By the time Bram Stoker died in 1912, Dracula remained his most successful and lucrative creation, a crude way of looking at a writer’s corpus but, in this case, informative of what financial circumstances his widow, Florence, was left in and how the property of Dracula was handled. As executor of Stoker’s estate, Florence had sole authorization over Dracula’s usage in any medium, whether stage plays or nascent motion pictures. In 1921, F. W. Murnau and Prana Films, cofounded by producer Albin Grau, had completed a complicated shoot of a German film titled Nosferatu (the production could only utilize one camera, which meant there was only a single negative to work with), a dramatically stark reinterpretation of Dracula released to little fanfare.
Neither Murnau nor Prana sought permission to use elements from Stoker’s most famous novel from Florence, a concern made less straightforward by the regional differences in copyright law but one that Stoker’s widow nonetheless viewed as flagrant plagiarism. Florence, along with the British Society of Authors, soon launched a legal campaign to sue Prana Films for damages. Ultimately, Prana filed for bankruptcy and, in lieu of being able to pay restitution to Florence, relinquished Nosferatu’s rights and all copies of the film to the Stoker estate. The fiasco took about three years and by 1925, Nosferatu’s market value had fallen so steeply that Florence set about trying to destroy as many existing prints of the film as possible. Five years later, Universal bought the rights to Dracula from Florence and reportedly also bought an existing American print of Nosferatu that they then studied for the 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Bela Lugosi. Of course, extant copies of Nosferatu survived in other countries, prominently in France and the U.S., these and other copies shown in revivals and eventually restored throughout the years.
The enduring appeal of Nosferatu is in what it conveys about adaptation and artistic interpretation. One small but significant trait, the vampire’s mortal aversion to sunlight, is a detail taken from Nosferatu, not Bram Stoker’s novel. Count Orlok, the Dracula stand-in, is a skeletal, grotesque figure whose seductive powers are made all the more mysterious and unsettling for his inability to blend in with normal society, whereas Count Dracula’s popular presentation is that of a suave, elegant nobleman. Orlok is a creation of Belial, a demon, while Dracula is a centuries-old undead warrior, no longer strictly human but still derived from an earthly lineage. Orlok’s departure from the Carpathian Mountains into civilization triggers a devastating plague, an invasion of East into West that sublimated antisemitic fears of infection with fresh memories of the Spanish flu. Perhaps most consequentially, Nosferatu is set in the fictional German town of Wisburg over half a century earlier than in Dracula, where the main action takes place in London near the turn of the century. These narrative and aesthetic differences, seemingly minor, result in dramatically distinct films, stories, and characterizations. Indeed, to adapt Nosferatu, as Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski did in 1979, or to fictionalize the very making of the film, as E. Elias Merhige and Willem Dafoe did in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, is to represent an entirely different character and setting.
Given the Gothic scenery and the occult trappings, and the fact that Hollywood makes movies no one asked for, it’s no surprise that a much-lauded auteur like Robert Eggers, writer-director of A24 hits The Witch and The Lighthouse, would finally get his chance to adapt Nosferatu for a new era. To be fair, the feeling that this version was a long time coming for Eggers was supported by the announcement in 2015 that Nosferatu would be his second feature. Deferring production to work on The Lighthouse and 2022’s The Northman, Eggers’s first project with Focus Features, delayed Nosferatu, along with casting changes, notably the exit of Harry Styles and Anya Taylor-Joy. That delay has only strengthened Eggers’s reputation as a laudable filmmaker in a depleted cinematic landscape lacking for originality or vision. The veneer of auteurism casts away cynicism about retreading familiar territory. As tiresome as the discourse surrounding the lack of originality in Hollywood has become, there are still pockets of hope, usually filled by singular talents like Eggers, who has only made four features, and would-be underdogs like A24, a zeitgeist-chasing production company whose recent astronomical valuation, injection of private-equity capital, and addition of a Kushner to its board has thoroughly removed itself from its indie origins.
In an era where companies like Netflix seemingly exist to churn out forgettable films and television shows that end up purposely buried on streaming platforms, Eggers, along with contemporaries like Ari Aster and Brady Corbet, position themselves as representative of everything worth praising about American cinema: unique storytellers trafficking in old-school filmmaking methods who want to challenge their audiences.
There are admirable qualities to the above-mentioned directors, but their work can be obviously derivative of their influences and their aspirations are distinctly mainstream, no matter how cleverly their films are marketed. This mass appeal in and of itself isn’t good or bad, but it clashes with the indie sensibility they’ve garnered and the resulting overdetermined praise their films receive, often before they’re even released. In general, movies made by ambitious directors seem a lot better if the primary audience hasn’t seen that many movies to begin with. What Eggers specifically has going for him that few others don’t is an aesthetic fastidiousness that suggests a filmmaker fond of reading novels and going down Wikipedia rabbit holes. His films are rife with period-specific vernacular and affect, a manner of artistic control reflected in the precise, long-take cinematography he often utilizes. The success of these techniques is often overlooked in favor of their existence at all. Which makes the notion of a remake of a seminal genre film by a celebrated genre director like Eggers all the more loaded, to the resulting project’s detriment.
Reprising the blue-gray monochromatic nighttime scenes of The Northman with the candle-lit interior shadows of The Witch, Eggers’s Nosferatu is often a dreamlike film, more akin to a Grimm fable and Nosferatu’s German expressionist foundations than a monster movie. This is perhaps most obvious in the film’s traveling sequences to Count Orlok’s estate, full of stark shadows, misty roads, and gauzy elisions of time and movement, carriages appearing out of nowhere, characters floating through the night. There’s also a batch of bizarre performances, where each player, from Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter to Ralph Ineson’s Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, seems to be acting in a different movie. Hoult, prone to speaking too quickly, is accompanied by almost everyone else in the cast in being directed to tear through the dialogue as quickly as possible, only to lead to glacially-paced wordless passages. There are exceptions. Lily-Rose Depp, who at certain angles conjures an early-career Keira Knightley with a similarly haunted demeanor, navigates her way through a script that requires her character, Ellen Hutter, to telegraph a psychological and emotional depth the film seems not to have much time for. Meanwhile, Bill Skarsgård, whose most ardent fans would dub him the 21st-century Boris Karloff, adopts a low-register, slow cadence delivery in his speech as Count Orlok, with his first scenes opposite Hoult playing out as if he’s receiving dialect coaching in real time.
Eggers prizes historical authenticity and a scrupulous attention to production design detail, and he furnishes Nosferatu with worn, beautiful sets and costumes and a pervading, almost benumbed atmosphere, as if every scene is slightly pitched down, a persistent drone giving way to quiet scenes that are punctuated by sudden sound effects. It’s a redundant juxtaposition with the film’s frequently loud soundtrack, peaking during moments of heightened drama, not so much supporting what’s happening as trying to convince the audience that it’s noteworthy. Indeed, throughout Nosferatu, it’s difficult not to feel like the viewer is at once waiting for the real movie to start and like that movie began long before the title card. There’s a disjointed, slapdash quality to the editing, straightforward scenes of exposition and lore stuck next to more abstract, digressive sequences where dialogue doesn’t matter as much.
One of the primary focuses of the Nosferatu marketing campaign was the film’s eroticism, the psychosexual extremity of vampiric lore as filtered through Eggers’s particular auteurist lens. It’s been a minute since a mainstream film premised on sexual subversion has actually delivered on its promise. For a film that has much moaning and writhing, plus a scene of implied necrophilia, in Nosferatu there’s a floating detachment to the narrative, a sense that nothing that’s happening is all that shocking, even if it should be. Some of this could be due to the fact that Depp, whose character is constantly besieged by episodes of alternately rapturous and torturous possession, performs these scenes with an unimaginative pornographic tremor and Skarsgård, as the psychic catalyst for her affliction, is buried beneath elaborate makeup and then hidden in shadow. Such suggestive coyness is a fair microcosm of Nosferatu as a whole, a film with many moments of potentially shocking violence, unsettling behavior, and gorgeous production that nonetheless constantly undercuts its own momentum and atmosphere. What would, in a more convincingly outré effort, be seen as a big swing comes off more like flailing.
The audience is left with a desire for something more subversive, gnarlier, and more fucked-up. This becomes even more apparent by the time Willem Dafoe shows up in the back half of the film as the Van Helsing surrogate Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz. Dafoe’s ghoulish, chittering, deceptively frightening turn as Max Schreck/Count Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire stands tall over Skarsgård’s comparatively flat attempt. It’s obvious he relishes the chance to work with Eggers for a third time, but even Dafoe’s comedic, lightly unhinged performance isn’t gonzo enough, ironically hampered by a relative creative freedom that doesn’t extend to anyone else in the cast. As it stands, Eggers’s Nosferatu feels neither memorable nor entirely forgettable, a damning liminal quality that lends the film a perfunctory air. Strange given how much lip service Eggers has given to his eagerness and hard work on it. The final shot, a would-be coup de grace of grotesquerie before a predictable hard cut to black, recapitulates that familiar sense of anticipation that hangs over the film, the sense that something else must come next, that what you’re really waiting for is around the corner. Whatever it is, it never comes.
