Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula, is a fever dream sprung from the fertile coffin of British bigotry; the mysterious count is linked in the novel to Jews, Romani, immigrants, and queer, unnatural desires.
In his long journey across the decades, the vampire has never shed its links to bigotry, but many latter-day chroniclers have tried to dilute and/or reverse that initial bite of hate. Some vampire tales, like Stephen King’s 1975 novel Salem’s Lot, link the toothy abomination to everyday, wholesome good small-town Americans—evil festers amidst the “normal” and their normality, rather than among the marginalized. Or, alternately, the Let the Right One In (2008), keep the connection to marginalized people (in this case, trans and queer people), but switches the valence by having you root for the monster.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu doesn’t mess with these fiddly efforts to put new dentures in the old beast. F. W. Murnau’s original 1922 film Nosferatu, despite changing some names for copyright reasons, closely followed Dracula in theme and anti-Semitic/anti-queer/anti-foreigner loathing, and Eggers lurks along in that mode as well. There’s more explicit blood and more explicit sex in the latest retelling. But there’s remarkably little effort to reimagine the vampire for more enlightened times—suggesting, perhaps, that our times aren’t necessarily more enlightened.
If you’ve read Dracula, or especially if you’ve seen the classic 1922 film, you know the broad outline of the plot, and spoiler warnings are superfluous. The noble but poor Wisborg legal agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is summoned to Eastern Europe to attend Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, with prosthetic nose), who wishes to relocate to Wisborg. Unluckily for Thomas, though, Orlok is a deathless undead abomination, obsessed with Thomas’ wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).
Orlok had an ill-defined dream relationship with Ellen in the past and is determined to feed on her in person—bringing plague to Germany as an unfortunate (or if you’re Orlok, fortunate) side effect. The only one who can stop the Count and end the pandemic is the aging scientist/mystic Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe)—and perhaps Ellen herself, in the tried and true tradition of innocent Christ-like sacrifice.
If anything, Eggers’ gothic vision is more conventional than Murnau’s scrappy, expressionist style, in which a brilliant use of shadows, film speed, and editing more than made up for the limitations of 1920s special effects, sound and color. Eggers’ camera is more mobile and he can pan across the city at dawn with a more technically dramatic sweep; he’s got access to gouts of colorful red blood.
But in Murnau’s film, the glorious grotesque weirdness of the Count’s carriage riding at unnatural speed over the twisting roads of the Carpathians, or the terrifying beauty of the twisted vampire shadow on the wall—no one in the history of cinema has ever really recaptured that, and Eggers doesn’t either.
The main change in Eggers’ version is that Ellen has a more extended tragic backstory, and arguably more agency. It’s she who decides to seduce the Count and keep him in her bed, feeding on her, until the crow of the cock and the dawn destroys him. At the same time, though, the fact that Ellen has a history with Orlok, if only in dreams, makes her sacrifice a kind of expiation of sin; she’s been defiled, and dies to erase her own past lapses. She’s the hero, in some sense, but her heroism is deployed in the name of repairing women’s purity, and restoring a patriarchal order threatened by her (mental) infidelity and self-assertion.
As for the anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and homophobic overtones—those are all reproduced with casual fidelity. Orlok has a hooked, Jewish nose, which is one of the primary signs of his evil; his bloodsucking trysts with Thomas are a disgusting signature of abomination; he’s an immigrant who violates national borders, bringing disease, murder, and chaos. Eggers doesn’t expand any of these markers of hate. But he doesn’t do much to mitigate them or redirect them. The Stoker and Murnau prototypes are holy writ; Eggers isn’t one to tamper.
Eggers’ faith is justified in some sense; the narrative, even at the film’s slow pace, still has a compelling propulsive power. The creeping invasion of evil, the distorted non-Christian defilement of the upright Christian home, can still sink its teeth into you. At the same time, the refusal to grapple with the uglier implications at this particular moment, as our leaders promise massive violence against immigrants and members of the incoming US administration cheer on the neo-fascist party in Germany—it can’t help but feel a bit cowardly. Eggers is an immensely talented filmmaker, and Nosferatu is beautiful and effectively frightening. But a vampire story that isn’t willing to confront evil fundamentally misses the point.