Nosferatu (2024)
Directed by Robert Eggers
A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.
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40 films that influenced Nosferatu
What critics say influenced Nosferatu
Depp throws herself into the role, often literally, bringing an alarming physicality that invokes Isabelle Adjani's terrifying performance in Andrzej Żuławski's "Possession," a manic psychosexual film that seems to have greatly influenced what Eggers is going for here.
Depp, on the other hand, as a woman possessed of an ancient evil, attempts to channel Isabelle Adjani in Possession on multiple occasions, but she just doesn’t have the chops to make her emotional disintegration anything less than hysterical and a big miss for me.
The latest in recent run of young actresses in horror films to channel Isabelle Adjani in Possession…
But not Adjani as Ellen/Mina, but rather the French star’s iconic turn in Zulawski’s Possession (1981)…
Ellen Hutter reminded me so much of Anna from Possession (1981).
Eggers draws more attention to Ellen and her Possession-like convulsions…
It was only a matter of time before Eggers sunk his teeth into Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He approaches the vampire legend through the inky shadows of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent masterwork, which he acknowledges as a formative influence, with maybe a sideways nod here and there to the 1979 Werner Herzog remake and even to Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque 1992 retelling. Eggers’ Nosferatu, however, is its own mesmeric creation, a superlative match of director and material.
Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula remains one of the most adapted novels of all time, originating with director F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation and lauded horror classic Nosferatu. Nosferatu, for all the creative departures it took in an effort to mask its retelling of Dracula, inspired a slew of adaptations and spiritual successors of its own.
Nosferatu is Germany's unauthorized version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the finest example of eluding copyright if there ever was one.
The subtitle of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent feature Nosferatu—an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula that became a touchstone for both cinema scholars and fright-movie buffs—was true to its grandly German Expressionist vision: “A Symphony of Horror.”
As the title states, Nosferatu is a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror - which was based on Bram Stoker’s "Dracula" (and also inspired Werner Herzog’s 1979 version).
For all the talk about Nicolas Cage in Longlegs, that transformation cannot even hold a candle to Nosferatu (2024)’s depiction of Count Orlok.
Earlier this year, I declared that Longlegs was the scariest movie of the year. I should have written “so far” because Nosferatu chewed it up and swallowed it.
…the inflation of this theme obscures the film’s vampirism and falls squarely alongside the more popular kind of contagion, as seen already in several 2024 releases (Longlegs, Immaculate, The First Omen, Late Night with the Devil).
…the Buffy/Angel arc on Buffy the Vampire Slayer…
Ellen, you would loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s “Becoming” arc!
I’d personally be happy if every vampire looked like Angel from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
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…tapping CGI to make Orlok’s shadow blanket the town where Murnau used miniatures in Faust is more inspired.
Eggers nods at another F.W. Murnau classic, “Faust,” with a shot of the shadow of the count’s long-nailed hand extending over Wisborg.
Horror movies have followed in the tenebrous footsteps of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu for over a hundred years. A 1922 German silent picture, this chilling adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula effectively laid the groundwork for many of horror’s most recognisable trademarks, from gothic visuals to orchestral scores and creepy figures lurking in the dark.
Director Robert Eggers breathes new life into “Nosferatu’s” withered lungs, staying true to his gorgeously gothic aesthetic while at the same time paying tribute to F. W. Murnau’s classic 1922 film.
Robert Eggers fought fang-and-nail for roughly a decade to remake Nosferatu. Passion is brimming from Eggers' melancholy interpretation of F. W. Murnau's 1920s vampire classic…
It wants to be Murnau’s original but Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein is in the way.
Where the earlier film climaxes by casting the silhouette of a vampire against a solid wall, this new one starts by projecting the same image across the soft white curtains of its heroine’s bedroom window…
Eggers’s reverence for Murnau’s film is obvious from how safe he plays it with his storytelling.
In 2019’s The Lighthouse, he recovered and re-envisioned the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe by marooning two nineteenth-century lighthouse keepers in the same space as a tentacled Lovecraftian monster to better orchestrate a fever dream about fragile masculinity and the menace of isolation.
It is, you might say, the film he was born to (re)make, for the talon-prints of Murnau’s spectral frightshow are evident on Eggers’ first three period films, The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman.
And while the monstrous mermaid in The Lighthouse isn’t a fully fledged character, her mixture of aggression and sensuality toward wickie Ephraim Winslow is one of the film’s defining motifs, a representation of both the allure and unknowability of the natural world and, maybe, of a woman’s mind.
…a straight line could be drawn from the shadowy crookedness of German Expressionism in early cinema to The Lighthouse or The Witch.
A mermaid looms over a delirious descent into madness of two lighthouse keepers in 1890s New England in The Lighthouse.
…a similar moment occurs in Eggers’s The Lighthouse (2019) when Winslow (Robert Pattinson) is beating Wake (Willem Dafoe) and he sees Wake briefly take on the form of a seductive siren, whom Winslow kisses.
While seeking to avenge the death of his father, a Viking prince is faced with betrayal and uncertainty in The Northman.
Or Queen Gudrún in The Northman, starting a new family with her brother-in-law after he killed her husband; whether she was actually being abused or pursuing her own desires is ambiguous.
It strikes a happy medium between the brooding, abstract moodiness of his first two films and the more conventional narrative structure of The Northman…
…after The VVitch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, we know to expect complete sensory immersion…
Eggers, now four features into a career that has included 2015's The VVitch, 2019's The Lighthouse, and 2022's The Northman…
[READ MORE: Our review of ‘The Northman‘ directed by Robert Eggers and starring Alexander Skarsgård]…
…you have genuine train wrecks like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Psycho, and The Wolfman…
…was Gus Van Sant's Psycho…
…there’s an expectation for this dual adaptation to rival the lukewarm receptions of last year’s Renfield, The Last Voyage of the Demeter, and even this year’s underrated Abigail…
The Last Voyage of the Demeter…
…a “Last Voyage of the Demeter” sequence that’s short on fresh ideas…
…full feature films have been made about just one subplot (spoiler alert for 2023’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter).
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Shadow of the Vampire…
…in 2000, Willem Dafoe portrayed the first Nosferatu actor, Max Schreck, in the horror film Shadow of the Vampire…
In the 2000 movie “Shadow of the Vampire” (a fictionalized depiction of the making of the 1922 silent “Nosferatu”), John Malkovich plays Germany’s F.W. Murnau, obsessed with “authentic” horror.
…or knowing Willem Dafoe played Count Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire…
…or even “Shadow of the Vampire” (2000)…
Schrek’s performance is so inhuman that Eggers’s Van Helsing (Willem Dafoe, perfect, no notes) played the actor as an actual bloodsucker in Shadow of the Vampire.
…the 1979 Dracula directed by John Badham with Frank Langella as Dracula…
Comparisons to previous Dracula adaptations are inescapable — Frank Langella’s 1979 version or Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version starring Gary Oldman, for example…
He’s not exactly a sexy vampire, like Frank Langella in John Badham’s 1979 Dracula…