My immediate impression of Robert Egger’s 2024 film was one of captivation – cinematography that recreated a 19th-century Germany immaculately, a star-studded cast and a vampiric plot had all the makings of a film I should have thoroughly enjoyed but by the time the credits rolled an hour and a half later my response was what did I just watch? That was just a poor imitation of Dracula.
I must disclose that I am somewhat biased as the first part of Dracula is probably one of my favourite pieces of literature, and the 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula is easily my favourite Halloween film (Winona Ryder as Mina, Gary Oldman as Dracula, Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing, Sadie Frost as Lucy and well, let’s not talk about Keanu Reeves as Johnathan Harker…) It was also an incredibly faithful visual adaptation, creating all of the horror, fear and eroticism that is there in the 1897 Gothic novel. Eggers’ Nosferatu? Not so much.
Egger’s love for the original adaptation
Within the first ten minutes, all I could think was that this is trying to be Dracula without explicitly being Dracula. Upon reading about the original 1922 Nosferatu it turns out Florence Stoker, Bram Stoker’s wife, had the exact same feeling, so much so that she sued and in 1925 all copies of Nosferatu were ordered to be destroyed for plagiarism. Yet somehow it survived, meaning a century later Robert Eggers could reinvent the film for a modern audience and that I could watch it on YouTube.
‘SpongeBob’ was probably my first encounter with Nosferatu, though the name did seem to exist somewhere within the recesses of cultural consciousness prior to his reinvention, I never had much awareness of him other than a spindly black-and-white vampire who skulks around in the dark. I’m sure he was terrifying to contemporary audiences but after watching the silent film, I came to find him quite funny as he moved around with unintentionally comedic timing (which I’m sure was ground breaking cinematography for the time) and his unceasing wide-eyed glare.
Comparing the two films, while not a shot-for-shot remake, you can see Egger’s love for the original in the way he draws inspiration aesthetically.
Although, I’m not sure if the respiration of the modern Nosferatu (rendering his dialogue largely unintelligible) or the original’s incessant theatre organ, which rarely matched the mood of the scene, takes the prize for worst audio. I felt like what both the original and modern Nosferatu failed to do was capture the eroticism of Count Dracula, in beginning as this ancient monster who becomes young and attractive, enthralling and enthralled with Mina and her friend. Nosferatu attacks sexually, but has no sex appeal and none of the seductive power of Dracula.
Changing of the Protagonist: Ellen, Gender and Sex Themes
It took the wife of the protagonist from the original film, Ellen, and made her the protagonist instead, which felt like an appropriate adaptation but fell short of making any significant point. She stands up to the men in her life – challenging her friend’s husband, questioning her own husband’s role as a man and hostile to the beast himself – brave for a woman of her time, yes. Ellen’s sexual urges are a major plot point, what attracted Nosferatu to her in the first place and ultimately what leads to their dual demise. Yet, it never really does anything with this other than depict it on screen.
Exploring Supernatural Themes & Cinematography
It would have been appreciated to see Ellen’s supernatural side explored more rather than be just background dressing, when Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Van Helsing) utters the line ‘in heathen times you would’ve been a high priestess of Isis’, this is where I wanted to see the film go further, not stop short. So yes, while Egger’s version did something its predecessor did not, in making Ellen more than a mournful-looking wife who awaits her husband’s return and becomes the monster’s final victim, it never really went anywhere with it.
But let’s not forget how evocative the cinematography was – developing simple shots from the original film and redeploying them with modern techniques was where the adaptation stood strong and showed Egger’s real love for the original. Ellen’s longing scene on the beach with the crucifixes became one of surreal contemplation, Nosferatu’s shadow hand moved from Ellen’s heart to become a terrorising cloud over the vampire-plagued town of Wisborg and then the final sun-lit bed shot.
“Horrified, and not in the way I wanted to be.”
The original ends with the heroic sacrifice of Ellen by luring and killing Count Orlok via sunlight and then a century later we have a post-coitus Ellen with a crumbling, scorched corpse atop her. Maybe this is where the differences at the very core of the two can be drawn – the original a Dracula rip-off, charming in its own way but a simple battle of good versus evil, more similar to the book (but never quite exactly) and its successor, whilst visually stunning, trying to make a point about female sexuality but ultimately failing to do so.
Other themes of the Transylvanian tale threaded through too: science vs faith and pseudoscience, disease and consequent quarantine (both Nosferatus being made in the wake of a pandemic), and fear of foreign invasion; all of which had the potential to hold a mirror up to our current political climate but only really form part of the background dressing. There were jump scares here and there but never anything that had me peeking through my fingers.
Horrified, and not in the way I wanted to be.
ROBERT GREENWOOD
Featured image courtesy of Cederic Vandenberghe on Unsplash. Image use license found here . No changes were made to this image.
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