NOSFERATU. Steeped as we are in vampire lore, it can be challenging to sort the origins from the iterations, source from echo. It’s possible this is because the definitive, canonical material is exceedingly limited, vivid enough in its construction — close enough to the truth? Who am I to say? — and so arrestingly simple in its mythmaking that it cannot help but color every attempt at expansion or derivation.
What we know in our pop culture of the vampire is mostly drawn from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which I remember attempting to wade through in youth (because we’re all fascinated by this stuff), to decidedly limited success. But the important wrinkle is that only a quarter of a century later, F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu (1922), a film adaptation that took a few canon-altering liberties with the source material, enraged the estate of the author and essentially created cinematic horror. Even if we haven’t properly seen the thing (as I have not), its iconography, mainly its chiaroscuro and the unforgettable image of Max Schreck as the redubbed Count Orlok, are a significant part not only of our cinematic lexicon but of the dream book of imagery that has so informed contemporary culture. More enchanted though we may be by the charismatic, sexier versions of the vampire, from Bela Lugosi to Wesley Snipes to Robert Pattinson, there is something in the collective id that knows Max Schreck’s Count as the origin point, the loathsome un-beating heart of more than a century of storytelling.
Werner Herzog semi-famously returned to the material in 1979, casting the maniacal and brilliant Klaus Kinski as his beast primeval. And in 2000, E. Elias Merhige made Shadow of the Vampire, a behind-the-scenes drama about the making of Nosferatu with Willem Dafoe in an unsurprisingly brilliant turn as Schreck. That movie (and its director) is now all but lost to time, but I was almost-obsessed with it, upon its release, as much for the sick-humor of the lead performance as for its atmosphere and exploration of the creation of modern folklore. And now, our foremost practitioner of dead language and arcana assorted, Robert Eggers (The Witch, 2015; The Lighthouse, 2019; The Northman, 2022) has rendered unto us his version of the ur-text; it is quite a thing indeed.
In early-mid 19th century Germany, a young woman is visited in dreams by the spectre of a being from beyond simple planes of existence who, rather authoritatively, seeks to make her his undead bride. Fair enough.
Years later, a title card informs, that woman, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), newly married to an ambitious real estate agent named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), still suffers occasionally from night terrors — rather routine for the betrothed of a demon — a malady she manages with relative aplomb. When Thomas is summoned to the crumbling Carpathian estate of a client who wishes to acquire property in Wisborg, where the Hutters make their home, Ellen’s symptoms accelerate precipitously. Thomas doesn’t have too easy a time with the client, one Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), either. And as the paths of these principals in our little operetta of blood and disease begin to converge, death becomes ever more present and grotesque.
Eggers could be called a practitioner in anachronism, sometimes as a pejorative. There are apocryphal tales of him living in some drafty keep, poring over ancient texts, acquainting himself with folk-rituals and bygone manufacturing processes. I think the mythology is good for business, but it seems more accurate to describe him as an academic historian who, in his purity of focus, has (almost) inexplicably been able to make a career for himself as a modern American filmmaker.
As he has done with each of his projects, Eggers here expands the palette at his disposal, going more Gothic than he ever has before and, in retreating a bit from the grandiose set-pieces of The Northman, allows himself to create a close-up magic sort of horror, but one self-aware enough to be infused with humor as much as with lush period detail.
A moment here for Skarsgård, who, like Eggers, seems sometimes like a creature from another time who has been able to reshape the cinematic landscape to make room for his bizarre, Chaney/Karloff style of transformative character acting. Conspiring with his director, he recasts the previously reptilian Orlok as a formidable monster, a giant Cossack with an inimitable voice and repulsive but undeniable appeal. And the horror of that magnetism is rendered brilliantly in Depp’s closely held but wildly kinetic performance.
Eggers, his cast and his dauntless crew — with a special nod to cinematographer Jarin Plaschke, who should probably be winning more awards — have approached the difficult task of remaking one of the most recognizable properties in visual media. Because they have done so with reverence, humor and an embrace of modern technology, they have truly reimagined it. R. 132M. BROADWAY, MILL CREEK, MINOR.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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This article appears in Through Mark Larson’s Lens 2025.