Euan Toh Euan Toh takes stock of the Stoker narrative remake, weighing it up against past versions to see if this year’s take on the vampire can fly on his own two feet. Have vampires become too familiar to be frightful? Director Robert Eggers clearly thinks not.
As part of my history degree a reading list lead me to the entire text of Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece Dracula and the full runtime of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu. I researched the significance of both works. I learned how they expanded and revised the mythos of the vampire. I read the Lugosi version and the parodies. I made it clear to many friends and family that 1979’s remake of Nosferatu by Werner Herzog is one of the most haunting films I have ever seen. I was down the rabbit hole. Overexposed to the silliness of the vampire, they felt removed from the terror they represent. Nosferatu (2024) attempts to the vampire to its frightful place.
Admittedly, the film is everything I hate about horror movies nowadays, but director Robert Eggers marinates the style so well that it becomes a seriously good movie for both the uninitiated and life-long aficionados of fear. I am not one of them. I can respect this version of Nosferatu, but I cannot find it within me to love it.
The standard beats of the plot are familiar, an adaptation of Dracula where the sinister vampire Count Orlok comes to haunt Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp. Whilst there is no new narrative, the film does move away from the expressionism of 1922 and meditative imagery of 1979, with 2024’s version descending into pure, visually gothic terror. But this lack of sublime gives the new Nosferatu a surprising cinematic predictability. The real surprise was that my companion and many other audience members were recoiling in fear throughout the film. The Dracula myth has not lost its touch and the idiosyncrasies of Eggers’ style try to greater or lesser success to spark what is left in our capacity for fear. Jason Bailey (New York Times) groups the film’s cinematic language as something which ‘ultimately feels like a container for all of Eggers’s cinematic compulsions’. Eggers does somewhat depart from his usual style, for a start there are more jump-scares than you would ever expect from a typically meditative director. A gothic panorama of desaturated darkness, modern technology and VFX , this passion project offers the visually accessible version of Nosferatu for modern audiences. Depp’s and Defoe’s ‘automaton’ performances are far from wasted. Depp’s range in the film sells the absolute gauntlet of acting that she had to run through for this movie while still offering a depth that would have easily been lost in a less convincing actress. Eggers achieves his most obvious ambition when translating the 102-year-old work: making Nosferatu an effective horror movie. Where the film falls short is in its haphazard and aborted revision of the symbols and themes that it had all the potential to convey. It is in the attempt to deviate from the previous versions of Nosferatu that the film exposes its biggest flaw. Whilst Ellen’s rewritten lore does, to the film’s credit, increase the predatory symbolism, her ‘melancholy’ borders on the banal to the downright exploitative.
Neither an uncanny auteur piece nor run-of-the-mill flick, Nosferatu is our annual refresher in the spectacle of meticulous horror filmmaking. Handling such a canonical legacy poses the difficulty of deciding what is modern exploration and what is unnecessary interference with the workings of a century-year old myth. If anything, Stoker’s story reminds us not to fix what isn’t broken, and vampires rarely break.
