Nosferatu (2024)

Rated R as it absolutely should be.  Like every other Academy Award nominee, it has a fair share of nudity and some pretty sexual moments throughout.  That somehow takes a backseat to the copious amounts of gore and horror throughout.  Also, the tone of the film matches Robert Eggers other films, so it's meant to be a deeply uncomfortable watch.  Well deserved R.

DIRECTOR:  Robert Eggers

Man, I feel like every blog I write on here is tied to a confession.  Yes, I'm the big bad film teacher who has seen everything.  Do you know what I haven't seen?  Either of the other Nosferatu movies nor Shadow of the Vampire.  Yeah, I know!  You'd think that a film teacher who is into vampire movies would have gotten around to it at this point.  I actually haven't.  I might watch it soon.  But do you know why I don't feel necessarily compelled to watch Nosferatu?  It might be because I just discovered, upon watching the 2024 version, is that Nosferatu was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

And do you know what I think about Dracula?  I'm burned out on the actual Dracula storyline.  I'm talking about the Bram Stoker novel.  I read that novel.  Heck, I read that novel on my honeymoon.  It's fine.  It did the job.  But I've now seen this story so many times that it does nothing for me.  And since this is a time for confession, the OG Dracula story is actually kind of boring.  It has things to say.  It is a bit scary.  But by contemporary vampire storytelling, man alive Dracula is kind of boring.  So when you make a movie like Nosferatu, that is a skin of the original story, you have to be able to appreciate it more of a commentary on cinema than the actual vampire legend.  After all, if you were really obsessed with Dracula, you would just make Dracula again.  And even then, I'd be having a similar confession saying that the original Dracula is a little bit boring.

If anything, this is a vehicle for Robert Eggers to do his thing.  Now, does Robert Eggers do his thing?  Absolutely.  He Robert Eggerses the crap out of this movie.  It looks haunting.  It's full of vibe and he makes a spooky spooky vampire movie that actually kind of nails some of the weirder elements of the story better than what other adaptations have done.  And, again, I haven't seen the original Nosferatu.  I feel like that's a huge slight on my normal film watching attitude.  I'm almost obsessive about seeing every version of something before the remakes, simply as research for writing this kind of stuff.  But right now, I'm drowning in film blogs and thirsty for time.  I have too much to write about.  I'm writing a million words a second because I am so far behind when it comes to writing these things.  I also have a million movies to watch before the Academy Awards this weekend.  It's not a pretty sight.  Am I going to knock out three extra movies when I don't have time to write about the movies that need to be written about?  I don't really think so.  Besides, these are my own stupid rules and no one is holding me to them.

There are some weird things about Dracula that are almost compounded in Nosferatu, especially Eggers' version.  Dracula, to a certain extent, indulges and harks on the fear of the foreigner.  Just so I have to stop writing Dracula in a movie that technically doesn't have Dracula in it, I'm going to start referring to Count Orlok as the focus on this.  I cannot stress enough that the story is exactly the same, so my criticisms should apply to both.  Count Orlok is meant to be this foreigner from another land who comes to England (which is a substitute for home or the West) to seduce women, ultimately leading them to their downfall.  Now, I've actually been kind of a fan of some of the Dracula (I did it again!) adaptations.  I'm one of the five people who really likes Bram Stoker's Dracula by Francis Ford Coppola.  But with the Dracula adaptations, the eponymous vampire tends to present himself as a handsome aristocrat who hides a monstrous form underneath.

With Count Orlok, especially given Eggers' visual style, he accentuates the fact that he is not traditionally handsome.  This version even has Bill Skarsgard of It fame to play Orlok.  I know a lot of people have had issues with Orlok's moustache.  I don't have an issue with the moustache.  If anything, it's a nice delineation between the two vampires.  But what it does do is accentuate the fact that this man is incredibly Eastern European.  There's nothing seductive about Orlok.  Instead, he comes across more as a barbarian than an aristocrat.  So my big question, if this is a story about the fear of the foreigner, is why?  Part of me thinks that the thought of what is being communicated isn't part of what is happening here.  Sure, I know that Eggers is probably smarter than I am.  But I also think that Eggers might have a different priority.

Eggers is making something that is a horror tank.  He wants you to feel uncomfortable from start to finish.  What Dracula traditionally offers is a shift from seductive to horrifying.  There are moments where we know that Dracula isn't going to attack. He may be in a public place looking all charming and handsome.  The big scary parts are when the vampire hunters take the fight to Dracula.  With this version of Count Orlok, he's just a brute throughout.  Every time he's on screen, he's menacing.  Now, this sounds like it would be an improvement, right?  If I thought that Dracula was boring, this seems like it would be more intense.  Honestly, and I don't know how this happened, but I got bored every time that Orlok was on screen after a certain point.  There was the torture of Hutter / Harker (Geez Louise, that's close) that was on point.  But there was never a moment of "When is Orlok going to strike?'  He's constantly in scary mode and that made him honestly a little forgettable in the grand scheme of things.  By the final act of the movie, I was walking around just so I wouldn't fall asleep.

But where Nosferatu kind of cooks is through Ellen Hutter, the Mina Harker character of the story.  Lily-Rose Depp deserves a little bit of attention for this movie.  I know that this might be the breakthrough role for her after a series of indie films that let her practice her craft.  What I like about Nosferatu over other Dracula adaptations is the notion that Ellen Hutter is the prize for the story.  Mina Harker tends to be more of a concept than a character in other versions of this story.  We know that if the vampire hunters don't do something to stop Dracula / Orlok, Ellen / Mina will be the victim of this.  But we never really get a visual understanding of the misery that Ellen / Mina is going through.  Instead, there's a desire from Ellen's perspective to embrace the evil that surrounds her.  It's kind of what makes the ending of Nosferatu more interesting than Dracula.  Ellen seems to submit to the evil that is infecting her by sleeping with the monster. But when she holds him to the light, it gives her far more agency than other Dracula tales allow.

It almost makes the von Franz character almost unsexy to play.  It's the Van Helsing part.  I'm kind of surprised that Willem Dafoe agreed to play this part considering.  I mean, I'm sure he didn't mind.  I get the vibe that Dafoe signs up for things just to play and hang out with gnarly dudes like Eggers.  But von Franz, unlike his Dracula counterpart, is slightly incompetent.  He's the most competent person there.  I can't deny that.  He's supposed to be.  But he's the guy who is trying his best in the face of what seems to be an impossible battle.  But Van Helsing always seemed to be a bit of a butt-kicker.  He's the guy who is ready for a fight, even if it means his own death.  Von Franz, on the other hand, is a guy who is over his head.  One of the most telling and interesting parts of this character is when he admits to not knowing how to defeat this vampire.  That seems damning but it also seems the most pragmatic.  This is a world where the evidence for vampires is probably scant.  How would someone have a guaranteed ending for a vampire?  As unsexy as it is, it's at least something new in the vampire canon.

I've said it a couple of times.  I got really bored with this movie. Maybe I'm starting to distance myself from horror.  I've probably seen so much at this point that it doesn't affect me like it normally does.  There were moments when I thought some of the visuals were great.  I loved everything done with shadows.  I mean, if we're going to do a sendup of German Expressionism, you have to do something with shadows.  I also learned that I'm more hesitant to go into Nosferatu from 1922 with an open mind because it should have been called Dracula.  That's something that my brain can't unlearn.  Still, there are things to be taken away that are positive from the movie.