Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, a new weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Today, he looks at the 2024 Robert Eggers film, Nosferatu. This article will contain spoilers.
This is an excellent movie to start our little project with, because this is a vampire-ass vampire film. Vampire 101, if you will.
The foundational story of the vampire in western pop culture, starting with Brom Stoker’s novel Dracula but really starting with F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), is pretty simple: Young upstanding man marries a young upstanding woman. Man is sent to a foreign land to present a real estate contract to its noble ruler, who wishes to buy an estate in the man’s home city. He encounters many frightful terrors, the most frightful of which is the bizarre noble ruler himself, of whom the populace of the land lives in mortal terror. Man is harried and imprisoned by the noble ruler and barely escapes with his life. The noble ruler, thus revealed to be a vampire, makes plain his aims: To have the man’s wife. He moves to the estate in the man’s city with the help of a loathsome assistant who arranged both the real estate deal and the young man’s participation from the beginning, and begins a campaign against the young woman to make her his bride. Some of the woman’s friends and associates are killed by the vampire. A local doctor and/or his old crank mentor and the man, having returned to his home city in the third act, band together to kill the vampire in his lair using the old crank’s knowledge of ancient ritual and legend. However, the vampire instead goes to the woman and lays with her in her marriage bed. She keeps the vampire there until the sun rises, and the vampire, beguiled and ensnared by the fulfillment of his base desires, is destroyed.
All the basics of vampire fiction are there: The fear of the Other and his strange customs; the base sexual nature of the creature’s thirst; the intrusion of the creature on places once held sacred or thought safe; the importance of old or secret knowledge and ritualism to make the creature weak or blunt his power; and, in the end, the creature’s ultimate vulnerability being revealed as not some metal or herb or religious symbol, but his own nature. Obviously the vampire myth has existed in some form or another almost as long as recorded human history; there are a number of fine books about that history, and if you don’t wish to read those, a number of fine Wikipedia pages as well. In order to make this manageable or entertaining at all, we’re going to constrain our scope to the hundred years, give or take, since Murnau’s classic film refined Stoker’s novel into the basis of the modern vampire in western popular culture.
Eggers keeps to all of these in telling his own version of the Nosferatu tale; his main additions are those that he’s able to afford with the advancement of moviemaking technology since Murnau’s day and a much bigger budget — he is able to spend more time on Orlok’s journey from Carpathia to Wisborg via a doomed schooner, for example, because he has the ability to actually conjure up a boat in a storm on screen. Where he makes his mark on the story is in what he chooses to show and what he chooses to give weight to in the storytelling nature of the vampire. To wit, Eggers is concerned foremost with space, narratively and formally.
Many of the shots in the movie are very simply framed; Eggers likes putting his subjects right in the middle of the shots and then creating stark, balanced compositions around them. It leads to some beautiful visuals in the contrasting black and whites that much of Eggers’s work is known for, and it’s deceptive in its simplicity, because while the viewer is constrained by what’s in the frame, the vampire does the majority of his work outside of it. “The monster is scariest when you can’t see him” is a well-understood horror trope; in Eggers’s Nosferatu, the vampire is literally at his most powerful when he is not on screen. When the physical form of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) is on screen he is tangible, physical; he can be touched; he can be hurt, whether by an attempted pickax to the heart at the hands of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) or later and more finally by the coming of the dawn at the film’s conclusion. But when Orlok hosts Hutter in his castle in the film’s first act, he moves through the territory at will, sliding off screen and then appearing again from an impossible angle; his own hand is less powerful than the shadow of it, moving across the screen to perform his will, with the vampire himself elsewhere — and everywhere.
Throughout Hutter’s entire visit to Carpathia, Orlok is depicted less as the ruler of a castle and the lands around it than as embodied in those things; he is the castle, the closed and locked door, the unmanned horse and carriage that finds Hutter at the crossroads, the crossroads itself, the wolves in the forest, the wolves in the castle, the wolves that chase Hutter off a cliff, into a river — a river which carries Hutter out of the territory, and therefore temporarily out of the reach, of Orlok. But then, didn’t he just sell that man a new house? And when the count comes to Wisborg, he comes as a very literal plague, spreading himself out through rats to consume the new territory.
Eggers is not concerned with the most popular avenues of modern vampirism, and the ones that have seen the vampire redeemed more often than not: Lust, love, or romance. To the extent such things exist in this film, they are reduced to and depicted as animal instincts and animal acts. Nosferatu (2024) is a horny movie, but it is neither a sexy nor a romantic one, and the few scenes of romantic love we see between Thomas and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) Hutter or their friends Fridrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) mainly act as the set up to some fairly brutal punchlines, such as the possession of Ellen on the eve of the third night where they have a rutting threesome with the demon itself or the brutal dismantling of the Harding family at the hands of the vampire — and, of course, the cuckolding of Thomas Hutter in the movie’s final scene that proves lethal for both parties. Depp’s work in particular has been singled out for heady praise, and it’s well-deserved; the Nosferatu story is always Ellen Hutter’s story as much as it’s Thomas’s or even the vampire’s own, but this version centers the character even more as the awakener and possible creator of the demon in Orlok’s corpse, and Depp exceeds the challenge she’s handed in selling that.
There are some other great performances in here; the leading men do their jobs well but aren’t the standouts, not even Skarsgård, who is now an old hand at this kind of heavy prosthetic movie monster work. No, it’s the old-timers who really punch this thing up. Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, an Abraham van Helsing-like character leaning firmly into the old occult crankery of that archetype, has excellent fun capering from sickbed to asylum to morgue to cemetery and back around again, dispensing vampire lore and explaining the plot to the initially irritated, then horrified, then dead Harding family. A bit less central to the movie’s marketing but no less entertaining is Simon McBurney as Knock, the Nosferatu story’s take on Renfield, the real estate broker who in one of the movie’s first scenes is uncommonly chipper and happy to see a flustered Thomas Hutter who has turned up 15 minutes late for a job interview — because, as it is revealed, Knock is a fully and delightfully mad devil-cult ritualist who incorrectly believes he summoned Nosferatu into the world through his vile works and has conspired to dispatch young Hutter directly into his master’s claws. His task concluded, he goes completely, openly off the deep end, shutters his business, and starts biting the heads off pigeons and cutting the throats of livestock in the streets.
A flat recitation of the events in the Knock scenes is deranged, but in execution they’re downright charming. If you’re in a certain mood, and in his other work Eggers has lived in this mood most fully in The Lighthouse (2019), the movie is so particular and oppressive in its stylization that it moves beyond being scary or tense; some scenes, like Hutter and Orlok talking business in Hutter’s first night at Orlok’s castle, are actually incredibly funny if you take them even slightly less seriously than intended, with Orlok in full Evil Goat Demon voice grousing at Hutter that a city boy like him with his fancy education doesn’t understand their rustic ways. This isn’t a knock on the movie; again, this is the most standard vampire story we have, and even if you’ve never seen the 1922 film it came from, you know how it’s going to end. It’s fine to have a little fun with it, even if Eggers is going to keep a straight face the entire time.
So why aren’t we starting with the original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, then? The pat answer is that Eggers’s film is the one in theaters right now, so we’ll dispatch it first while there’s still a chance for you to go out and see it, something you should absolutely do if you’ve made it this far into this column and haven’t already. (If it’s no longer in theaters by the time this is out, see it on streaming and hope the service doesn’t annihilate its black levels; it’s a fairly dark film, obviously.) But considering Eggers sees this film as not simply his interpretation of the original Murnau but an attempt to realize the vision Murnau had for his own film that he couldn’t achieve for budgetary reasons, it makes sense to start here and bridge back — Murnau will be next week’s film, then Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, and then the actual proper capstone for the Nosferatu films made across the years, E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), starring John Malkovich as F.W. Murnau himself. If you’re not aware of the conceit of that movie, just go watch it; we’ll circle back around to it here in a couple weeks.
And after that, I believe Rob has arranged it so that our patrons get to torment me by choosing what I watch next every week for this Century of the Vampire feature. I could get lucky, and they could choose After Dark or Interview with the Vampire. Or they could pick Dracula 2000. You could make me watch Dracula 2000. Sign up to our Patreon to make me watch Dracula 2000.
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