It rivals The Substance as 2024’s most arresting horror film – and it was a killer year for the genre – but you’d hesitate to call Robert Eggers’ deeply sinister, slow-burning new take on the vampire classic ‘fresh’ exactly. Plague, rats, death and moral degradation abound in a tale made with a coolness manifest by none of its out-of-their-depth characters.
The American auteur, crushing it in every film he makes, returns to his horror roots with an even darker vision. The Witch, his debut, a parable of evil penetrating a Puritan family unit in Colonial America, gave us the demonic and meme-able Black Phillip. Nosferatu gives us just blackness, shadows to get lost in (props to cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s noir lighting) and an undercurrent of lurking villainy that’s articulated in the film’s lulling early stretches by the jittery strings of Robin Carolan’s impressive score.
As with FW Murnau’s 1922 silent adaptation of Henrik Galeen’s Dracula riff, a film spilling over with post-Great War dread, and Werner Herzog’s AIDS-era remake Nosferatu the Vampyre, the plot is set in motion by a humble real-estate deal. Wisborg realtor Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends his ambitious young agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) to the Carpathian castle of one Count Orlok, to complete his purchase of a new abode in their seafront town.
Wrong move. The man he meets has none of the doomed romanticism of Klaus Kinski’s vampire, a mole-toothed softboi who was prone to lamentations about how ‘the absence of love is the most abject pain’. Instead, played by a thunderous and unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård, locating his octave range somewhere south of the pit of hell, Eggers’ vampire is a brawny, plague-spreading force of nature – a monster in looks, words and deeds, from whom Hutter (the Jonathan Harker character in Stoker’s story) can only recoil in terror.
Dread courses through every frame
It’s one of the effective tweaks Eggers’ script makes to reinvigorate his source material. The psychic bond between the vicious, lusting Nosferatu and Hutter’s beautiful, gutsy young bride, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp, another standout), is more complex and layered than in previous versions. The family of the Hutter’s friends and confidantes, the Hardings (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, a bit hammy, and a porcelain Emma Corrin), are directly in his path. Only Willem Dafoe’s eccentric occult professor offers hope of breaking the spell between the monster and his mark.
Eggers’ own spell never lifts for a second. As the quietly menacing opening act gives way to a maximalist second half and the accursedness levels go through the roof, Nosferatu becomes a genuinely chilling experience. Dread courses through every frame – doubly so in those occupied by Skarsgård’s vampire and the febrile McBurney’s scurrying Herr Knock, by now outed as Orlok’s deranged familiar.
If it lacks something in thematic resonance, at least compared with its 1922 and 1979 forebears – beyond an uncomfortable callback to our own pandemic lockdowns – the genre beats are that much fiercer here. This Nosferatu is a worthy modern addition to a classic horror lineage. Get lost in its shadows.
In US theaters Dec 25. Out in cinemas worldwide Jan 1.