Nosferatu (2024): Have Vampire Movies Been Done to Death? By Holly Hartford

What is Eggers giving us that we haven’t already had?

When I went to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024),  I was expecting to be impressed. Waiting in the queue for popcorn, the guy behind the counter said he had seen it recently and, despite all the buzz, he thought it was boring. What a strange thing to say to someone you’ve just sold tickets to. But, of course, I took it with a pinch of salt; clearly, he doesn’t know how to appreciate a good movie… 

Before I say anything else, I want to establish that Nosferatu was very well-made: beautiful colour palette, solid acting (excluding some Aaron Taylor-Johnson moments), breathtaking cinematography, blood-curdling sound design and a stunning ending scene that is still ingrained in my brain. The gothic atmosphere was chillingly executed. And yet, I expected more.

Starting with the big man himself, I had some issues with Count Orlok’s appearance. In this version of the Dracula story, he’s essentially an immortal corpse. My question is: why the moustache? Not only that, but it was an impressively – perfectly — groomed moustache, put on an otherwise hairless and decaying corpse-body, merely for the purposes of it being ‘historically accurate.’ Yes, the moustache is true to the original text, and designed to resemble that of a Transylvanian nobleman. Despite this strong insistence upon accuracy, there is one detail they missed: it looks ridiculous. The hair situation was not consistent with the rest of his rotted design. This may sound pedantic, but it was jarring enough that it broke the spell, even if momentarily, and its silliness felt misplaced alongside an otherwise brooding and macabre characterisation.

There are positives. This version of the infamous vampire villain is not slick with the seductive glimmer of Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), or perhaps Robert Pattinson in the cinematic masterpiece that is Twilight (2008.) Instead, Egger’s villain is well-executed as a thoroughly repulsive creature with mangled flesh, who animalistically gurgles as he mounts his prey and siphons their blood, carelessly massacring children and embodying a mechanical personification of consumption itself. I appreciated his enormous frame, particularly in scenes when he’s standing in his giant bearskin cloak. Regardless of the moustache, his presence was mostly foreboding and carried an impressive physicality that was blood-chilling at times.

However, dare I say, he was a forgettable villain who absolutely did not give me nightmares. Orlok’s introductory scene slowly exposes him as an ominous figure gradually pieced together in the dim shadows cast by candlelight and a roaring fire. Your heart is racing, you’re squinting, straining to see the face that has been hidden from you so cleverly throughout months of marketing and promotion. Unfortunately, it was anticlimactic. I thought his voice worked well— extremely well. Keeping the long fingers and nails was a nice touch, especially eerie when catching the light, as they encroached upon the edges of a frame. But frankly, he looked younger than I expected. Even the mutilated face of Nicholas Cage in Renfield (2023) was a scarier sight to see than this. Given the deliberate efforts to hide him from audiences in the trailer, they did a perfect job of building the anticipation. Such a shame that it landed like a wet balloon.

With regard to Orlok’s role in the story, I’m far from a professional in the field of cinematic vampire lore, but my impression of this movie is essentially a decrepit man corpse wanting to have sex with a young virginal woman. Upon facing rejection, he (of course) resorts to violence until she submits. To me, this limits his mythical mystery. It’s a classical patriarchal tragedy, ending with the woman dead —she barely gives consent, and when she does it’s under duress, so I’m not seeing the same female agency that others claim to see. If anything, Nosferatu seemed more like a pesky mosquito that you just couldn’t quite swat away, certainly with little of the complexity seen in previous iterations. 

The movie establishes a dichotomy between the rational, scientific world, positioned as limited and ultimately ignorant in the face of the occult: yet within this realm of the occult, all the features of the former world of reason are still there, just dressed up differently. Meaning, Nosferatu feels less like a mysterious demonic being, and more like an aggressively heterosexual man who happens to be immortal. What if Nosferatu was non-binary? What if he fancied the husband, not the wife? Eggers certainly doesn’t shy away from breaking some rules, so why not kick away entirely the crutch of heteronormativity. What if we actually delved into the guts of a story and got creative with the push and pull of death and desire, rather than relying on the artificial, sociological positionings of gender which somehow always still exist in realms of myth and fantasy? To put it simply, why does Nosferatu want Ellen? I wanted something more than just man-wants-sex-with-woman, even if some want to embellish this interpretation with readings into allegory and Ellen’s role in summoning him as a child. This film barely scratched the surface, ultimately leaving untouched the true complexities of death, desire and obsession.

The story in general felt dull, trundling towards predestined moments that we already know from past remakes. Despite a shifted focus to Ellen, I found myself asking: what is the point? Eggers said in an interview that he wanted to go back to the folklore of the past, to a time when people believed vampires were real. I loved this aspect of the movie, shown briefly when Thomas passes through a rural village and witnesses a disturbing ritual. But alas, it was brief and gone too quickly, only minorly returned to when the smallfolk treat him after his escape from Orlok.

More broadly, I didn’t care about the characters and I struggled to find narrative depth. It was all atmosphere— no stakes, no chemistry, and no gristle to sink your teeth into. It was as if scenes just delivered information, developing the tale in a very vertical progression rather than a more lateral dive into true meaning, which was only touched upon by the underdeveloped nudges towards the juxtaposed worlds of science and the occult. If I’m honest, I wanted Ellen’s storyline to delve more into her connection with Orlok and the essence of her supernatural senses. I wonder if the bad dreams, hallucinations and seizures were overly dramatised, as Lily-Rose Depp’s performance pleasantly distracts us from Ellen’s stunted development.

In one of his press tour interviews, Eggers says that this movie meant a lot to him on a personal level, having loved the story of Nosferatu since he was a kid. With this in mind, it makes more sense that he didn’t do anything spectacular with this film. Perhaps he intended it to function solely as a homage. However, this made it less enjoyable and left me mourning the untapped potential of a possible masterpiece, more so than Ellen’s lifeless corpse.

Overall, this remake is visually beautiful, but it didn’t pack the punch needed for yet another remake of a story we already know off by heart. Eggers did good, but he could have done better.