’Does evil come from within us?’
Robert Eggers’ remake of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu has technically been in development since 2015 but for Eggers, the gestation period has been much longer. As a child, Eggers became transfixed by an image of Max Schreck’s iconic portrayal of Nosferatu villain Count Orlok and begged his mother to rent the VHS of the 1922 original. He then directed a stage adaptation of the film while in high school. This was Eggers’ starting point in the film industry so the phrase ‘passion project’ has perhaps never been more apt…
The plot is essentially the same as the source material (itself a loose and illegal adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula). Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is tasked with brokering the sale of a decrepit manor house to the mysterious stranger Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard). Hutter travels to some strange far-flung land to meet Orlok and in doing so awakens Orlok’s obsession with Hutter’s wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). The talented supporting cast is made up of Willem Dafoe as Van Helsing stand-in Professor von Franz, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Hutters’s companion Friedrich Harding and Ralph Ineson as Ellen’ doctor.
It’s a bold undertaking to adapt one of the most celebrated and important horror films in history, particularly as Werner Herzog has already attempted a remake back in 1979 but while Eggers is clearly reverential of the source material, he’s also a bold enough filmmaker to bring his own vision to what is a well-worn tale. While all of his films look beautiful, this one is perhaps the most visually striking of all of them. The desaturated colours and stark blues and greys are truly mesmerising and Eggers could teach pretty much every other modern-day director a thing or two about how to properly shoot nighttime scenes without losing clarity. It helps, of course, that Eggers clearly has a cast he can trust, having used Ineson and Dafoe many times before and while his other frequent collaborator, Anya Taylor Joy, dropped out of the project, Depp is a more than able alternative and she gives her all here in a career-best performance. It is Skarsgard who really sells this film, however. Despite the fact that I have seen many, many vampire films, Skarsgard’s portrayal of Orlock here is the only one that has really frightened me. There are some truly terrifying sequences and moments throughout, moments that kept flashing back into my mind days after watching the film for the first time. He also produces some quite astonishing voice work (without the help of AI – take note, Adrien Brody). It’s easy to see why someone could become hypnotised by that voice.
Nosferatu had a massive marketing campaign and plenty of hype but on this occasion, it was justified. Quite simply, it is one of the best vampire films ever made.
