Nosferatu Revamped

A century after the original, the legendary Vampire Count returns to the silver screen. (2024)

Carnality runs like a river of blood through Robert Eggers’ adaptation of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu. Naked maidens, escorted on horseback by nomadic peasants, are offered up as human sacrifices in a Transylvanian village. An effluvia-smeared madman sits nude in a bloody heptagram and screams his desire to serve his Lord. A young woman suffers recurring nightmares of marrying a physical incarnation of Death while her family perishes in the church rows. And, set against this viscera, a newly married German couple — the Hutters — confront a series of increasingly seismic challenges to their tender but fragile wedlock.

The first of these is a forced separation, for Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), an up-and-coming real estate salesman, must embark on a perilous solo journey into deepest Transylvania, leaving wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) behind in Wisborg. Why must he go, Ellen demands, so soon after their marriage? Because, as Thomas’ employer Herr Knock explains, an enigmatic but affluent client by the name of Count Orloff (Bill Skarsgard) has set his sights on a new home to which he can retire, in Wisborg of all places. The Count, however, refuses to budge from his citadel until he has a signed contract in place. Thus Thomas Hutter, like so many young professionals since the dawn of time, embarks on a business trip to retrieve Orloff’s gilded signature and thereby secure his family’s prosperity.

And so Nosferatu gets underway, this modern retelling of an (unauthorised) adaptation of the classic Bram Stoker novel Dracula. To state the obvious, a lot has happened in the world of film in the last century, but the task facing Robert Eggers remains broadly the same as in 1922: to entrance, mesmerise, and terrify. And for fans of the original, it is pleasing that the new film works best when it draws directly from the source material.

Like its predecessor, Nosferatu is rich in Gothic imagery. Its bleak, wind-ravaged Transylvania is blighted by wolves, and peopled sparsely by superstitious Roma peasants. A mysterious horse drawn carriage, with coach and horses black as jet, materialises out of the night and ferries Thomas to the towering gates of Count Orloff’s ghastly, crumbling fortress. When the Count sets sail for Wisborg, storm clouds portending his arrival gather over the sleepy city and break violently over churches with jagged steeples, in the best tradition of German Expressionism. And when, finally, the Count’s ship wrecks itself in a Wisborg port, emitting a stream of rats, the locals mutter darkly to one another of a disastrous plague. The symbols all seem to say the same thing: something wicked this way comes…

Which brings us to Nosferatu himself. Popular fiction and film have often muddled vampires’ overt sexuality — their deathlessness, their blood-drinking, their androgyny — with actual sexiness. No such luck here. Even within the pantheon of the undead, Skarsgard’s Nosferatu belongs in the exalted class. Blanched skin, raw-boned face, an enormous moustache that barely conceals protruding fangs. The Count’s eyes are all cornea, his voice is all gravel. And his body is strangely hirsute, which you see all too clearly in the full frontal shots (did I mention the full frontal shots?) which also give us ample opportunity to observe his supernatural genitalia.

But of all the Count’s hideous features, most disturbing are his hands: phallic claws that hang from his wrists like diseased rats. Wherever Nosferatu goes he is preceded by them, and the film’s most cinematic scene is an aerial shot of Wisborg at dusk, as the shadow of his tendril-like fingers reaches across the town.

Against this immortal foe the young Hutters and their allies must pit themselves. The ensuing struggle, which comprises the whole second half of the film, is the eternal one: the battle between dark and light, between love and death. But always in the foreground — and this is what Nosferatu is really about — the twin forces of lust and desire.

Lust infuses virtually every scene, whether between Ellen and Thomas or between the Count and one of his victims. And the Count has eyes for Ellen, too… In a departure from vampire tradition, when Nosferatu feasts on human blood, he drinks from the heart rather than the neck, a distinction which emphasises rather than diminishes his eroticism. As he utters in one memorable scene, “I am an appetite. Nothing more.” The confrontation between Nosferatu’s animal-like bloodlust and the pure, conjugal love Ellen feels for her husband is the crucible in which the film’s final half hour crackles and smoulders.

A word on the acting. From relatively little, Simon McBurney produces a memorably deranged performance as Herr Knock, Thomas’ erstwhile employer. Skarsgard brilliantly embodies — vocally as much as physically — the terrible Count, and his early scenes opposite Hoult in the Transylvania Castle foster a claustrophobic, nightmarish tension that pervades the rest of the film. But it is Depp’s performance as Thomas’ wife Ellen — tender but unsure, loving but conflicted — that hangs like a crystal in this brutal, male-dominated picture: defiant, compelling, and beautiful.

For all this, Nosferatu succeeds for the same reason that its predecessor did a century ago. It is chilling, tense, even shocking. But what lingers most, more haunting than the graphic set-pieces and evocative cinematography, is the story, with its subtle but inescapable message that love’s inverse is death. And that beneath even the purest and most unblemished love, monsters lurk, rubbing their ancient, unclean hands.