Cineworld blog editor Sean Wilson explains why he finds Robert Eggers' bold new take on Nosferatu so scary, and how this informs the wider appeal of horror cinema.
The tagline for the classic 1982 horror movie Poltergeist reads, 'It knows what scares you.' The line, which doubles up as a quote from the film, is an economic marvel, suggesting the sentient intelligence of something purely evil and malevolent, thereby priming us for the viewing experience to come.
That said, why do things scare us specifically? What is someone's genetic makeup that makes them scared of (to name but a few) spiders, the dark, flying or confined spaces? A lot of people would say this is informed by contextual experience: a negative childhood experience with dogs, for example, might lead someone to be scared of them for life.
However, this gets trickier to identify when we broach the fictional realm of horror cinema. We perceive that we're engaging with something fictional and fantastical, and yet a good horror film will still extend its talons and get under our skin to exploit an intangible, deep-rooted sense of fear.
I've never met a vampire and I'm not sure I even believe in them, despite the wealth of folklore stretching back millennia. So why does a character like Nosferatu hit me on a gut level when I can identify it as a fabulist, heightened piece of construction that bears no relation to reality as I perceive it?
I'm thinking of this because director Robert Eggers is now presenting his new take on the Nosferatu folklore. Eggers' adaptation is the third Nosferatu feature film following the 1922 silent film (subtitled 'A Symphony of Terror'), directed by F.W. Murnau, and the 1979 iteration directed by Werner Herzog.
The 1922 version stars Max Shreck as the eponymous vampire Count Orlok, alias 'Nosferatu' (an archaic Romanian term for 'the unpleasant one'). It was an unofficial remake of Bram Stoker's seminal 1897 vampire text Dracula, recapitulating key elements of the book's narrative while installing new character names in a bid to circumvent copyright.
That said, it didn't work. Stoker's widow was so incensed by the film that she demanded all copies of it be destroyed. Fortunately, a few negatives were smuggled into the United States, instigating the birth of a seminal German Expressionist text that largely defined the relationship between light and shade in horror cinema.
Even today, the spindly, long-fingered shadow of Count Orlok ascending the staircase is a shorthand for impulsive, skin-prickling terror, one that few other chillers have matched, save, perhaps, the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock's seminal Psycho (1960).
Given that the shadow of Nosferatu has lingered over horror cinema for more than a century, Eggers impressively manages to locate fresh impetus and nuance in his film. One senses how Eggers is building on his critical horror triumphs The Witch (2016), The Lighthouse (2020) and The Northman (2022), each of which is renowned for infusing period-specific authenticity with rich character-led drama and menacing atmosphere.
Eggers' greatest achievement is how he relocates the story more explicitly around the character of Ellen Hutter, who was somewhat marginalised as a wallflower victim in the Murnau version. In Werner Herzog's take, she had somewhat more agency when realised by actor Isabelle Adjani, playing opposite Klaus Kinski as Orlok.
Eggers, however, builds his tale around Ellen (emphatically portrayed by Lily-Rose Depp) from the off. In the process, Eggers locates the heart of female sexual repression and identity that has always underpinned classic Gothic vampire stories – it calls to mind John William Polidori's 1819 short story The Vampyre and Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 book Carmilla, both of which are acknowledged as influences on Bram Stoker's Dracula.
It is Ellen who opens the story with an invocation to the monster who has stalked her nightmares since childhood. Ellen is increasingly terrified by the seductive possibilities of an arcane evil that she barely understands and which seems to exist primarily within her subconscious – until the moment that it doesn't.
Enter Bill Skarsgard's hulking Count Orlok who is an awesome spectacle of monstrous revulsion. He has brokered a property deal with Ellen's husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), whom Orlok traps inside his remote Carpathian mountain castle, and arrives in her German town of Wisborg to make Ellen his own.
The imagined becomes actualised and the metaphorical becomes physical as the hideous Orlok goes on a plague-ridden rampage to satisfy his desires. That said, is it only his desires that are being satisfied? Ellen starts to grapple with the notion that she as much as anything is the instigating agent in the horror that unfolds.
It's easy to perceive why Skarsgard's Orlok is so terrifying. This Orlok is much more of a moldering brute of an animal than the Max Shreck and Klaus Kinski iterations and allows Skarsgard, already entrenched in our minds as Pennywise from the IT films (2017 and 2019) to firmly put his stamp on a classic character.
On a basic level, the actor's height combines with astute costume decisions (from costumer Linda Muir, working from traditional Transvylanian designs) and a raspy death rattle of a voice to create an imposing sense of threat. He's as tall as he is wide, augmented by Eggers' discreet use of full-body shots that invoke stomach-sinking fear when Orlok eventually steps out of the shadows.
Orlok is the embodiment of every childhood nightmare: massive, unstoppable and possessed of a cunning intelligence who, by his very inhumanity, knows how to exploit every human weakness. For me, it called to mind the fear I had around clowns at a young age, initiated by a chance glimpse of a standee of Tim Curry's Pennywise from IT (1990) at the local video store.
All of that is relatively easy to explain, but the claustrophobic sense of oppression I felt from this version of Nosferatu (and I very much mean that as a compliment) goes deeper. Truthfully, the real fear comes from the acute vulnerability and hysteria baked into Lily-Rose Depp's outstanding performance, once again underlining the notion that horror films work best when they come from a place of empathy.
This version of Nosferatu suggests that evil is inescapable, even when it exists inside one's head. We are all determined by our subconscious thoughts, and from these thoughts spring nebulous, deep-seated desires that force us to confront the darker parts of our nature.
In one of the film's quietest but most chilling scenes, the tremulous Ellen confesses a dream vision to her spouse Thomas. She admits to being attracted by the stench of death and destruction on her wedding night, which subsequently transfigures her entire outlook on marriage, existence and identity.
The waking hours are barely a reprieve from the real monster lurking within. We all imagine ourselves as the heroes of a particular narrative, but what if our latent subconscious repositioned us as the villains of other people's stories? Orlok's physical presence when he finally arrives ensures that, for Ellen at least, this becomes a horrible reality.
Eggers' film therefore strikes fear into us on two different levels. It grapples with the nebulous parts of our human psyche, suggesting that we are the agents of our destruction, and it also serves the outward needs of a classic monster movie, taking us up close and personal to manifest evil.
Little wonder that I felt the walls closing in right from the start, augmented by cinematographer Jarin Blaschke's superb cinematography, which adopts a painterly, almost greyscale vision of death and destruction. It all feels like a horrible waking nightmare and there are few things more terrifying than a lucid dream, wanting to move and escape but being unable to.
This is the delicious (no pun intended) conundrum of Robert Eggers' Nosferatu. It asks us to dance with the devil and sup at his feast, something we'd be loath to do in real life but which invites an appalled sense of fascination when filtered through the medium of a horror film.
This is true of all iterations of the Nosferatu legend. The Max Shreck version is a haunting fairy tale monster made real whereas Klaus Kinski's take re-imagined the character as more of a tragic figure who's doomed by his desires.
They and the Eggers/Skarsgard take all invite a level of discomfort akin to looking into a funhouse mirror: we're seeing a fantastical distortion of reality and yet there is still truth contained within, just amplified with grotesque contours and edges.
Horror movies allow us to ride the edge of taste and the limits of our own humanity, taking us right up the psychological line where we threaten to become bestial and then retreating when the credits start rolling. There's something oddly cathartic about this experience: we've engaged with the darkness but, owing to the fact it's a film, we won't suffer lasting physical harm.
Psychologically, though? That's a different ballpark and it's always the sign of a great horror movie when it stays with you and exposes a deep-seated truth about oneself that would be better off left buried.
As with the previous films, Robert Eggers' Nosferatu embodies all of these facets. It's a beautiful nightmare that I couldn't wait to wake up from, but which I'm perversely delighted to have experienced. Even more so, I'm willing to experience it again.
Nosferaru is released on January 1st, 2025.
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