An Undead Classic Brought Back to Life

There are two great performances in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. One is by Bill Skarsgård, who is truly terrifying and altogether inhuman as the title character. The other is by Eggers’ camera, which pans, tilts, swoops, and glides with the uncanny grace of a supernatural being. It works in concert with Skarsgard’s Count Orlok to stalk and torture the characters — and to shower audience members in dread.

The story Eggers tells here is nearly as old as cinema itself; it contains very few surprises for anyone who’s seen the prior films that share its title — or the ones named after Nosferatu’s formerly copyrighted cousin, Dracula. The reason to see this Nosferatu anyway is its handsomely detailed production, which is soaked in gothic atmosphere thanks to incredible design, cinematography, and that creepy Skarsgard performance.

Eggers avoided any temptations to update the classic tale, which was first adapted (in unauthorized fashion) from Bram Stoker’s Dracula by German expressionist director F.W. Murnau in his 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu. Instead, he finds contemporary resonances in the tale of a society besieged by a monstrous plague; swarms of rats follow Skarsgård’s Orlok wherever he goes, bringing with them a veritable pandemic of disease and decay. As the main story involving this undead bloodsucker proceeds in the foreground, the background fills up with the bodies of the sick and the dying. If Orlok himself doesn’t get you, Eggers suggests, something much more mundane will — and possibly quicker than the vampire.

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Not that Skarsgård’s Orlok presents himself as a stereotypical cinematic vampire, with the cape and the slicked hair and suave Eastern European accent. In Eggers’ construction, he’s more like the personification of all that’s unholy; at one point he refers to himself as “An Appetite, nothing more.” At his best, he looks sort of like the mascot of a German metal band: Big furry coat, enormous mustache, pointed nose, spindly fingers with enormous clawed nails.

At his worst — like any good vampire, his form is mutable — Orlok looks like he’s barely even human, and while he’ll chomp down on any part of a warm body that’s available, his preference is to hunch over a victim, distend his jaw, and chomp straight to the source. (The sound effects that accompany these moments are … very wet.) No one working today can create a complete horror villain quite like Skarsgård (who previously put this skill to very good use in two It movies.) He and Eggers made a lot of big choices here: A guttural growl of a voice, breaths that come in low and unsettling wheezes, shuffling movements, dead-eyed stares. They all paid off. This Orlock is unforgettable.

In just about every variation on Dracula and Nosferatu, the count targets a sensuous young woman. In Eggers’ version, that is Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen. Years before the main narrative, a young Ellen prayed for a guardian angel. Instead, she awoke Orlok from some sort of “eternal slumber,” creating a psychic connection between them that grows even stronger after she marries handsome and ambitious real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult).

Thomas’ boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), sends him off to Transylvania to sell the count a property in their small German town. While he’s gone, Ellen experiences strange convulsions and terrible nightmares involving the count. Her conditions worsen to the point that Ellen’s physician Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) calls in reinforcements: His former mentor Professor Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe).

Ellen’s friend Anna (Emma Corrin) becomes one of Orlock’s potential targets as well, helped in part by the fact that Anna’s husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) refuses to believe the plague decimating their village bears some larger supernatural origin, even after Dafoe’s professor shows up to educate the other characters about the occult. (“We must know evil to be able to destroy it!” says Dafoe at one point, uttering a line that feels like it could be spoken by at least 60 percent of all characters Willem Dafoe has ever played.)

You must surely know the rest. Orlok travels there to sample the local cuisine — with a special interest in Ellen. Most of Nosferatu’s set up feels extremely familiar. How could it not, after countless iterations of this story in nearly as many different artistic mediums? What starts to make Nosferatu sizzle and shine, even in the shadowy moonlight of a cold German evening, are Eggers’ stylistic flourishes. In movies like The Witch and The Lighthouse, he displayed a unique gift for period horror that feels fresh without resorting to modern gimmicky or irony. His movies play like they could be the films their characters would have watched in cinemas, had film existed in their time periods in the first place.

The same can be said for Nosferatu. Although his camera moves in ways Murnau’s never could 100 years ago, Eggers’ Nosferatu still bears many visual echoes of the earlier film, especially in its use of moving shadows to suggest Orlock prowling through Friedrich and Thomas’ homes. Throw in some really disgusting practical gore and a couple big jump scares, and you have an extremely effective, extremely old school horror film; made for 2020s tastes but steeped in a tradition that’s unnerved fans for over a century.

RATING: 8/10