By Quinn Kinsella
“Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu seeks to answer this question posed by Lily-Rose Depp’s character, Ellen Hutter. Director Robert Eggers is no stranger to lavish period pieces steeped in the occult, envisioned by the devout research that makes his films so compelling.
Nosferatu is a passion project; Eggers first saw F. W. Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film as a child. Of his first encounter with the film, Eggers recalls, “I was maybe 9 when I first saw it, and it was very much Max Schreck’s performance [as Count Orlock], and the haunting atmosphere of the film, and how it distills the Dracula story into a simple fairy tale . . .” In high school, Eggers directed a production of Nosferatu where he starred as Orlock himself. The lengthy relationship Eggers has had with this centuries-old horror tale is not dissimilar to the protagonist’s history with the vampire in his adaptation. Eggers has been attempting to get this film made for over a decade, and now that it is finally here, the gothic passion project that has consumed Eggers for years proves to be as hauntingly timeless and relevant as the original.
Robert Eggers will go down as one of the pioneering genre filmmakers of the 21st century. With his debut feature, The Witch, in 2016, he quite literally redefined the horror landscape. Giving rise to the problematic term of “elevated horror,” The Witch saw a major switch in the genre. Years later, with the 2019 black-and-white mystic thriller The Lighthouse, Eggers cemented his singular vision with his signature foreboding atmosphere and constrictive aspect ratio of 1.19:1. His first two films were independent, low-budget features distributed by the then-buzzy production house A24, which has now built an empire off of the auteur directors they put belief and money behind. For his third film, Eggers switched to Focus Features for the estimated 80 million dollar epic The Northman. Released in April 2022, The Northman is a Viking revenge tale, the very story that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Eggers’ third film was his most ambitious, taking on a scale very few directors can pull off while maintaining their auteur status.
In an age where every other theatrical release seems to be a sequel or a remake, some may question the validity of a Nosferatu remake over a century after the release of the original. Eggers is not the first to sink his teeth into the vampire classic, though; legendary director-actor duo Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s 1979 film Nosferatu The Vampyre was a hauntingly stylized and atmospheric take on the vampire story. The original Nosferatu, directed by F. W. Murnau, is a simplified tale of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. Murnau’s 1922 film dilutes Stoker’s story into a simple tale of desire and horror, paying greater attention to the atmosphere and evoking a more stylized horror than the complex plot of the source material. F. W. Murnau and his production company were sued for copyright infringement by Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s widow, for the unlawful use of his novel. Many film prints of the original Nosferatu were lost due to a court order to destroy all remaining copies. Luckily, some survived and were restored, allowing future generations of young viewers to be cast under the same spell a young Robert Eggers was.
As spellbinding as the original was, Eggers’ Nosferatu proves to stand on its own and amid one of the strongest years in film in recent years. For a film that is lauded as being one of the most haunting of the year, Nosferatu also makes a case for being the most visually compelling film of 2024. The movie has been criticized for its bland color palette, but this is Eggers’ intention. A majority of the film takes place during the night, and the nearly entirely black-and-white palette is in dialogue with the original film. The historical accuracy Robert Eggers’ team spent countless hours solidifying this film’s commitment to not only make the best possible movie they could but also a reverence for the rich history and gothic legacy this story upholds. Every stitch in every costume and every intonation of every line is so carefully placed, creating a believable and lived-in 19th-century Germany. I have seen no other movie this year where the production and costume design play as large a role as the actors.
The production design and costume department are one of the core reasons this remake works so well. Craig Lathrop and Linda Muir make Nosferatu the spectacle that it is. Their dedicated research and collaboration with the director make for costumes and sets that are period-accurate to a tee. Both Lathrop and Muir have worked with Eggers since The Witch, and for over a decade, they have formed a creative dialogue visible on-screen. There is an understanding between all collaborators on this film that makes for the sleekest and most polished Eggers movie to date. The heads of production design, Craig Lathrop and Beatrice Brentnervona, were as committed to period authenticity as their director, with countless hours of research going into every curve of every piece of furniture. Linda Muir is spoiled with a script dripping with gothic themes and a deeply troubled gothic heroine, rivaling Cathy in Wuthering Heights and giving a much more nuanced take on the original source material’s heroine, Mina, from Stoker’s Dracula. On dressing Depp’s character, designer Muir says, “In Robert’s version of the Nosferatu story, Ellen has a backstory that I don’t think was present in previous iterations. In the film, she is haunted from childhood. With her, we wanted to evoke a feeling of fragility, youth, and naivete.” That feeling of fragility Muir describes is represented perfectly in her costuming, complemented by Depp’s physically demanding performance. Linda Muir and Craig Lathrop received recognition from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences last month with Oscar nominations for costume design and production design, respectively.
Nosferatu is one of the most cinematically complex horror films in recent years and the visual anchor of this production is one of the pioneering cinematographers of the genre, Jarin Blaschke, who has collaborated with Eggers on all his features. Blaschke continues his strong streak of some of the most compelling and nuanced cinematography not only within the genre but outside of it as well. Shot on film and innovatively utilizing live flames that bring to mind Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Blachke’s impressive one-takes sweep the audience head-first into the gothic landscape Eggers has created. The composition of frames and blocking sees an improvement from The Northman. Though the compositions in the Viking epic were meticulous, Nosferatu pays closer homage to paintings of the time. Much as F. W. Murnau’s original 1922 film paid homage to the German expressionist paintings of the early 20th century, Robert Eggers’ adaptation takes inspiration from Biedermeier, a German art movement composed of naturalism that represented the middle class. The settings of Thomas and Ellen Hutter’s home and their lush costumes evoke the work of painters such as Carl Spitzweg and Eduard Gaertner, creating arguably the most accurate gothic tale ever put to film. Nosferatu has earned Blaschke his second Oscar nomination, his first was for The Lighthouse.
Nosferatu continues a recent trend of horror films “demonizing” mental health, or further using the horror genre to creatively explore the deepest corners of the human psyche. Eggers talks extensively in interviews, explaining Ellen as a somnambulist (what sleepwalkers in the 19th century were called). While some saw the epilepsy and visions Ellen is plagued with as an illness, others saw what Willem Dafoe’s character describes as a “second sight.” Similarly, Ari Aster’s 2018 family drama Hereditary follows a grief-ridden family afflicted by various debilitating mental health crises throughout the history of their family. In the end, the psychological problems that have seemed to plague this family for generations prove to be satanic, a curse that has followed the family, culminating in the haunting third act. Eggers’ version of Nosferatu does something quite similar with trauma. Instead of Count Orlock being a frightening creature that springs from the shadows at random (as is the case in Dracula), in this version, Count Orlock has been in Ellen’s life since childhood. The “troublesome afflictions” she has suffered throughout her life are frighteningly similar to what people who are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) experience. Count Orlock haunts her, much the same as war veterans are haunted by the sound of gunfire and the cries of their compatriots years after the battles took place. By providing an allegory for trauma through a cinematically gothic lens, Eggers’ Nosferatu really shines. It’s what makes the film so powerful, and it is one of the many reasons a remake was warranted. After all, some stories benefit from remakes.
The works of Shakespeare have been adapted time and time again; Romeo and Juliet spawning a myriad of adaptations, while his comedy The Taming of the Shrew was retold for a modern teen audience, taking the form of Heath Ledger’s classic 10 Things I Hate About You. While Nosferatu and 10 Things I Hate About You are not often spoken about in the same breath, they have one thing in common: the source materials date back hundreds of years, but both films are updated for modern times in a way that makes the stories anew. Eggers has said of Lily Rose-Depp’s character Ellen, “She is a modern, 21st-century woman trapped in the 19th century.” Ellen’s character highlights the gender oppression of not only the 1800s but of our modern times as well. Her ravings and illnesses are discarded as girlish fantasies. Her sexuality and innate femininity are disregarded, and she is dehumanized, her behavior being described as “animalistic” at one point. Gender plays a very specific and unique role in this telling of the vampire classic, and whether purposeful or not, it is one of the reasons Nosferatu stands out from its predecessors.
While paying devout respect to the original, Eggers also creates a wholly new and authentic piece of art. Like the best fairy tales, they are not told only once. They are told time and time again by the fireside, evolving and taking a different shape each time a new teller takes it on. This time, in a darkened theater, Eggers has told his version, and it is sure to be cherished and retold for years to come.
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