However, he finally filmed the thing after his unsettling The Lighthouse (2019) and compromised The Northman (2022), and although the end product is too long (surprise!), it’s also often gloriously frightening.
The original Nosferatu (one of the most famed and influential movies ever made) was, of course, a pirate version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which results in the odd fact that this was inspired by Murnau’s film, Stoker’s novel, director Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake Nosferatu The Vampyre, and a toothy bunch of other vampy classics.
Shot mainly in the Czech Republic (and a little in Toronto and Romania), we open in Wisborg, Germany, in 1838, where young real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) lives with his new wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). When he’s offered financial security if he travels to the faraway castle of the mysterious Count Orlok, he departs despite Ellen’s fears, and she’s left to dangerously sleepwalk and experience socially awkward erotic dreams.
After Hutter’s hallucinatory journey, director Eggers recreates some of the silent film’s key shots and scenes quite closely, despite the fact that this Orlok is strikingly different from Max Schreck’s (the silent Orlok) or Klaus Kinski’s (the Herzog Orlok). As played with a kind of feverish dedication by Bill Skarsgård (who also portrayed Pennywise The Clown in the It movies), this Count is finally revealed as some bizarre hybrid of Cossack, plague victim, junkie 1970s rock star, and Davros (creator of the Daleks in old-school Doctor Who).
Naturally, Orlok comes to Wisborg (via the Demeter in Dracula), bringing rats, disease, and terror, and we’re treated to an elaborate combination of the feral fears of the silent film and the sickly psychic sexuality of the 1979 version. And Eggers’ cast rise to the Gothic occasion, especially a wonderfully weird Willem Dafoe (from this director’s The Lighthouse), who nearly played Orlok but instead appears as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a wildly eccentric Van Helsing variation who’s fairly hopeless when things get pestilent.
Who knew that all-encompassing ancient evil could be so bloody beautiful?
