlok’s crumbling castle is a classic gothic mansion from the fiction that inspired Stoker. The shadow of his clawed hand flies across the city like a malevolent shadow straight out of German expressionism. There are rats. So many rats (the detail most like the Herzog movie.)

My Pajiba colleague Lindsay Traves described the film as having a "fairy tale malevolence and romance novel histrionics that slam violently up against the sort of steely formal tableaus that Eggers has always trafficked visually in." Eggers is meticulous in how he shapes these unnerving settings that feel both beautiful and cursed, melding this kind of uncanny quality with seeming historical mundanity. A puritan family’s peace is spoiled by the unignorable malice in the woods. Two lighthouse keepers descend into madness to the backdrop of a very boring job. Norse mythology’s ultraviolent fantasy clashes with the cruel reality of marauding colonisers. And in Nosferatu, a love story in a “proper” modern age is curdled by the primal force of the supernatural.

Vampirism has long been used as a narrative tool to explore ideas of sexuality and desire. It’s probably the primary mode of this mythology for many writers and readers (there’s a reason vampire romances are a thing and have been beloved for decades.) Murnau’s Nosferatu was more intrigued by the idea of a plague invasion than a hot dude with fangs (and the imagery of a raiding bloodsucker with a hooked nose and rat-like features was heavily rooted in the era’s anti-Semitic propaganda.) Herzog’s film painted the vampire as pitiful, so isolated and suffering for it that the idea of living forever seems horrid beyond belief. Eggers’ Orlok is powerful and all too willing to use his supernatural forces for evil. He has no empathy for others, not even Ellen, with whom he is obsessed.

I’ve seen a lot of write-ups heralding this Nosferatu as a proudly horny erotic horror. Yeah, it does f*ck, more so than its predecessors which were more about predatory figures and the pathetic nature of the lone vampire seeking a companion. Still, I feel like heraldry of Eggers’ film as a daringly sexy work is somewhat overblown. This also might just be because I am a monsterf*cking weirdo who thinks more films should feature skeletal vampires with walrus moustaches doing the horizontal monster mash. I wouldn’t say this movie was tame, per se, but its take on the debauched desires of Ellen and her conflict over feeling “tainted” by Orlok’s seductions are more about the mental engulfing than the physical. But make no mistake, she is f*cking that corpse.

And boy is Orlok a corpse. There’s nothing beautified about this vampire, which allows the very tall and lanky Skarsgård ripe opportunity to creep and stalk like a creature that hasn’t been human in a long, long time. He is a plague, albeit one with a discriminating palette. He kills those who he wishes to suffer, those whose pain will make Ellen all the more pliable to his whims. His unique eroticism does offer a sick kind of thrill, as he berates the supposedly modern world that has reinforced a rigid gender binary where men are sensible and women are hysterical. Repression or death? Tough call.

Ellen’s troubles, with and without demonic control, leave her convulsing and twisted. Depp has clearly taken inspiration from her Nosferatu predecessor Isabelle Adjani and her “greatest of all time” performance in Possession. Her wide eyes and dancer-like flexibility allow her to fully embody the gaslit Victorian heroine type. Poor Ellen is subjected to all manner of “well-meaning” men whose only options seem to be doing nothing or making it worse. Thomas’ good friend Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has little patience for her illness, while his doctor (Ralph Ineson) keeps diagnosing her with too much blood and shoving ether in her face. One “cure” involves tightening her corset, perhaps the least subtle piece of imagery one could imagine regarding oppressed Victorian women and the patriarchal stranglehold. Can you blame her for preferring the mad scientist played by Willem Dafoe?

As much as I enjoyed Nosferatu, I wish Eggers had pushed the material further. This is his first film based on a pre-existing story, one he’s cited repeatedly as an inspiration for his career, and you can sense that he’s a touch timid to deviate from that which he respects so thoroughly. Given the focus on themes of female hysteria and repression, there was certainly room to further flesh those concepts out. Emma Corrin’s character is dishearteningly underwritten. Some of the cinematography is muddy to the point of opaque, while other moments are startlingly beautiful. Frankly, it could have stood to be more bizarre, like The Lighthouse or The Northman. You can see how perhaps Eggers was constrained by knowing this would be his most mainstream release yet.

But even diet Eggers is still Eggers, and it is undeniably badass to see a major studio putting down its cash for something this unabashedly erotic and repulsive. Those expecting a traditional scare-filled horror will be disappointed, but 2024’s Nosferatu is far too enjoyable to dismiss on such grounds.

And don’t worry: the cat doesn’t die.

Nosferatu is playing in cinemas now.

Happy new year to you all! I hope 2025 is full of love, curiosity, zero-bullsh*t, and some good old-fashioned gossip.