Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu ignores a century of Draculas to summon an old monster

The hipster-traditionalist writer-director Robert Eggers is back, stalking the pages of history as usual. He’s known for digging deep into the language and traditions of the past to excavate his visions: the folkloric superstitions of early American settlers in The Witch, the fevered perversions of the Victorian imagination in The Lighthouse, the elemental mythology of Scandinavia in The Northman. But in his new movie, Nosferatu, the corpse he’s exhuming is a cinematic one. 

In the 1920s and 1930s, filmmakers created two distinct lineages of Draculas. In 1922, German silent film visionary F.W. Murnau released Nosferatu, an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — then only 25 years old. He transplanted the action from England to Germany and changed the characters’ names, but it was otherwise a pretty faithful take on the book, keeping the action in the 19th century. Murnau and lead actor Max Schreck renamed their Dracula Count Orlok and envisioned the vampire as a bald, cadaverous, rat-toothed horror with clawed hands: a specter of Europe’s barbarous past.

In 1931, Tod Browning’s Dracula was released, starring Bela Lugosi. This early talkie, working from a stage adaptation of Stoker’s book, updated the action and shuffled the roles of some characters. Lugosi, who had played Dracula on stage, made his version of the vampire sinister but stately, with courtly manners, formal dress, slicked-back hair, and a batlike cape.

Stoker’s heirs sued Nosferatu’s producers, and a German court ruled that all copies of the film be destroyed. That didn’t quite happen — too many prints had made their way overseas by that point — but Murnau’s vision was almost wiped from the record, and it didn’t resurface for several decades. Lugosi’s version of the character became not just the iconic cinematic Dracula, but the archetypal vampire in pop culture, while Schreck’s monster receded into the shadows.

Eggers, ever the purist, is out to reset that narrative. His Nosferatu is a tribute to Murnau — and through Murnau, to Stoker — that bypasses a century of movie Draculas (with one notable exception) and goes straight to the source. Eggers is trying to tap into something primal and terrifying that the sexy urbanity of the post-Lugosi vampire glossed over. Still, he’s only half successful, because his reconstruction is too meticulous to be truly raw.

Eggers precisely replicates Murnau’s setting: the elegant German port city of Wismar in the 1800s. He uses Murnau’s German character names, too. Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas Hutter, a real estate agent summoned to visit a mysterious Transylvanian count in his mountain castle and bring him the deeds to a Wismar mansion. Lily-Rose Depp is Thomas’ wife, Ellen, a sensitive woman who falls under a trance-like spell after he departs. And Bill Skarsgård — fast developing a Lugosi-like career as horror cinema’s favorite handsome monster — is Count Orlok, the centuries-old vampire who terrorizes Thomas, then leaves his mountain home to descend on Ellen and Wismar, plague and death following in his wake.

Eggers’ painstaking formal compositions, high-contrast lighting, and intensely detailed production design are all steeped in silent-cinema traditions. You can’t imagine a director better equipped to recreate Murnau’s vision as a modern spectacle, and Nosferatu often has a shivering, shadowy beauty. Eggers and his usual cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, give the film a color treatment so washed-out, it’s almost monochrome, referencing the spectral blue, pink, and sepia of tinted prints of the original movie. It’s a delicate, ghostly-looking film, less stark than the black-and-white Lighthouse. It looks properly haunted.

At the same time, Eggers fleshes out Murnau’s stripped-down retelling of Stoker into something more expansive and sturdy, strengthening characters and subplots, sometimes following the novel, sometimes not. The Hardings (Kraven the Hunter star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Deadpool & Wolverine villain Emma Corrin), a wealthy couple who care for Ellen in Thomas’ absence, are given a much more substantial role in this version, as is Wismar’s misguided Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson). And Eggers introduces professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a scientist and mystic, as a kind of Van Helsing figure — something Murnau didn’t really bother with. As Sievers and the sceptical Hardings grow progressively more worried for the absent Thomas and the psychically tormented Ellen, they reluctantly call on this eccentric crank for solutions.

No actor better understands Eggers’ project than Dafoe, and he plays Von Franz with relish, investing every line reading with a precise, stylized vigor and his trademark rasp. Nosferatu comes alive when he’s on screen, but the other actors are sometimes suffocated, only occasionally finding the intensity needed to break through Eggers’ archaic phrasing and mannered direction. Another exception is the British character actor Simon McBurney, who is delightfully deranged as Herr Knock, Nosferatu’s version of Renfield: Thomas’ boss and Orlok’s enraptured slave.

The key creative pact in any Dracula movie, though, is between the director and his vampire. (E. Elias Merhige playfully explored this topic in his 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire, in which John Malkovich plays a fictionalized Murnau, with Dafoe as a version of Schreck who might actually be a vampire.) This is the one area where Eggers and Skarsgård diverge sharply from the original film. Skarsgård’s Orlok is still ancient, corpse-like, and heavily taloned. But where Schreck was twisted and withered, Skarsgård’s version is towering and hairy, swathed in furs, with a long mustache and a barbaric aspect. Even his looming physicality is dwarfed by his voice; Skarsgård speaks outrageously slowly in a cartoonish Transylvanian accent, rolling his R’s for days, and the sound mix gives his every utterance a booming, subsonic resonance that rattles the theater. It’s a choice; it may be too much for some, but it couldn’t be any more Gothic.

In his previous three films, Eggers’ vision was striking for its originality and craft. As perfectly matched as Nosferatu is to his taste and talents, it’s deflating to watch him build a monument to someone else’s art, even from a distance of 100 years. Like Werner Herzog before him, who remade Nosferatu in 1979, Eggers can’t resist the temptation to recreate some of Murnau’s most famous shots, such as the vampire’s shadow creeping menacingly up the stairs toward Ellen’s boudoir.

But Herzog also invested his version with his distinctively documentarian, anthropological viewpoint, and tinted it with the world-weary cynicism of the ’70s. Eggers doesn’t allow anything so personal or contemporary to creep into his straightforward reconstruction, beyond putting even more emphasis on the psychosexual connection between Ellen and the Count. (This is the only version of the story I’ve seen where the link between the Ellen Hutter/Mina Harker character and the vampire predates the Count meeting Thomas/Jonathan at his castle, as if she had summoned the monster into being with her secret desires.)

There’s one other film interpretation of the Dracula story that looms large over Eggers’ Nosferatu. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula also sought to cut through the Browning/Lugosi tradition and reframe the legend as an opulent Victorian Gothic tale. But Coppola ignored Murnau, too, instead cooking up his own witches’ brew of intense eroticism, silky grandeur, and absurd camp. It’s a wildly uneven movie, but Gary Oldman’s mesmeric performance as Dracula and Eiko Ishioka’s ravishing costumes created an all-new and startlingly transgressive iconography for the old vampire.

Eggers is gracious enough to pay polite tribute to Coppola, quoting him directly in a couple of shots. But invoking Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rough on his Nosferatu, which feels staid and sexless by comparison. Eggers has made a visually grand movie, with an impressively doomy atmosphere and one hell of a closing shot. As a finely wrought monument to the ultimate Gothic horror movie, it’s worth seeing. But as a new reading of one of the most resonant stories of the past 150 years, it rings hollow. It has no fresh blood in its veins.

Nosferatu debuts in theaters on Dec. 25.