Here is Robert Eggers’s avowed passion project as writer-director: a luxury-arthouse remake on a grand scale, paying homage to FW Murnau’s classic silent film from 1922, the German expressionist nightmare of Count Orlok, or Nosferatu, the “evil one”, a pallid vampire living in the shadow of the Carpathian Mountains. Eggers’s film can’t quite bear to say the comedy word “Transylvania” out loud, though we get to glimpse it on a map. It is an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic fear, with some beautiful images and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlit hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story feel slightly literal and self-conscious.
The German stage actor Max Schreck was the vampire in the 1922 version, and Klaus Kinski was in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. Now it is Bill Skarsgård (known for playing Stephen King’s scary clown Pennywise) who stays semi-shadowed for much of the film. He is undead but intimidatingly athletic, like an animated corpse, ripped in every sense. He is not hairless in the traditional Orlok way, having a bushy moustache, and he speaks in a booming native tongue with borderline-ridiculous subtitles. It is the early 19th century, and the count plans to buy property in the fictional German port town of Wisborg with the help of a cringingly submissive secret acolyte there, to bring his ancient evil into the heart of enlightened Europe. Orlok tricks an innocent, wholesome young realtor into making the perilous journey to his castle to oversee the document signing in person, but he plans to set the seal on his imperial expansion with the ecstatically obscene blood-conquest of this man’s demure young bride, for whom he has conceived a telepathic passion; she sees him in her dreams.
The Murnau movie was famously taken without permission from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula with the names changed to avoid lawsuits. But it kept most plot points, including the vampire’s sea journey, which made sense when Dracula was heading to Yorkshire but is more puzzling when Orlok is travelling from Romania to Germany. Eggers keeps it here, with plague rats. Nicholas Hoult plays the fresh-faced property agent Thomas Hutter. Lily-Rose Depp is his wife Ellen, haunted by her sleepwalking and nameless sexual yearnings. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play the couple’s friends, the Hardings. Ralph Ineson is the local physician Dr Sievers. And Simon McBurney is Thomas’s creepy employer, Herr Knock.
Most importantly, Willem Dafoe plays occult expert and vampire-hunter Professor Von Franz, a heterodox outsider and freethinker who is the only one they can rely on; he is the equivalent of Stoker’s Van Helsing and the great ancestor of Father Merrin in Friedkin’s The Exorcist. (Dafoe actually played Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, E Elias Merhige’s 2000 movie about the making of Nosferatu.)
Any adaptation of Nosferatu has to decide on what can only be called the Mel Brooks question: how far to lean in to the black comic horror and absurdity. Herzog did it marginally, and so does Eggers – surely – by giving Dafoe’s professor a bizarrely long pipe to smoke (the equivalent, perhaps, of Klaus Kinski’s unsettlingly tall wineglass in Herzog’s Nosferatu). And Dafoe’s occasional way of suddenly appearing in the side of the frame is a little Marty Feldman-esque, although Brooks never wrote anything like the line that Eggers gives to the local tavern landlord, yelling at the unruly locals: “May the mind of God bugger you!” Macabre comedy works to mimic an uneasy giggle of fear, and to pre-empt possible derision or scepticism and to keep the powder of horror dry. More serious is the suggestion that Professor Von Franz’s attitudes are more complicated than we thought.
The film is handsomely produced and shot, with good performances, although for me Skarsgård’s vampire is opaque and forbiddingly gruesome without being necessarily as scary as could be expected. Murnau’s creation took the vampire into a more fabular realm of demon or monster, and away from the novelistic tradition of being a personable, patrician, plausibly human persona. Stoker’s Count Dracula was a distant cousin to literary figures such as Mr Rochester and Maxim de Winter. Orlok is more abstractly brutish, and has to be so from the very beginning, but I feel that Eggers’s vampire is more stylised, more studied, but less insidiously frightening than he needs to be, and there is less sense of his weakness – his passion for Depp’s Ellen – becoming dangerous to him. What psychological subtlety there is gets transferred to the Freudian ordeal of Ellen, who is attracted yet disgusted by the vampire but realises the way in which these competing instincts must be reconciled. This is an elaborate, detailed love letter to the original, intelligently respectful and faithful.
• Nosferatu is released on 25 December in the US, and on 1 January in Australia and the UK.
