Robert Eggers only needs a few moments and you are captivated by his dark imagery. Be it the banishment from civilization in “The Witch”, the boat that sails out of the fog to the “Lighthouse”, or the invocation to the gods in “The Northman”. Also “Nosferatu – The Undead“ builds on this strength and captivates you, there’s not even anything to see on the screen. At first only a music box sounds. Wind whistles softly in the room. Then a whimper joins in. A young woman is visited by evil at night. She stands praying at the window before she is attacked while sleepwalking in the park and the camera pans down into the ground. The prologue is an announcement: Welcome to the cinema of graves and dead!
Eggers is following in big footsteps with his long-planned remake. “Nosferatu – A Symphony of Horror” by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau was published in 1922 as an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” and is still one of the most formative horror milestones ever. Just don't make any mistakes, Eggers seems to have thought. And so his new film is based closely on Murnau's classic, which brings horror to the fictional German port town of Wisborg.
Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) and his good friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) have no idea what threat has targeted their hometown.
The newly married Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Transylvania in 1838 by his cunning boss (Simon McBurney) to complete the house purchase from Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). The disaster begins when Thomas finds out that Orlok is a vampire who wants to move into an old castle in his neighborhood. In addition, the undead bloodsucker has long since kept an eye on Thomas' wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who stays at home…
This remake will not win an originality award. You could quickly conclude that you have already seen it all several times. Not just in countless adaptations that directly refer to Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” novel. “Nosferatu” was also re-released once – in 1979 by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski as a vampire. Eggers' vision is thoroughly traditional and true to the work. She doesn't even try to fundamentally change history. In this respect, “Nosferatu” undoubtedly has its lengths and repetitive dry spells. Especially since Eggers extends the originally hour and a half silent film by a good half hour.
Visually stunning gothic horror cinema
Nevertheless – and this is where the film becomes particularly interesting for newcomers – the director has managed to create an old-master gothic horror film that is staged with a great knowledge of its genre and the underlying material. First of all, his remake looks extremely impressive visually. Here too, Eggers draws heavily on the silent film template, citing its high-contrast aesthetics and some famous shots. The typical Eggers meticulousness with which he reconstructs a bygone era and who likes to rely solely on natural light when filming may seem outdated, but it results in deeply atmospheric images. Its eerie, romantic motifs and play with darkness and shadows are just as frightening as in the iconic original.
“Nosferatu” should therefore definitely be enjoyed in the dark of the cinema and on the big screen. His many long shots and atmospheric images are best shown there. The episode in the vampire castle in particular is wonderfully classic, effective horror cinema in its choreographies of when the camera makes who or what appear. When you think you see a throne with a devilish figure in the half-darkness, before the illusion turns out to be a coffin upon closer inspection, Eggers brings up all the will-o'-the-wisp horror that vampire horror and gothic cinema have in store.
For Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the vampire's arrival also means a psychosexual awakening – and with it an escape from the patriarchal rules.
But why “Nosferatu” again in the 21st century? Maybe because the apocalyptic feeling of the original is so present again today? Even more excessive and darker than Murnau and Herzog, Eggers celebrates the delayed arrival of evil, which attacks the city with a symbolic plague. “He’s coming,” is said again and again. The anticipation of horror is more nerve-wracking than its eventual arrival. It takes on a truly ritualistic quality, as the end of the familiar world is invoked – sometimes with occult blood magic. Everyone is heading towards the abyss here. For too long, the image of foreign enemies has obscured the causes of fear within society.
At this point, “Nosferatu” makes some sharpenings that fit in perfectly with the director’s previous work. He precisely demonstrates the various layers of interpretation of the mythical vampire story. Is this the fear of submission or even the longing for it? The film theorist Siegfried Kracauer once read the original as a harbinger of the approaching National Socialism and the vampire as an authoritarian tyrant. Are you afraid of old fundamentalism and superstition suddenly infecting a society that considers itself modern? “Nosferatu” suggests both readings and thus updates explosive, still current topics.
Lust and decay
Above all, Eggers brings out the erotic component. Not in the sense that he just lets the vampire roam around as a seducer. With him, everything is so theoretically abstracted and conceived in disturbing, picturesque images that sexual desire and self-annihilation inexorably converge. The flirtation with death as the ultimate ecstasy is adapted here with drastic physical effects even more radically than was the case in the original. This is also successful because Eggers puts the Ellen character and thus the female perspective more in focus. His film critically reflects a patriarchal world that uses internalized roles to determine exactly who closes shops, who stays at home and what marital duty and sin mean. The suffering trip, Ellen's obsession, her unleashed desire is now shaking this system.
Eggers stages “Nosferatu” as a battle with instincts, as a marital drama in which at some point tortured and haunted bodies compete for sexual satisfaction and the symbolic end of the world is interlinked with eternal self-punishment and social hostility to pleasure. This is particularly intense when Bill Skarsgård is involved as a walking, decaying corpse to which the characters gradually succumb in an ambivalent, almost sadomasochistic relationship. With every echoing sentence, his Count Orlok seems to breathe the foul breath of plague into the world. An impressively disfigured undead with a mustache and a fur coat! If you didn't know who was hiding under the elaborate masquerade, you wouldn't recognize the Pennywise actor from the “IT” films at all.
Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) is closely based on the classic Dracula figure of the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing.
What remains is a film that seems both timeless and contemporary and reactionary, out of time. Robert Eggers' allusive cinema has always been backward-looking and restorative, including in its design. It strives for the old and traditional. His myths, legends, fairy tales and legends seek the timeless and universal. This opens up areas for attack, especially since with “Nosferatu” and “Dracula” you can’t actually ignore the historical baggage that also resonates there. Eggers doesn't want to know or reflect on the devastating stereotypes and enemy images between the progressive West here and the demonic East there, which have long prevailed and have influenced the models artistically.
At the same time, it can hardly be denied that with his “Nosferatu” he has not only made one of the most technically impressive vampire films in a long time. He films the psychosexual underpinnings and all the thematic layers that make the bloodsucker myth so fascinating, with a range and a desire for bloody horror that consoles many weaknesses. Perhaps that is the real quality of such a remake: that it sparks such great joy in digging once again into the material that was believed to be familiar, its sources and pitfalls worth discussing.
Conclusion: It is questionable whether Robert Eggers' new adaptation will achieve a similar status as FW Murnau's silent film classic. On the other hand, it is a bit slow in parts and relies too much on the familiar. However, in terms of horror, atmosphere and narrative complexity, it can easily keep up with the original. “Nosferatu – The Undead” is an old-school horror piece at its finest.