Nosferatu

Directed and written by Robert Eggers ◆ Produced by Jeff Robinov, John Graham, Chris Columbus, Eleanor Columbus, Robert Eggers ◆ Distributed by Focus Features & Universal Pictures

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Iconic though the name “Dracula” has become in our culture, it is, in fact, a diminutive. The Transylvanian potentate Vlad III, who was feared for impaling his captured military opponents, took it from his father, Vlad II, who was known as “Dracul,” or “the Dragon.” Vlad II, who ruled over neighboring Wallachia before hostile relatives drove him across the border, earned the epithet from his membership in the Order of the Dragon, a medieval chivalric order founded for reigning sovereigns by the 15th-century Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund of Luxembourg. Adding a final “a” connotes “son of,” which might be appropriate since everything we know about the fictional “Dracula” derives from the title character in the Irish author Bram Stoker’s lasting gothic horror novel of 1897.

Stoker gave the world a nocturnal vampire who must feed on human blood to survive but presents in everyday life as a continental gentleman, a Romanian count of meretricious elegance and charm. Seeking to relocate from his ancestral lands in Transylvania to London, where he can exist more anonymously, he pursues the young wife of his real estate broker, who then joins forces with men on the edge of science and the occult to track him down and destroy him. 

Adaptations, amendments, and embellishments to Stoker’s tale abound across media, ranging from depictions in high art to a campy, bespectacled puppet known for his “counting” on Sesame Street. There have been more than 30 film adaptations of the Dracula tale in the last century or so, the oldest extant version of which is the German director F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), which changed the names, setting, and much of the story in an attempt to avoid international copyright restrictions. Dracula himself became “Count Orlok.” The story’s essentials, however, remained similar enough to the novel that Stoker’s widow and literary executor Florence Balcombe sued and enforced the destruction of all prints of Murnau’s film, though one survived for posterity to enjoy. Director Robert Eggers, who is mainly known for period horror/action films, including The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), and The Northman (2022), decided to base his new film version, which premiered in December 2024, on the legacy of Murnau’s film rather than Stoker’s novel.

Zig-zagging on the Dracula theme is nothing new. Tod Browning’s foundational film adaptation of 1931 starring Bela Lugosi was produced with full rights and preserved much of Stoker’s content, as adapted for a 1924 stage play. A generation later, Terence Fisher produced a reasonably faithful Stoker version starring Christopher Lee, which was then spun off for less authentic sequels. Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre, a success at the time that is now largely forgotten, attempted an homage to both Murnau and Stoker, using Stoker’s original names while preserving Murnau’s altered settings. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) made a more faithful adaptation of the novel’s characters and settings but altered the ending to gesture toward the “vampire chic” that late 20th-century adolescents indulged in to channel a sense of alienation. Such spoofs as Stan Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1979), a saucy effort starring the ubiquitous George Hamilton, and Mel Brooks’s poorly received Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995), starring the serious actor-turned-comedian Leslie Nielsen, made light of the contrast between Stoker’s character, an elegant European aristocrat with ghoulish but by then clichéd habits, and the infelicities of the modern world.

The elasticity of the Dracula legend is a curse nearly as inescapable as the one that weaves through its various versions. When Eggers conceived of the new film project in 2015, he was in his early 30s and had made only one feature film. He fully appreciated the challenges of taking on such an enormous subject and wondered if he was ready for it. His Nosferatu takes a number of liberties, reflecting what one might call “modern” sensibilities. The young wife of the story, Ellen, is no longer a hapless victim of the undead Count Orlok, but bound to him as a result of a lonely childhood fantasy for an eternal soulmate.

Despite never meeting him in person, Ellen grows up possessed by his brooding soul, which communicates with her telepathically and drives her into frenzies. Her community and her eventual husband—Thomas Hutter in this Murnau adaptation, but Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s novel and its direct descendants—interpret her frenzies as what clinicians used to call “hysteria” and treat with restrictive procedures. Those treatments have led postmodern social theorists to equate hospitals with incarceration, surveillance, and control.

The repressive medical treatment trope shows Eggers has studied the phenomenon, but it seems like an unnecessary overlay added to the story. Lily-Rose Depp, the 25-year-old daughter of Johnny Depp, has a talent for conveying the pathologies of this character, who is so radically altered from the source material. Eggers’ interpretation, however, raises the larger question of why the Byronically handsome Hutter, played by the English actor Nicholas Hoult of the remade Mad Max and X-Men franchises, would look upon her with love, desire, or even patience.

One might wonder the same thing about Swedish actor Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok, who does not coincidentally happen upon the girl, as conventional Draculas and Murnau’s Orlok do, but picks her out at enormous distance despite having populous local communities with many young women in his immediate vicinity, which Eggers’s script inaccurately calls the “Carpathian Alps.” Orlok is monstrously deformed, as was Max Schreck’s Orlok in Murnau’s film. Modern cinema, however, allowed Eggers to make him not merely scary but actually disgusting, as though he had just risen from a filthy grave. Makeup reportedly took six hours each day to create a body that appears to be rotting and covered in lesions. His eyes are poisonous. His only remaining humanity sprouts in a bushy mustache that Eggers’s hipster neighbors in Brooklyn might envy.

Yet, for all his terrifying looks, Skarsgård’s accent, which he worked on with an Icelandic opera singer and modulated with studies of Mongolian throat singing, still sounds so close to that of Bela Lugosi and his many imitators that he lapses into caricature. It does not help that the sound effects reproduce the throbbing heartbeats, moaning choruses, and whistling wind that have been sonic staples of horror films for generations. Orlok terrorizes Hoult’s Hutter in the confines of his decrepit castle, but the impression he leaves on the viewer is unintentionally comical. It takes only a small stretch of the imagination to hear him telling a hapless victim, “Aye vant to suck your blooood.” Eggers’s script also gives Skarsgård tedious word salads to recite as Orlok deepens his psychic hold over his remote victim. When she breaks free at the end, despite a lifetime of hysteria, it is plausible that she does so because his seduction techniques are so inept.

Eggers put a lot of effort into the film’s visual and historical contexts. Filmed mostly in the Czech Republic, the sets beautifully and evocatively recreate 19th-century European urban and rural landscapes. Eggers deserves all due credit for selecting Romania’s Corvin Castle, located in the Transylvania region, as the outdoor setting of Orlok’s residence. A Renaissance-Gothic edifice dating back to the 15th century, it is legendarily where the historic Vlad the Impaler is believed to have at one time been imprisoned. Its association with the Dracula story dates back to Stoker, though it is unclear whether he knew of its direct connection to the tale.

Courtesy of Linda Muir’s costuming, Orlok’s putrid body is clad in eclectic but fairly solid recreations of early modern Balkan warrior garb. The German townspeople repopulate an ancient Baltic port with convincing realism. Casting Willem Dafoe as the occult scientist who helps defeat Orlok and the resonantly voiced English actor Ralph Ineson as the town doctor adds to the film’s atmosphere. So, too, does the multitalented actor Simon McBurney, who also writes plays and directs opera, in the charismatic role of Harding, Hutter’s friend who struggles to care for the departed real estate broker’s troubled wife.

Eggers worked a lot on the ethnography of the legend and its settings. This included, for some scenes, a recreation of Dacian, an extinct Romance language that was a forerunner of modern Romanian, which also appears at appropriate times, and Romani, the language of the Roma people who have historically inhabited that part of the world. Hutter’s arrival in Transylvania occurs amid a Romani community played by non-professional actors of that ethnicity. Reaching back to Stoker, the sea voyage that returns the beleaguered Hutter and the entombed but menacing Orlok from Transylvania takes place on a ship crewed by Russian speakers, who give their all in a brief scene portending the plague that will beset the German town.

Nosferatu, which earned over $120 million at the box office, has been nominated for four Academy Awards, for best cinematography, costume design, production design, and makeup and hairstyling. If Eggers had stuck to the original narrative, the film might have nabbed Best Picture.