Nosferatu

Vampires are not sexy. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about Twilight or Interview With the Vampire, the fetishization of the bloodsucker depends on ignoring the fact that, whether you call them vrykolakas, bruxa, obur, or strigoi, they are supernatural mass murderers.

To see that is to see the truth of the myth, and so it’s easy to imagine Robert Eggers coming out of watching Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and wondering why everyone was slavering over the beast that rips throats and damns souls. It could explain why Nosferatu – his remake of F. W. Murnau’s seminal expressionist horror Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens – remembers in every frame that Count Orlok is a creature of darkness, death, corruption, and the grave.

Murnau’s 1922 classic is an unlicensed adaptation of Dracula and follows its story closely (closely enough that Stoker’s widow sued him). With both book and film now in the public domain, writer/director Eggers is free to give his own spin on Henrik Galeen’s original script. However, as the saying goes, why mess with perfection? The story remains basically the same: In 19th century Germany, promising young lawyer Thomas Hutter (Hoult) is dispatched to the Carpathian Mountains for what he thinks is a simple property sale to a foreign aristocrat. What he doesn’t know is that Orlok is nosferatu, the undead, the slayer, the carrier of plague, who aims to destroy the city of Wisborg. He is ancient evil pitted against modernity – a conflict that only scientist/alchemist Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz (a suitably unhinged Dafoe) understands – and this devil has particular, malicious plans for Hutter’s wife, Ellen (Depp).

Ever the historian, Eggers doesn’t try to rebut or rewire Murnau’s work. Instead, he elaborates upon it and makes reference without simple emulation. He has stepped onto this unholy land and paid perfect tribute. Just as he plays with Murnau’s themes of doom and darkness, so his oppressively Gothic visuals takes vital imagery – a shadow of a hand on a wall, crosses on sand dunes, a driverless coach at midnight – and gives them new, corrupted life. Moreover, his solutions to some of the more antiquated and problematic elements of the story are subtle and ingenious, such as how the Szgany locals are depicted.

What Eggers truly comprehends is that Nosferatu is not about sex. It’s about power. Pure, malevolent, selfish, devastating power. His version of Orlok is not the rat-faced horror so memorably summoned by Max Schreck in the original, and fascinatingly copied by Klaus Kinski in 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. Instead, as bone chillingly portrayed by Bill Skarsgård, he’s a giant, rotten warrior, and possibly the closest we’ve seen on screen to Vlad Tepes, the real-life Transylvanian historical inspiration for Dracula. The moment that Hutter crosses the broken threshold of Orlok’s decrepit castle, he is a fragile insect before a dark god, and so it is for all who come under his sway. It is true horror – not simply shock or grossness, but the absolute terror of doom. It’s what Murnau understood, and what Eggers has always understood. All of his films – The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman – have focused on characters contending with their lack of control, and in Nosferatu that theme is played on a greater scale than ever through the tragedy of Ellen.

The original centered on her as the purehearted wife who sacrifices herself to conquer evil. For Depp’s explosive, shocking interpretation, sex is present, yes, but it’s corrupted by Orlok. There’s nothing erotic about this wheezing, rotting, carnivorous corpse, and Eggers rebuts the “sexy vampire” nonsense by depicting a supernatural abusive relationship. If you think that there’s anything sexy about how he rips the throats from babes, that’s on you.