A horror film dubbed one of the “most profoundly frightening horror films in years” is now available for streaming.
Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, stars Bill Skarsgård as the vampiric Count Orlok, with a supporting cast that includes Willem Dafoe, Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult.
The remake of the classic 1922 horror film was nominated for four Oscars and marks Eggers’ biggest box office success to date, after his work on The Northman, The Witch and The Lighthouse.
Although the film is still available to watch in the cinema, it has been released on digital platforms. Horror fans can watch Nosferatu on Prime Video, where it is now available to rent and purchase.
Skarsgård, 34, is also known for playing the terrifying clown Pennywise in the It movies, but said his latest role had put him off making horror films altogether.
Speaking to Empire, he said: “When we were done with it, I was like, ‘I never want to play something this evil again. I never want to put on prosthetics again.’”
He added that the end of shooting “was a relief,” and continued: “It really affected me. Orlok is an occult sorcerer, and it did a number on me in terms of just trying to inhabit that space.”
The movie received critical acclaim. In a five-star review of Nosferatu, The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey praised Eggers’s fidelity to the original film while adapting for modern audiences.
“The director’s work is a necessary rebuke to a culture that’s become a little too fond of the modernised adaptation – valid, at times, but never free from the disparaging notion that [F W] Murnau’s images or [Bram] Stoker’s words have lost their power,” she wrote. “It’s nice to imagine that Nosferatu would play as well for an audience in the 1830s as it would now. ”
Loughrey added: “Eggers’s interpretation of the classic novel, via the classic silent film, is not only a luxurious, Gothic revelation – it’s also one of the most profoundly, seductively frightening horrors in years, all because its terrors seem to crawl right out from our own stomachs.”
