'Nosferatu' is the Very Specific Dracula Dads Crave
Tim Burton is the goth director for theater kids, Robert Eggers is the goth director for history majors.
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Robert Eggers has the rare distinction among directors, an honor possibly unique unto him, of being, if anything, too committed to the atmospheres he’s creating. He has a tendency to make movies that are so transporting, usually to environments of pure dread, that you worry you’ll never make it back again. It can be distracting.
Watching his movies I’ve discovered, at times, that maybe I don’t actually want to be in the head space of a 19th century lighthouse keeper slowly losing his mind, or a 17th century English colonist whose daughter has been possessed by the devil. Eggers is the only director I can think of who occasionally makes me yearn for additional markers of artifice, if only for reassurance. I approach his work with a sense of deep admiration and also a little fear. May the man never make a non-period piece.
If that sounds to you like the exact kind of guy you want directing a Dracula movie… oh yeah, man. Fuck yes. Abso-goddamn-lutely. Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is one of the most “no-notes”-ass movies I’ve ever seen.
If Tim Burton is the goth director for theater kids, Eggers is the goth director for history majors (and/or English majors). If the Dracula legend has arguably gotten overly theatrical over the years (see: Francis Ford Coppola’s disjointed 1992 version, which we reviewed on the podcast), leave it to Eggers to remind us that Dracula isn’t just a spooky story: it’s also a reflection of a very specific moment in history.
It works both ways too; as much as Dracula needs Eggers, Eggers needs Dracula. His maniacal commitment to the bit is the perfect companion to a story whose relevance is normally taken for granted or played for camp. And also him working from a property whose beats most of us already know by heart is actually a gift. A little camp in an Eggers movie means you can just marinate in the dread and terror without worrying about it being your undoing (I still wouldn’t take anyone under 15 to see Nosferatu).
Oh hey, about that title! Why isn’t it just called “Dracula,” like the 1897 novel by Irishman Bram Stoker?
Because Nosferatu is specifically a remake of FW Murnau’s 1922 expressionist silent film, Nosferatu. Back then, Nosferatu (a title supposedly taken from an archaic Romanian term meaning “the offensive one”) was “a low-budget film made by Germans for German audiences” (per film historian David Kalat) — most of the names and settings having been changed in order to make them more familiar to those Germans. Meaning, yes, one of the most legendary silent films of all time essentially began as a German Jackie Jormp-Jomp take on Dracula.
This Nosferatu being a remake of that one, so it is that we get Thomas Hutter rather than Jonathan Harker, Count Orlock instead of Dracula, and the whole thing being set in the fictional German town Wisborg instead of beginning of England. Mostly stuff for the trivia section of IMDB, but turning the dial ever so slightly more foreign (to English-speaking audiences) works in Nosferatu’s favor. One of the main submotif’s of the whole thing (both versions), after all, is northern and western Europeans’ tendency to see all those dark, mountainous, forested parts of Europe between the Black Sea and the Adriatic (ie, Transylvania) as being inscrutable, forboding and generally a place where ancient and backward traditions still persist, wreaking occasional vengeance on their successors when the opportunities arise. (We also have the American equivalent of this, of the “ancient” world taken revenge against the modern, in Deliverance, plus basically the entire genre of folk horror).
Nicholas Hoult plays Thomas, a business manlet on the make with a brand new wife (Ellen Hutter, played by Lily-Rose Depp) and an adoring mentor — Herr Knock (Ka-NOCK) played by Simon McBurney. McBurney is such a wonderful little weasel, capable of playing his natural rodent-like qualities for both wise, resourceful country mouse and wicked little rat, with Herr Knock being an ideal role allowing for both. Herr Knock has a career-making task for young Thomas: traveling deep into the wilds of Romania to get some ünter-Slavic fossil’s Johan Hancock on the deed to a crumbling estate the firm has just pawned off on him. The deal is done, but the buyer, Count Orlock, demands someone from the firm travel to him before he’ll sign. Why’s he being so weird?? Probably best not to think about it, you know how eccentric these old garlic munchers are! Anyway, this will probably be Thomas’s ticket to being made partner. Doncha want that??
Meanwhile, Ellen desperately wishes Thomas wouldn’t go. And she’s being strangely adamant about it. But then, she’s always had a touch of the melancholy about her, some kooky leftover from an isolated childhood, plus a flair for the dramatic. Nothing the medicine of the time — tighter corsets, bigger vibrators and some bloodletting —wouldn’t cure, most likely. Eventually she relents, and Thomas sets off, over rugged mountains and isolated valleys through bough-enshrouded forest paths beset by howling wolves to the jagged castle of Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgard), an ancient weirdo with the kind of impossibly lanky frame that explains why so many people in his neck of the woods would eventually became so good at basketball. He also has knobby claw hands, beady black eyes, and an impossibly slow and deliberate manner of speaking, trilling his R sounds in ridiculously serrated fashion, even in words that normally wouldn’t possess them. Grrrrrrdddddd eeeeevvvvveennniiiiiinnnnggkkkkkkk. The only thing that seems to animate him is the sight of blood. Veird!
Yes, you kind of know where the story goes from here. But Eggers brings it all so richly and terrifyingly to life that a sense of familiarity is actually a good thing. Skarsgard’s performance, meanwhile, as this decidedly more rotten and corpselike dracula, lives right on the border between camp and pure terror. He’s gross and horrifying, but not altogether undelicious.
“I’ve seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!”
Nosferatu is 134 minutes of living deliciously. And yet much like The Northman was the first riff on Hamlet to make me feel like I actually “got” Hamlet, Nosferatu is the first Dracula movie to make me feel like I finally understood what the story of Dracula was really about — beyond the blood sucking and the dead feeding upon the living and so forth (not unimportant themes, to be fair).