Robert Eggers' Nosferatu is a Remake Done Right

It's spookily scarifying!

Vampires are canonically the sexiest of all mythological creatures, just barely beating out Yetis and Frankenstein’s Monsters. That’s right: monsters. You don’t think that sick motherfucker stopped with one, did you? On the contrary, I imagine that Dr. Frankenstein, a warped genius whose brand of science I would deem “mad,” had a whole army of undead ghouls eager to do his bidding.

Sex is at the core of vampire’s shadowy allure. Fucking was so central to Twilight’s tacky cult that E.L James removed all of the vampiric elements to what began as

[/p- fan fiction, amped up the BDSM and leaned into horniness, and walked away with Fifty Shades of Grey, a multi-media franchise worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

No vampire is sexier than Count Dracula. That’s his whole deal. Oh sure, there’s some creepy stuff with bats and rats and tombs, but Dracula is a sexy motherfucker. He’s quite the lady killer.

The same cannot be said of Count Orlok/Nosferatu, the iconic villain of Nosferatu, D.W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece of German Expressionism.

Nosferatu shamelessly ripped off Dracula to the point that Bram Stoker’s widow sued successfully for copyright infringement. A court ordered all copies of the film destroyed. Thankfully, some prints survived. That’s fortunate for Tim Burton and his fans since 99 percent of his ideas come from German Expressionism.

Dracula was a Christian Grey-like figure of wealth who could pass as an extremely handsome human being. He had his ghoulish side, of course, but it seemed like he could score beautiful women without hypnotizing them into doing his bidding. He doesn’t just have a girlfriend; he has a harem. He doesn’t have a bride. He has brides.

The same cannot be said of Count Orlok/Nosferatu. He is physically repulsive, a hideous, bald bat-like monster with fangs and claws and a rapacious appetite for human blood and female flesh.

The classic German silent film was so convincing that 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire prankishly posited that Max Schrek (an Oscar-nominated Willem Dafoe) could persuasively portray a vampire because he was a vampire.

Dafoe also appears here in the Van Helsing role of the eccentric vampire hunter. That might seem strange, but Dafoe has a face for German Expressionism/rat-based horror.

Murnau’s film was remade in 1979 by Werner Herzog with Klaus Kinski in the lead. Kinski might not have been a literal bloodsucker, but that does not mean that he wasn’t also a monster and a karmic vampire in his own right.

Now Robert Eggers, the acclaimed director of The Witch and The Lighthouse, has gifted the moviegoing public with his version of arguably the most revered, respected, and influential shameless rip-off in film history.

Bill Skarsgard plays the title character as ancient and unholy, more animal than man. The It star and Nepo Baby is a handsome man transformed, through the magic of make-up, into someone vomit-inducingly repulsive. It’s a remarkable transformation.

Eggers wisely goes the Jaws route when it comes to the titular icon. He purposefully keeps the character’s onscreen appearances to a minimum. He never allows us to get comfortable with Count Orlak. The character subsequently never loses his ability to shock and unnerve.

Stellan Skarsgard’s handsome son starred in The Crow and Nosferatu in 2024. That means he had a terrible year and a wonderful year in which he brought a beloved pop icon back to the big screen in an eminently satisfying way that critics and audiences adored AND in a manner that bombed with EVERYONE.

The same is true of Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who was wonderful in The Fall Guy, terrible in Kraven the Hunter, and acceptable here in the secondary role of a proper gentleman cursed with having to deal with a literal and metaphorical blood-sucker.

Taylor-Johnson isn’t bad, but he nevertheless occupies the Keanu Reeves role of the actor who takes us out of a period movie with his unmistakably contemporary presence.

Nicholas Hoult of The Weatherman and Renfield fame stars as Thomas Hutter, this universe’s version of Jonathan Harker. He’s the most English German gentleman in the history of Deutschland.

He’s an ambitious young businessman eager to make his mark so that he can afford a comfortable life with his Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp). Out of hunger and desperation, the earnest upstart agrees to journey to Transylvania to sell a rundown castle to the mysterious and much-feared Count Orlok.

Sex and capitalism are the ominous engines that drive Nosferatu. They’re also monsters in their own right that torment our poor, overmatched hero. He just wants to make a good life for his wife. He does not realize that he’s already lost her.

Thomas was dispatched to the spookiest recesses of Eastern Europe on a suicide mission concocted by his boss, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney).

Herr Kock is Nosferatu’s version of Renfield, which means he’s out of his mind and his master’s loyal servant. He lives to serve Nosferatu, who has a sinister hold on his soul and Ellen’s as well. The title character does not have to be onscreen to dominate the proceedings.

Thomas is warned by the Romani people that Count Orlak is a primitive creature of pure evil. The adorably naive Thomas dismisses the townspeople’s warning as primitive superstition. He does not understand that he’s left the world he knows and entered a perilous and uncanny realm of darkness.

Thomas represents modernity, and Orlak embodies an unfathomably dark past. The Count’s methods aren’t just unconventional but terrifying and intimidating. Thomas understandably looks like he would like to run away from Orlak’s sinister abode and not stop running until he reaches home but he does not have that luxury.

The Count abuses his power to make the much younger man do his bidding. He controls Thomas through supernatural means but also through money. In that respect, he’s like Tommy Wiseau in his early relationship with Greg Sestero, but less creepy.

We have tremendous reverence for cinematic bogeymen and bogeywomen. We elevate actors who scare us to great heights but are less deferential towards actors who play scared instead of scary.

In that respect, Hoult is as responsible for the film’s success as Skarsgard. We see the world through his eyes. He’s an everyman confronted with a force beyond his imagination that wants to emasculate him, humiliate him, cuckold him, and steal his soulmate.

Nosferatu is a masterpiece of atmosphere and inference. You’d have to return to the original Star Wars trilogy and its larger-than-life villain to find a movie that got as much out of sinister heavy breathing as Nosferatu does. We don’t need to see him do anything violent or crazed; just knowing that he exists is terrifying enough.

The title character may be repulsive and have a creepy connection to rats spreading the Bubonic Plague. Yet, Depp’s haunted, cursed beauty is irrevocably drawn to him because that attraction has nothing to do with looks or charm or personality and everything to do with his supernatural powers.

Depp has the big eyes and expressive face of a silent screen siren. Her performance is pitched at a level of frenzied sexual hysteria. Nosferatu is sexual in a way that’s sometimes downright stomach-churning.

Nosferatu is to Murnau’s original what Bram Stoker’s Dracula was to the Universal classic that catapulted Bela Lugosi to stardom: a sensual, seductive, and deeply unnerving new take on classic material from an auteur working at the apex of their abilities.

Four and a half star out of five