Vampire pics are a perennial. Tales of undead blood suckers are probably the sturdiest horror film subgenre—outranking Frankenstein’s monster or, say, zombies—largely because of their morbid sexual component.
Typically, vampires sneak into their victims’ bedrooms late at night while they’re asleep, loosen the victims’ clothing, enter their dreams, and mount them in order to bite them and drain their blood. Those who survive are left in a somnambulistic daze. They typically wonder out loud, before they “die” and become vampires themselves, about this sensual, recurring nightmare they can’t seem to escape.
F.W. Murnau made the single best vampire film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, as a silent in Germany in 1922. Of all the various remakes and spinoffs, among the scariest are Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932), Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the Hammer Films remakes, especially Terence Fisher’s 1958 Horror of Dracula. Most of the rest are burlesques.
With that in mind, we arrive at writer-director Robert Eggers’ brand-new Nosferatu with a certain weary wariness. Surely we already know everything this kind of film could ever show us.
Eggers—maker of such iffy oddities as The Lighthouse and The Witch—hews closely to the Murnau and Herzog versions with his tale of a strange foreigner with evil intentions, vamping on a placid 19th-century European family.
Decadent undead nobleman Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) fits into the moldy gothic milieu quite adequately, but it’s Eggers’ disturbing scene construction that draws the viewer in. The modified black-and-white settings in Wisburg and Transylvania objectify various night terrors—frightened Rom villagers, a naked young woman on a horse, incomprehensible Romanian dialogue and above all Orlok’s castle, with its deep-black recesses. It’s a place where nothing lives.
The ancient names of Paracelsus and Agrippa, stirred into the discussion by learned Professor Albin von Franz (Willem Dafoe, dependable yet too familiar in this sort of costumer), only reinforce the murky mysticism. The dread enveloping the figure of Orlok is the dread of decomposing flesh come to life and now suddenly clawing at the existence of ordinary, unassuming people. Men and women with warm blood in their veins. The idea of Orlok’s apparent eternal invincibility is more frightening than any makeup effect.
Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter and his melancholic wife Ellen (overmatched Lily-Rose Depp) offer only token resistance to the threatening forces around them. Under Orlok’s influence, Ellen kisses Thomas in a way he’s never been kissed before. Meanwhile, the experience of their friend Anna Harding (Emma Corrin) is truly terrifying—being haunted by a fiendish Carpathian vampire is no way to spend a period of gestation.
Contrast the travails of these discomfited bourgeois folks with the plight of real estate agent Knock (Simon McBurney), Count Orlok’s insane, lick-spittle slave, confined in a Victorian madhouse yet monstrously obedient to his master’s commands. The vampire/Dracula subgenre has enjoyed some delightfully gaudy performances by its Renfields/Knocks over the years: the unforgettable Dwight Frye, Tom Waits, Roland Topor and Richard Jenkins (a standout in Matt Reeves’ Let Me In) immediately come to mind. McBurney’s Knock tends the garden admirably.
Eggers’ Nosferatu is not perfect. There’s too much superfluous dialogue, and the omnipresent sound cues detract from the creepiness—Murnau’s silence was far more disconcerting. When Ellen goes into Exorcist-style paroxysms in one scene, her husband shtups her violently—what kind of supernatural sexuality is that? As for Dafoe’s learned expert, when that actor turns on the sub-Freudian blather, there’s nowhere else to go.
The moody black-and-white cinematography of Jarin Blaschke is the best reason to stay with this well-intentioned tribute to the vampires of the past. There are a few nicely composed scenes, but nothing to make us forget about, for instance, Chloë Grace Moretz’s feral teenager in Let Me In. Eggers’ Nosferatu is a reminder of other, better horror films. Let it rest in peace.
Playing at Cinelux in Capitola, Scotts Valley and Watsonville; and Santa Cruz Cinema.
