Bill Skarsgård prowls 19th century Germany in a lush and terrifying reinvention of the vampire genre. Here’s our Nosferatu review.
In Eastern European folklore, the dead don’t rest easy. It stands to reason that the living don’t, either. Centuries of stinking corpses exhuming themselves to feast on family members’ blood will do terrible things to a sleep schedule.
We arguably last saw these unsightly fellows in 1922’s Nosferatu, and for some reason, it’s taken more than a century of cinema for these decidedly un-sexy strigoi to reappear on screen (though the film has been remade before: Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu: The Vampyre from 1979).
In the meantime, the vampire film has been through a few identity crises – from camp terror to teenage heartthrob. But despite sitting at the heart of the monster cinema canon for as long as anyone can remember, it’s been a while since we’ve seen them as properly, unambiguously scary…
Enter Robert Eggers, with a long-gestating remake of FW Murnau’s copyright-dodging classic. Terror here comes from all the places you’d expect it would: dark corners, swarms of rats, ruined Czech castles and, yes, the biggest reinvention of the vampire since Edward Cullen. The result isn’t just frightening – genuinely unnerving in a way gothic horror hasn’t been in years – but astonishingly beautiful. Like all Eggers’ films, everything in the frame and coming out of the speakers is meticulously detailed, and the level of craft is such that one could almost forget to be loin-soilingly terrified at the same time. Almost.
That Nosferatu manages to shock so effectively while staying largely faithful to Murnau’s story (itself an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) is a triumph on its own terms. The year is 1838, and Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) are newlyweds. He is seeking to impress at the estate agents where he works; she, in her younger years, may or may not have invited a servant of Belial for tea and sex in the middle of an existential crisis. It’s a tale as old as time.
Expanding on the expressionist melodrama of the silent original, Depp’s Ellen is a brilliantly judged mess of contradictions. Her husband and their friends (Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s boat-builder, Friedrich Harding, and his wife, Emma Corrin’s Anna) have diagnosed her with some combination of melancholy and hysteria. Whatever the truth to our modern eyes, she’s clearly having a rough old time of it.
So, when Thomas is sent by his, er, unusual boss (a scene-stealing Simon McBurney) to finalise a sale with a Transylvanian aristocrat, everyone decides it would be for the best if Ellen stays with the Hardings while he’s away. Mild spoiler alert: it would not.
One of the many joys of Nosferatu is the way its marketing has kept Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok hidden from its promotional material, and the film is likewise reluctant to give him away all at once. Glimpsed largely as a shadow behind a curtain or a clawed hand stretched over a slumbering German town, he spends much of Thomas’ unglamourous business trip flitting from one pitch-black corner to another. This seems as good a reason as any to see the film on a cinema screen, if possible – lit more often with firelight than with lightbulbs, darkness has rarely looked so good, and unless your TV/laptop/deluxe home cinema system is really top of the range, home viewing might end up being an exercise in frustration.
In a real cinema, in real darkness, though, by God is Nosferatu beautiful. Eggers and his long-time collaborator Jarin Blaschke have continued to hone their craft together since The Witch, and their love of long, unbroken takes and natural lighting really come into their own here. As Orlok’s ghostly carriage looms out of the mist to bring poor Thomas to his castle, the effect is almost literally chilling.
The staggering level of period detail, from costumes and sets to even plenty of the more supernatural details of the plot, only elevate things further. That the monster at the centre of Nosferatu drinks blood from the victims’ heart, rather than their neck, is no accident. The tropes of the vampire genre have so much baggage after a century of velvet capes and Halloween parties that Eggers and his production team might have found the only way of making them properly scary again by heading back to the source. Relying more on rural peasant hearsay than 21st century pop culture, the result is unsettlingly primal – like an exhumed folk memory we’ve collectively tried to forget.
By ditching the tropes of one sub-genre, Nosferatu is able to borrow more liberally from the inspirations of other ones. At times, it feels more like a possession flick than a vampire one: Depp’s eyes roll back into her head and her spine contorts in ways it’s unsettling to discover weren’t done with visual effects. It’s an astonishingly physical performance, one which manages to impress even while surrounded by a supporting cast of more familiar faces (Hoult, Skarsgård, Willem Dafoe, Ralph Ineson) all at the top of their game.
And though Nosferatu goes to absurd lengths in its historical authenticity, at times it feels incisively contemporary. Like the 1922 film’s post-flu pandemic plot, the wizened count brings with him a wave not of vampirism, but bacteria. As a frankly absurd number of (very real) rats pour from his abandoned plague ship and buboes spread through the populace like wildfire, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the stop-starts which brought the film to cinemas at this moment in time were meant to be.
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Of course, plagues and possessions in this world are all the more terrifying because we’re so fully engrossed in the 19th century viewpoint. A strange cocktail of modern-age entrepreneurs and the Transylvanian peasants who bury their dead with a stake through the heart paint a horrible vision of a world where nobody has any idea what the hell is going on. The film’s pacier second half sees the mix transition from an eerie mismatch to complete, paranoid panic.
Plenty of these compliments – Eggers’ addiction to historical detail, Blaschke’s stunning cinematography, Robin Carolan’s wonderfully gothic score and the astonishing production design – apply just as easily to Nosferatu as the director’s previous work, but they’ve never been more effective than they are here. This feels, on first watch, like Eggers’ best film even among a filmography not wanting for critical adoration, a stunning demonstration of one of modern Hollywood’s most exciting filmmakers at the height of his powers. This is pure, blockbuster terror from a master of their craft; if we see a better horror film in 2025, I’ll eat my bald cap.
Nosferatu is in UK cinemas 1st January 2025.
