By J. M. Tyree.

More revenants, albeit less interesting ones, are likely to emerge from this weirdly unkillable source, one that has always reached into the uncanny ability of cinema itself to bring dead things back to life.”

Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu is not my favorite contemporary vampire movie (that would have to be Ana Lily Amipour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night [2014]), or even my favorite Eggers film. The Lighthouse (2019), an extraordinary and idiosyncratic nightmare, is probably more true to Murnau’s Expressionist ideals, and the sublime potential of the Gothic, than this remake. For the first hour I didn’t know why Nosferatu was being remade at all – surely this was a mistaken project from the beginning since Murnau’s inimitable 1922 classic remains incorruptible from beyond the grave. As the second half of the film unfolded into abject madness, and afterwards thinking through the film with friends, however, Eggers’s Nosferatu has stayed with me, its shadows deepening as its various challenges to its predecessors have seeped into the frame.

Something interesting about the stakes of filmed adaptation are at play in this film, because it’s largely an adaptation of another film and not of an “original” literary property. Even in its relatively routine first half, the film is remarkably faithful to Murnau’s faithless adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Stoker’s widow successfully sued for copyright infringement, and, although the film outlived its legal death, the 1922 Nosferatu remains a founding document of the concept of intellectual property in cinema. Yet if Nosferatu has always been about IP, then the endless revenants of the ever-proliferating vampire mythos are also about cinematic DNA, and whose ideas are grafted on to new branches of the story of the hungry undead.

Nosferatu (2024) - Release info - IMDb

As Linda Hutcheon’s work on adaptation theory has demonstrated, DNA mutation provides a better model for continuity and novelty in art than the classic binary of faithfulness/faithlessness. (1) This critical approach from adaptation studies also represents a challenge to Fredric Jameson’s theory of postmodernism, in particular its negative claims about the ceaseless recycling of the culture industry in which little of new interest is added by each iteration. Simplifying greatly, Hutcheon’s alternative view finds recycling and ekphrasis everywhere in the history of art and more value in productions of the present that are less repetitive and more complex than they appear on the surface.

I would argue that something like this dynamic powers the basic coding of Eggers’s film. Even what seems standard issue about the first half of the film retains interest because this is the first film that doesn’t intend to re-graft the vampire story back to the second half of Stoker’s literary source material. It’s cinematic in the old school auteurist sense of being anti-literary. Even Herzog’s ratty Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979), for all of its engagement with Murnau’s landscape Expressionism, and the roots of the Gothic in German Romanticism, restores and shuffles the English character names from Stoker, although it disrupts the storyline with a final droll twist about Jonathan Harker that amusingly departs from both of its sources.

As already noted by several reviewers, Eggers shares with Herzog Murnau’s interest in shifting the meaning of its story to the concerns of its woman protagonist (Ellen Hutter/Greta Schröder). Herzog further emphasizes this shift by making his Doctor van Helsing, played by Walter Ladengast, a useless male authority figure fully invested in rigid ideas of rationality. Combined, all of this means that, as Herzog’s Lucy Harker (Isabelle Adjani) explains directly, she will have to do her fatal work “alone.” Eggers takes Ellen’s (Lily-Rose Depp’s) solitary fight against her sexual abuser to an extreme, in the process investigating the most complex aspect of Murnau’s film, and the precise facet, I would argue, that diverged most from the concerns of Stoker’s novel. Or the numerous filmed adaptations that have attempted to project some sort of “romance” between the predatory male vampire and his women victims. Eggers reveals that this drift is deeply misguided, linking this film dialectically to his concerns with women’s liberation in his debut The VVitch (2015).

In this specific sense, Murnau rejects most of Stoker’s ideas about life and love at a fundamental level even as he transplants his novel to the emergent art form of the 20th century. Stoker’s “IP,” so to speak, includes a moral coding of Victoriana by which good men assemble to protect the chastity of a woman on behalf of her incapacitated husband during the “danger zone” between betrothal and the sexual consummation of marriage. This time-period (in which, in practice, anything might happen if people are afforded privacy, secrets, freedom, and equality) becomes all-important for the protection of society from contagion by outside forces associated with sexual degeneracy and overtones of plague emanating from the “East” in this reactionary tale. (This point is deliciously mocked at length in Guy Maddin’s brilliant and strange ballet film version of Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary [2002].) Stoker’s IP is awfully binary (day/night; light/darkness; good/evil; life/death; pure/unclean; soul/body; chastity/defilement; pleasure/depravity; faith/reason; Christian/occult; etc.), whereas Murnau’s IP is more about a German fusion of these polarities, which are inseparable and intertwined fundamentally, as Lotte Eisner argued in her notes on cinematic Expressionism in The Haunted Screen (1952). (2) Eisner’s critical importance to Herzog, most famously expressed in his epic walk from Germany to France, which he believed would protect her health from cancer, is also evident in the location shooting of his Nosferatu.

Eggers builds on this rejection of Stoker’s core values by Murnau and Herzog in making this her story. His primary innovation takes Herzog’s film one step further, it might be argued. All three films try to explain the deep sexual hypocrisy of Dracula’s storyline, in which Ellen’s/Lucy’s faithfulness to her husband is founded on her sexual purity, even while Thomas/Jonathan (played in Eggers’s film by Nicholas Hoult) faces no moral judgement after being penetrated without consent by the vampire during their nights in the castle, and rightly so. The question Eggers asks is: Why should his version of Ellen not be afforded the same respect?

In a notable review, Kelli Weston expertly summarized Eggers’s film as a return to the “Female Gothic” and its centring of women’s subjectivity, arguing further that “those who shut their eyes to the past, are compelled to repeat the repressed as contemporary experience…we, too, are still replaying its guiding tensions.” (3) Weston, who is more generous in her reading of Stoker than I am, demonstrates how the Hutter/Harker figure upsets conventional gender dynamics by making him into a trapped Gothic heroine.

In any event, Eggers ultimately requires of his audience a view of Ellen on terms of equality with the men around her, not despite or even because of the terrible things inflicted on her, but rather as a person capable of love and ideals who has experienced the worst. This might seem like a narrative of women’s senseless suffering and self-sacrifice out of Lars von Trier, but it’s arguably more like Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in which the protagonist’s sacrifice has a collective resonance (and therefore political in the broadest sense), not an individual act of self-destruction in the name of faith in an ideal. (There’s a nod to Dreyer in the film’s title font, and to Vampyr’s [1932] cinematic use of “irrational space” in Eggers’s mise-en-scene. He also uses an image from Murnau’s Faust [1926] to indicate these collective concerns by depicting a sky-borne shadow falling across the entire city of Wisborg.)

All three film (versions) try to explain the deep sexual hypocrisy of Dracula’s storyline, in which Ellen’s/Lucy’s faithfulness to her husband is founded on her sexual purity, even while Thomas/Jonathan (played in Eggers’s film by Nicholas Hoult) faces no moral judgement after being penetrated without consent by the vampire during their nights in the castle, and rightly so. The question Eggers asks is: Why should his version of Ellen not be afforded the same respect?”

It is unavoidable that the timing of this film’s release overlaps weirdly with the shadow of a sexual abuser returning to a throne that he believes will grant him the unlimited abuse of power. This is a coincidence but audiences that experienced this film in December 2024 or January 2025 might feel an additional frisson of bleakness in the film’s worldview and its unspoilable ending, which is straight out of a Bosch painting. In fact, Eggers’s film has bad news for both reactionary and liberal viewers. On one hand, the tradwife ideal is revealed to be seething with perversions and the purity-ring narratives of relationships are a misogynist powertrip. Yet, perhaps even more disturbing, the story of women’s empowerment is not necessarily one of victory or triumph over the odds.

Sacrifice is not “for others” in the sense of self-abnegation but instead an act of solidarity undertaken by the defiled, who might save others by embracing the abjection that comes to us all. Julia Kristeva could have appreciated this film, since it reveals the truth in her theory, expressed in the final pages of her book, Powers of Horror (1980), that power might be investigated and demythologized by and through abjection. (4) The lead-up to the film’s finale is genuinely unhinged, linking Eggers to the European New Extremity horror directors like Julia Ducournau and Lynne Ramsay who do not believe that cleansing the screen of everything except uplifting content and escapist fantasies will help society deal with its current revenants.

The Last Thing I See: 'Nosferatu' (2024) Movie Review

On the opposite end of the spectrum of interpretation, another potential fan of this version of Nosferatu might have been William Peter Blatty, who believed The Exorcist (1973) would drive people to Catholicism by convincing them of the reality of demons. So is this Nosferatu an unexpectedly and provocatively Christian film? It engages, after all, with historical points of theological disputation, like whether evil is a substance; whether the devil can be saved; why one must sin to be saved; how the defiled, the outcast, and the crucified are most important; whether Providence rules this world; and why it doesn’t seem like God is paying attention.

I read a thoughtful critical review of Nosferatu in a Catholic outlet disappointed by the film’s portrayal of a world in which God is absent. (5) Imagine their surprise when they discover that God is not only absent from mainstream commercial genre cinema, but also appears to be absent from the real world. If that is Eggers’ view of religion, it’s far from superficial. Instead, it’s one that eviscerates shallow ideas of redemption and Providence, and easy visions of eternal life, whether they are preached from a conservative Christian perspective or a liberal secular wellness ideology grounded in the indefinite elongation of physical existence (ahem!).

This is already a lot of living plasma to extract from a genre piece, admittedly, but horror has always been a place for ideas where Art with a capital “A” hides out during reactionary moments like the 1980s and the present. But another reason for horror’s current status as the mobile resting-place of interesting mainstream box office stuff, however, is probably specific to our era of collapsing space for feature films made for grown-ups to talk about with other grown-ups. (More people have seen this film and want to talk about it with me than any other film released in the last calendar year so far, by a wide margin.)

In this way, Nosferatu also challenges another kind of IP, the domination of theatrical distribution by sequels to kids’ films and comic book movies that keep studios alive a little bit longer by banking on selling multiple tickets for family nights out. Horror also bridges the widening gap with home streaming by remaining profitable in theaters and living rooms. More revenants, albeit less interesting ones, are likely to emerge from this weirdly unkillable source, one that has always reached into the uncanny ability of cinema itself to bring dead things back to life.

Notes

(1) Hutcheon, Linda, with Siobhan O’Flynn, A Theory of Adaptation (Second Edition, Routledge, 2013 [2006]), 32.

(2) Eisner, Lotte H., The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt (translated by Roger Greaves, University of California Press, 1973 [1965, 1952), 102-5.

(3) Weston, Kelli, “Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu Is a Modern Gothic Triumph” (The Nation, January 7, 2025, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/robert-eggerss-nosferatu/).

(4) Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (translated by Leon S. Roudiez, European Perspectives, Columbia University Press, 1982 [1980], 210.

(5) Olszyk, Nick, “The new Nosferatu is spooky, exciting, and God-less,” Catholic World Report (December 29, 2024, https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2024/12/29/the-new-nosferatu-is-spooky-exciting-and-god-less/).

J. M. Tyree is the editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly and an associate professor in the VCUarts Cinema Program. His most recent book is an uncanny cine-novella, The Haunted Screen.

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