A New Nosferatu Lurks in the Shadows Between Color and Monochrome

What a strange yet hypnotizing task, the business of remaking Nosferatu, only slightly mitigated by the fact that it’s been done before. F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 silent film, subtitled A Symphony of Horror, adapted Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula without permission before the authorized 1931 edition (and is not especially less faithful to the novel than that early Universal Horror classic); then, in 1979, Werner Herzog remade the film as Nosferatu the Vampyre, a more verdant, eerily quiet version, expertly suffused with the grim unease that it could be taking place closer to our world.

That sense of creeping inevitability bleeds into the 2024 edition of Nosferatu, adapted by Robert Eggers – whose film that comes closest to a contemporary setting, The Lighthouse, takes place around the time Stoker’s novel was published. His Nosferatu echoes its official source, as the earlier film echoed its inspiration: In the nineteenth century, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to the remote castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), in the scenic Carpathian Mountains, to complete a real-estate transaction. Orlok becomes entranced by a photo of Thomas’s wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), and when he makes his way to his new home, he brings vampiric pestilence with him as he stalks his adopted hometown, and Ellen in particular, with a kind of rigorously evil devotion. To call it love or even lust would not quite do justice to the totemic figure he cuts. This Orlok is neither the beastly, rodent-like version played by Max Shreck nor the elegant, be-caped Bela Lugosi. Get ready for a main vamp with a beard more prominent than any fangs, somewhere between a lumberjack and a living tree. This Orlok gives the impression of a vampire who audibly gulps down blood not exactly out of hunger, but to collect and taste what he lacks.

Eggers himself has been accused of a kind of bloodless formalism, with tightly coordinated camera moves, eye-poppingly meticulous production design, and dead-center compositions – a Wes Anderson of the macabre and the unknowable, perhaps? As with Anderson, this characterization may be technically accurate without precisely conveying the experience of watching the films at hand. The careful, deliberate camerawork adds to Nosferatu’s menace, especially in service of long, dialogue-free scenes where the color appears to drain out entirely. Like the tinted versions of the 1922 film, this is not really black-and-white in the traditional terms, but often doesn’t look much like what we think of as full color, either. Eggers creates a liminal world of shadow and candlelight; the implication of Orlok – his gnarled claws, also more prominent than fangs, reaching out in impossibly vivid silhouettes – becomes just as scary as his physical presence.

This is what Ellen seems to intuit more clearly than the men of Nosferatu around her. She senses Orlok, and his obsession with her becomes a kind of feverish, mesmerizing force, ultimately giving her stronger ideas than even vampire expert Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, having fun in the Van Helsing-like role beefed up from the original) about how it might be destroyed. At one point, past Eggers muse Anya Taylor-Joy was tipped to play Ellen, and although she surely has the range to pull it off, Depp (daughter of the famous weirdo/monster hybrid who shares her surname) has a haunted brittleness that would not look as believable coming from Taylor-Joy fresh from Furiosa. Taylor-Joy often seems self-possessed, while Depp’s Ellen must, to some extent, submit to genuine possession; she moves like someone from an Exorcist knockoff, only apparently without any visual-effects assistance.

It’s a more literally full-bodied performance than the 1922 film allows, not because that masterpiece is in any way insufficient, but because Eggers has essentially made a supersized version, lingering on the plague that Orlok appears to bring with him to the city. (This was also a memorable feature of the Herzog version.) At the risk of evoking the Dracula version of the famous meme about an inexperienced film watcher receiving “Boss Baby vibes” from a second, wholly unrelated film, the Eggers version of Nosferatu feels something like the Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula, in its baroque elaborations if not its particular visual scheme. If there’s a limiting factor to this approach, it’s that, following the Shakespeare-adjacent grandeur of The Northman, the new film inches Eggers slightly closer to the world of – shudder – intellectual property. Of course, all of his horror movies draw upon folk tales, gothic horror, and any number of inspirations, but The Witch and The Lighthouse are faintly recognizable stories rendered with an otherworldly, sui generis hints of madness. Nosferatu is an expanded, distended version of something more familiar, taking its place as another branch of Stoker translations.

In that company, though, Nosferatu is a hell of a picture. If Eggers often appears to be reaching as far back as possible for his cinematic influences, riffing on a silent movie allows him – forces him, even – to reveal his more modern sensibilities, where men are repped by the contorted, strangled scream face of Hoult and the ineffectual Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), whose wife Anna (Emma Corrin) is this story’s version of Lucy from Dracula. In a plague-ridden town, it’s Ellen’s visionary, full-tilt fever that allows her to more closely commune with the evil around her, maybe even finding a hint of sick ecstasy. Nosferatu, in its enveloping-shadow way, finds more than a hint.

Director: Robert Eggers
Writer: Robert Eggers
Starring: Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Bill Skarsgård, Williem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin
Release date</strong: December 25, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on social media under the handle @rockmarooned.