Nosferatu: a risk-taking reimagining of the foundational movie vampire

The issue of how perverse it is to remake F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) – an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula which diverges greatly from its source but not greatly enough to dodge a plagiarism suit – was settled in 1979 when Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre came out the same week as John Badham’s Dracula (and the Stan Dragoti comedy Love at First Bite). Yes, it’s an odd notion – like, say, remaking Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) or James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931) – but Murnau casts significant shadows on Dracula, aptly, since the vampire’s grasping silhouette is a key element carried over into writer-director Robert Eggers’ new reimagining, which dispenses with any subtitle and is just called Nosferatu.  

Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) recreates many key images from Murnau but uses Stoker’s character names. Eggers fixes his version to the location and period of the original (Wisborg, Germany, 1838) and features Count Orlok rather than Dracula. Elements introduced in Nosferatu (1922) filter into many versions of Dracula – the crumble-to-dust-at-daybreak finish – and so don’t seem quite as welded to Nosferatu as other unique features used by Herzog which Eggers can take or leave. Given that by far the most distinctive aspect of Murnau’s Nosferatu is the look of Max Schreck’s Orlok – bald, rat-eared and fanged, shaped like a stick-insect in a corsetted frock coat – it’s a surprise Eggers goes with so little of it.  

When Schreck first scuttles out of shadows, Murnau is so fascinated by the creature he stages many shots which show off his (astonishing) image. But Eggers cuts the moment with Orlok disguised as the coachman bringing Thomas Hutter (here played by Nicholas Hoult) to the castle and has a driverless carriage do the job. The director then stages Thomas’s soul-destroying, mind-wrecking ordeal in the castle – Hoult gets his second impressive turn as ‘Dracula’s bitch’ after Renfield (2023) – without fully showing the antagonist onscreen or in focus. Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) remains in shadow or silhouette throughout, only seen clearly in the light of breaking dawn which not only kills him but renders him a pathetic, chicken-legged wreck.  

It’s possible that Orlok is distinct from the common-or-garden strigoi (vampire). Perhaps this Nosferatu is a human-shaped instrument of corruption and evil who drinks from gnawed wounds in a vampire-fashion but is as capable of spreading his baleful influence across Europe without obvious fangs. That Skarsgård’s Orlok doesn’t look like Schreck – or Kinski or Reggie Nalder in ‘Salem’s Lot (1979) or many other copycat king vampires – is a bold move on Eggers’ part, but it seems Nosferatu’s pop culture afterlife (he’s a semi-regular on Spongebob Squarepants) has rendered the once-fearsome rat-face almost familiar. 

Skarsgård may not look like any previous film Nosferatu/Dracula but is close to the description of the Count in the novel: its precedents are illustrations of Dracula editions from 1897 to 1922, created by artists who only had Stoker’s words to go on. This Orlok has a bit of a beak but not the hook-nose often taken for an antisemitic trope. He has a blood-dripping moustache like the historical Vlad the Impaler and a frogged coat which might suggest military rank or just that it’s bloody cold in his ruined castle. The scabby sores on his skin look more like symptoms of venereal disease than plague. Several times, he’s seen naked – and it’s not a pleasant sight. Herzog’s film was an homage, but Eggers’ is a reimagining – a risky, uncomfortable prospect which requires the director to add a great deal of his own material.

In a new twist, this Nosferatu is a Christmas movie – we’re told that Knock (Simon McBurney) has run riot in Wisborg’s Christmas market, a bourgeois home has a decorated tree and Orlok’s visitations to Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) are on the pattern of the ghosts besetting Scrooge on three successive nights which roll together, as if the monster fractures time itself. A fresh set-up (which comes from J.S. LeFanu’s pre-Dracula 1872 novella ‘Carmilla’) has Orlok first appear to Ellen in a childhood dream, securing a lifelong vampire’s invitation which dooms them both. 

In The Witch (2015), Eggers’ ambiguous devil recruits a young woman cast out by puritanical early Americans to ‘live deliciously’; Orlok has much in common with Black Phillip, but only promises ruination. In common with Eggers’ The Lighthouse (2019), this calls on craggy, quixotic Willem Dafoe – who wore the Max Schreck face in Shadow of the Vampire (2000) – to provide grotesque comic relief as an ineffectual Van Helsing analogue. Often monochrome but not in black and white, the imagery is perpetually on the point of blurring, like drawings left out in the rain. Thundering music and overlaid dialogue – Orlok speaks in guttural, subtitled primitive argot – constantly amp up the dread. Like The Northman (2022), Eggers’ primal sword and sorcery take on Hamlet, his Nosferatu takes the skeleton of a foundational text (arguably, two of them – Murnau and Stoker) and clads the bones with his own obsessions and interests.   

► Nosferatu is in UK cinemas on 1 January 2025.