How does Robert Eggers’ retelling of FW Murnau’s silent horror classic compare with the original, or indeed Werner Herzog’s estimable remake? Ian Haydn Smith investigates.
It makes sense, Robert Eggers directing a remake of Nosferatu. FW Murnau’s film revels in the Gothic, which has been a constant element in all of Eggers’ work. It’s there in his striking debut, The Witch (2015), a portrait of supernatural happenings affecting pilgrim-era settlers in a 17th-century village. It’s present in his surreal coastal potboiler The Lighthouse (2019). It’s even there in his Viking vengeance saga The Northman (2022).
Like Dracula, the 1897 novel by Bram Stoker from which it was adapted, Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is a tale of abject love. A connection exists between Ellen Hutter, a young woman from the German port town of Wisborg, and the ravaged Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok, who exists on human blood and is fated to live forever. When Ellen’s clerk husband Thomas is dispatched to the count’s castle to finalise the purchase of property in Wisborg, he is imprisoned there while Orlok makes his way to Germany to forge an unholy bond with Ellen.
Eggers first encountered Murnau’s film as a child. In high school, he wrote, directed and starred in a stage adaptation, which impressed a local producer so much that he gave it a run at a professional theatre. Since his movie career began, Eggers wanted to bring his own version of the story to the screen. It was going to be the follow-up to his accomplished debut The Witch, but he changed his mind, believing he wasn’t quite ready to take it on. Although The Northman proved to be a challenge for him, Eggers has noted in recent interviews that the experience prepared him to take on Murnau’s classic.
What the new Nosferatu achieves stands as both a remake and a remodelling. The film presents the same atmosphere and oppressive environment of the original, while bringing certain characters’ traits and motivations more in line with contemporary perspectives. Like the previous two versions, Eggers’ film is the product of the era it was made in.
Nosferatu (2024)
In 1922, when the original was released, German cinema was at a creative and commercial apex, even as the country itself was hobbled by the collapse of its economy and social structures in the aftermath of World War I. As the impact of the Versailles Treaty took hold – the penalty for Germany’s aggression, which would play a significant role in the rise of Hitler and the Nazis – the short-lived German Expressionist style found a welcoming cinema audience. Its relegation of realism in favour of an emphasis on the outward projection of tormented characters’ – and, by extension, Germany’s – psyche and emotions, envisioned through wildly imagined set design and dramatic use of chiaroscuro lighting, proved a powerful symbol a nation on the precipice of a social, economic and moral abyss.
In his seminal study of German cinema from this era, From Caligari to Hitler: The Psychological History of the German Film (1947), Siegfried Kracauer suggests that the films, including Nosferatu, which appeared under the banner of German Expressionism, were ‘faced with the seemingly unavoidable alternative of tyranny or chaos’. Count Orlok is a prime example of the tyrannical figure. At the same time, there existed a romantic notion that such tyranny could be overcome by love, hence Ellen’s role within the narrative. The drama played out on a heightened level, which Eggers’ film has embraced, but which Werner Herzog’s remake distanced itself from.
Nosferatu (2024)
One of his few outwardly conventional genre films, Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) is very much an homage to Murnau’s film, which he considers the greatest of all German films. But all the characters’ names have reverted back to those that appear in Stoker’s novel. (Murnau didn’t get authorisation from the Stoker family to adapt the novel and they sued, resulting in a judge ruling that all prints be destroyed. Only a few survived. By the time Herzog made his film, the intellectual-property rights were no longer owned by the family.)
Klaus Kinski’s antagonist resembles Max Schreck’s from the original – more monster than human. But as Herzog says in Paul Cronin’s book-length interview with the director, Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed (2014), the two figures are markedly different. ‘In Murnau’s film the creature is frightening because he has no soul and looks like an insect, but Kinski’s vampire has real existential anguish. I tried to humanise him by presenting the vampire as an agonised, sad and lonely creature, desperately thirsty for love, but terrifying at the same time.’ The melancholy that Kinski skilfully projects envelops the whole film like a permanent mist. The dreamlike images that made the 1922 film so fantastic are less prevalent – the setting is more grounded in a recognisable 19th-century environment. Eggers’ Nosferatu opts for Murnau’s approach, although the new film’s nemesis couldn’t look more different to the characters Murnau and Herzog envisioned.
Nosferatu (2024)
The most striking contrast between Eggers’ version of the story and the two that preceded it is Count Orlok. Unlike the bald, cadaverous creature of the first two films, Bill Skarsgård resembles a human who has existed for hundreds of years. His skin has fallen away leaving open, festering wounds. His face is mottled and dominated by a large moustache. In his hauteur he resembles a former military officer – it’s easy to imagine him once leading a cavalry charge. Skarsgård underwent months of voice training for the role, which adds significantly to the richness of his character. It’s interesting that, in possessing such recognisable human traits, this version of Count Orlok is more monstrous.
Ellen, Orlok’s object of desire, also contrasts with previous portrayals. In Murnau’s version she was played by Greta Schröder, while Isabelle Adjani portrayed her in Herzog’s. Lily-Rose Depp appears in Eggers’ film, and she brings a welcome modernity to the role. Even though it is set in 1938, Ellen evinces an independence that looks forward to the rise of the suffragette movement. By challenging her station in a class-ridden society, being unwilling to control her emotions and fearless in speaking her mind, she is a more modern figure. Eggers’ approach to sexuality is also different. Ellen’s connection with Orlok is a combination of loneliness and illicit desire – a potent mix she experienced at a vulnerable moment in her youth. But it is her strength of character that also seals Orlok’s fate.
Nosferatu (2024)
Eggers adopts Murnau’s more fantastical style and setting. The film is shot in colour, although Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography is drained of it so often it can be a surprise when a flourish of yellow or red appears. In addition to languishing in both the sensuous and the rancid, this Nosferatu also embraces camp. In doing so, there’s a link with Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), particularly Willem Dafoe’s colourful portrayal of Prof Albin Eberhart Von Franz, who resembles a distant cousin of Anthony Hopkins’ more outré Professor Abraham Van Helsing in the other film.
Like Herzog’s film, Eggers’ Nosferatu is an exercise in reverence from one director to another. Eggers’ desire had long been to bring his vision of Murnau’s world to the screen. He’s achieved this by adding his own stamp to the story. And like the work of any great horror director, his dream has become our nightmare.
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