By Gary D. Rhodes.

Few filmmakers are as capable of waking the dead, and of transporting us to them, than Robert Eggers, the Charon of American cinema.”

“He is coming,” we learn of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) during Robert Eggers’ new film, just as we have heard for many years in advance of its production and its Christmas Day premiere. The vampire has arrived, the hell of plague following with him.

No photo description available.

I would very much like to review Nosferatu, meaning to view it again, to see it a second and third time.

By contrast, I do not wish to write a popular-audience film review of it. Three stars out of four? A thumb pointing up or down, attached to a person with little knowledge of film language or global cinema history? We should recall that, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the insult of all insults is the word “critic.” Film critics who make their livings from such drivel are sadly the most enduring vampires of the cinema, feeding off the art of others while contributing little but worthless verbal bloodshed.

Let me instead return to Nosferatu and share a few impressions of my experience, because Eggers’s films – The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022) – are profound experiences, less to be explained than to be explored.

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is unsettling and unsettled, existing in a nether region between Henrik Galeen’s script and Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897), between the Middle Ages and cinematic technology. His Nosferatu is become an expansive mythology, too sweeping to be categorized neatly as German Expressionism or Weimar Cinema.

I do not perceive Eggers’ Nosferatu to be a remake, though he clearly has returned to material forged by Murnau, material that he alludes to in the macro – meaning its basic narrative – as well as in the micro, as in the case of his blue nighttime lighting that recalls silent film tones. The two films dialogue with one another. In Eggers, Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) nearly falls down steps while descending into Orlok’s crypt. In Murnau, Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim) falls before ascending similar steps. The shadow of Orlok’s claw over Wisborg in Eggers recalls Mephistopheles’ (Emil Jannings’) shadow over the village in Murnau’s Faust (1926). For that matter, I could not help but think of the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich, who was such a major influence on Murnau, when meeting Eggers’ character Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson).

My experience of Eggers’ Nosferatu was one of rebirth. He expands the mythos far beyond where Murnau left it, as if taking up the captainry of a death ship crashing against the waves before docking at new shores. The rather tenuous long-distant relationship between Orlok and Knock (Alexander Granach) in Murnau, founded solely on a grimoire contract, gains far more narrative and emotional depth with Count Orlok and Knock (Simon McBurney) in Eggers.

More striking is Eggers’ depiction of Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp). Depp is a deep well of emotions conjured, a soul in turmoil, such a striking contrast to Greta Schröder in Murnau’s film, who was distinctly less compelling than Weimar actresses like Brigitte Helm and Lil Dagover. Particularly fascinating is the backstory Eggers develops for his Orlok and Ellen, which solves something of a mystery in the narratives of Murnau’s film and Stoker’s novel: why would the vampire risk choosing his real estate agent’s wife/fiancée, rather than any other woman in his new city? In so doing, he greatly amplifies becoming exposed and hunted.

Hence the sexual triangle between Orlok, Ellen, and Hutter is heightened in Eggers, particularly when Orlok bites Hutter in Transylvania. Rarely have I seen parallel editing stir such power, such illicit and passionate power. Bells tolled cannot be unrung. (I cannot forget that editing suites in early Hollywood were sometimes understandably called “joining rooms.”)

Eggers’ Nosferatu was one of rebirth. He expands the mythos far beyond where Murnau left it….”

Much of what distinguishes Eggers’ Nosferatu is his use of sound, including dialogue. Like Murnau, Eggers situates most of his film in the non-existent German city of Wisborg, a shadowy elseplace, but it assumes an even more mythical status because all of its inhabitants speak in pronounced British accents. Here is a paradox, one well suited to the paradox that is the “Un-dead,” the nearly incomprehensible state of being conscious and ambulatory while being neither alive nor dead.

For me, Skarsgård’s Orlok is as enigmatical as Schreck’s. Yes, Skarsgård has appeared on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. And for much of the twentieth century, Schreck was truly a man of mystery. But at this point we have Stefan Eickhoff’s Max Schreck, Gespenstertheater (2009), a book over two inches thick. Neither man’s biography is shadowy as of 2024.

The point is that I know I could eat a cheeseburger with Skarsgård or play pickleball with him or exchange knock-knock jokes, and it would have no effect on my experience with his Orlok, which is a decidedly foreign body, a repellent relative of Schreck’s, not a twin or dark shadow, but a kinsman rooted in the same, twisted family tree. The uncanny voice Skarsgård affects is unforgettable. So too his coat, fashioned from animal fur, accentuating how feral he is, its sleeves nearly reaching the ground, serving to troglodyticize him all the more.

But this Orlok is not pure animal, even if his bloodlust and passions are animalistic rather than romantic. He sports a large moustache, an incantation of Stoker’s vampire. Eggers’ film repeatedly speaks of “providence,” against which is Orlok’s inverted, trinitarian demand that Ellen submit to him on the third night he visits her. He is not just a pestilence. He is a disciple of Satan at Christmastide.

It would not be unexpected for some people to argue over whether the Eggers’ Nosferatu is better or worse than Murnau’s. Personally, I am uninterested by such questions, especially in the form of thumbs pointing up or down. My world happily has equal room for both films, as well as, for that matter, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000). As we learn in Eggers’ film, Nosferatu is “infinity.” My experience with all of these motion pictures has been meaningful, time and again. And the Eggers Nosferatu is sui generis. The End.

By way of postscript, I understand that Eggers plans to make a western. I very much hope he does. I also hope he returns to horror, a genre long met with critical disdain, another reason for my skepticism of film critics. From Méliès to Christensen, from Murnau to Browning, from Hitchcock to Kubrick, some of the most important film directors have captained cinematic death ships.

Few filmmakers are as capable of waking the dead, and of transporting us to them, than Robert Eggers, the Charon of American cinema.

Gary D. Rhodes, Ph.D., filmmaker, poet and Full Professor of Media Production at Oklahoma Baptist University, is the author of Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries (Boswell Books, forthcoming), Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Becoming Dracula – Vols. 1 and (with William M. [Bill] Kaffenberger, BearManor Media), Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial (co-authored with Robert Singer, Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Emerald Illusions: The Irish in Early American Cinema (IAP, 2012), The Perils of Moviegoing in America (Bloomsbury, 2012) and The Birth of the American Horror Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2018), as well as the editor of such anthologies as Becoming Nosferatu: Stories Inspired by Silent German Horror (BearManor Media, forthcoming), Film by Design: The Art of the Movie Poster (University of Mississippi Press, 2024), The Films of Wallace Fox (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), The Films of Joseph H. Lewis (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and The Films of Budd Boetticher (Edinburgh University Press, 2017). Rhodes is also the writer-director of such documentary films as Lugosi: Hollywood’s Dracula (1997) and Banned in Oklahoma (2004).

Read a review of Gary Rhodes’s new book, Vampires in Silent Cinema (Edinburgh University Press), here and an excerpt from the book here.

Read also:

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *