Nosferatu

UK Release Date. 1 January 2025
Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 12 mins
Director. Robert Eggers
Cast. Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson.

Rating. 77%

Review.

Imagine if you will, that you had never read Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Imagine if you had never seen any of the various adaptations of the original source material, from the early Universal Pictures' Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi and Helen Chandler to Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) starring Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder and Keanu Reeves. Imagine if you remained blissfully unaware of the multitude of tropes associated with the seminal vampire tale.

And in the midst of it all, we have the enigma that is Nosferatu. The character first appeared in F.W. Murnau’s silent Nosferatu in 1922, and then notably again in Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation, Nosferatu The Vampyre. F.W. Murnau's original Nosferatu was a fairly faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but an unofficial adaptation nonetheless. The German director and screenwriter Henrik Galeen did not obtain the rights from the estate of Bram Stoker, and as a result, the characters names had to be altered. So,

• Count Dracula became Count Orlok
• Jonathan Harker became Thomas Hutter
• Mina Murray became Ellen Hutter
• Professor Abraham Van Helsing became Professor Albion Eberhart Von Franz

Even so, Florence Stoker, the widow of Bram Stoker successfully sued Murnau's production company and the court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed for breach of copyright laws. Despite this, a number of prints survived, and the film ultimately gained a reputation as a masterpiece of German expressionist cinema, with a legacy that proved enormously influential in the worlds of horror and cinema more broadly.  

Now, writer and director Robert Eggers, the generational talent behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, has delivered a surprisingly traditional yet utterly mesmerising take on the classic vampire tale with Nosferatu. Eggers adaptation attempts to restore the mystery, intrigue and dread, by stripping away all of the clichés that have taken root since F.W. Murnau’s original adaptation.

Those familiar with the story of Dracula won’t find anything particularly surprising in Eggers’ Nosferatu. What you will find is a classic tale of Gothic horror handled with an enormous amount of care. From meticulous sets and exquisite costume design to extraordinary cinematography and gripping performances. Particular credit must go to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, who has collaborated with Eggers on all four of the director’s films. From the foreboding dark shadows of Orlok’s castle to the spectacular outdoor scenes shot on location in the Czech Republic and Romania, every shot within Nosferatu is a work of art that mixes beauty and horror to great effect. Blaschke brilliantly redeploys the trademarks of German expressionism to make vampires scary again. There is one spellbinding scene where a hapless and callow Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) arrives at an ominous and icy crossroads only to be met by a spectral-like horse and carriage, which evokes immediate comparisons to Victor Sjöström’s 1921 silent film, The Phantom Carriage. 

An excellent cast - including Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Nicholas Hoult, Ralph Ineson, Willem Dafoe and Simon McBurney - all give a fine performances, but by far the most impressive is from Lily-Rose Depp, as the haunted heroine Ellen Hutter, a newlywed plagued by a dark encounter in her past. The performance requires a rollercoaster of emotion and physicality to convincingly portray her character's default ice-cold serenity and frequent manic episodes. Her physical ability is to be admired as she portrays Ellen’s fits of madness impressively.

The connection between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and the heroine echoes Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, but Eggers places the relationship at the dark heart of Nosferatu. Although in love with her husband, Ellen has been haunted for years by (nightmarish) erotic visions of another man. In contrast with most vampire films, then, Eggers' Nosferatu centres on sex rather than sexiness. Count Orlok is as far from the suave and attractive vampire depicted in much of the genre as one could imagine. Eggers wisely keeps him at a distance and in the shadows during the early scenes, but the creature the audience eventually sees - underneath all the prosthetic make-up and the layers of heavy clothing - is more like a walking corpse. He may never be as iconic as his 1922 counterpart, but the imposing fiend that Eggers and Skarsgård have created is a 'Dracula' unlike any other, which in itself is quite an achievement after more than a century of on-screen vampires.

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a love letter to traditional gothic horror that sets a new bar for production design and cinematography. For some people, there’s no escaping the inevitability that Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is still a Dracula film - no matter how innovative or visually distinctive - which means that familiar things keep happening to familiar characters. But for me, I found. Nosferatu utterly engrossing despite my familiarity with, and fondness for, Bram Stoker’s original prose.