One of the better decisions George A Romero made in his Dead films was to leave the cause of the zombie plague a mystery. There are theories dropped into television and radio broadcasts in the films, but there’s never a definitive answer. The truth is that he never cared; what was important to him was not the scientific undergirding of the dead rising to become cannibals but rather the moral and philosophical questions he could explore within that scenario. In Day of the Dead Frankenstein isn’t trying to cure Bub, or even to figure out what happened to Bub. He’s trying to figure out if Bub can be made more human. In Survival of the Dead the issue isn’t curing the zombie but rather the way the people on Plum Island refuse to let go of the idea that their undead relatives can be cured; it’s about denial in the face of tragedy.
Sadly the vampire film has chosen another course. Over the decades the vampire has been scientized, with vampirism often being reduced to an infection and the powers of the vampire restrained to what your standard street level Marvel superhero could do. There are reasons for this - for one thing the zombie is the Other while the vampire, more and more, represents us and our own lusts and desires - and while for a time this was an interesting avenue to explore, the way that vampire stories have turned towards science fiction, or have at least shed most of their occult trappings, is a general loss for us as genre fans.
Robert Eggers comes to save us, in much the same way he saved us from saccharine witch stories and modernized, softened heroic fantasy. His Nosferatu returns the vampire to being a creature of horror, a denizen of the darkness and an agent of the Devil. Gone are the handsome, conflicted vampires of the past few decades and here instead is a monster, a grotesquerie who does not romance his victims and whose general concept of consent is dubious, at best. This is a vampire steeped in the old ways, the ancient myths, the beliefs that have been passed down to us from a time before written history, when the idea of the dead returning to hungry life was not a dream but a nightmare.
He chose his source material carefully and wisely. FW Murnau’s original classic, suppressed for a time because it was pretty clearly a blatant ripoff of Dracula, is drenched in the mystical and the arcane. Perhaps it took Germans, closer to the dark forests of Eastern Europe, to bring the vampire back to its arcane roots. As an Englishman Bram Stoker was too removed from these myths and legends; while he delved deeply into the lore of Eastern Europe, Murnau perhaps had it in his blood.
And Murnau’s movie is not just window dressing occult stuff. The film is full of real alchemical and hermetic symbology, and it utilizes Enochian, the language of angels that was revealed to occult superstar John Dee in the 1500s. The film tells us that Count Orlok became a nosferatu - a Romanian word that means vampire - as a result of a pact with the demon Belial. What’s more, Murnau’s film takes the vampirism very seriously, and that makes sense, as the movie’s producer met a man during WWI who claimed that his own father had become a vampire.
Eggers leans heavily into this, and he has made a mystical movie that is dreamlike in parts, depicting the strange absence of reality that marks true occult events. Magic, like vampires, has been made more scientific - it’s often depicted as a rules-based system that is simply an alternate way to interact with the universe, a kind of physics or chemistry. But real magic is weird, and Eggers gets that. Real magic is something that happens at the soft meeting place of the world and something psychotropic and unstable, a realm that itself has no rules but only whims. It’s the place of dreams but also nightmares, and that’s what makes it so exciting and terrifying and, in the end, so interesting.
Murnau’s Nosferatu was Expressionistic, and while Eggers has not quite made a big budget Expressionist film, he has adhered to the deeply subjective nature of the movement. But Murnau was also working in the Gothic and romantic styles, and Eggers again has made a movie that leans in that direction. And on top of it he has put his own obsession with veracity, something that has made all of his films so tactile and immediate and real, and in the process has taken everything to another level, making a movie where you are in the actual world of 1830s Germany but you are also trapped inside the subjective perspective of the leads, blurring all lines between what is happening and what is in their heads.
The performances of the leads makes this visceral; Lily-Rose Depp in particular is phenomenal as the object of the awful Count Orlok’s desire. In some ways this is a nothing role - a woman given to fainting and being “hysterical” and other sorts of wilting flower behavior. But Depp gets into the heart of what is happening to this woman, which is the most beastly kind of lust possible, a primal and powerful sexual desire that transcends time and space.
That’s a vital part of Nosferatu. Gone is the suave, romantic vampire - did you know that the original Nosferatu introduced the idea of vampires being allergic to the sun, which gives that film a direct line to the shimmering teen dream vampires of Twilight? - and returned is the animalistic lust that so frightened people on the cusp of the Victorian era. This is not love, not even like, this is rutting, a feral desire in the loins that burns so hot that it cannot be ignored. More than that, it’s dangerous for a woman to feel this way at the time, a sign of mental illness at best, yet Depp’s character is drowning in this arcane lust.
She is in love with her husband, played by Nicholas Hoult (having a very good end of year with this, The Order and a great turn in the otherwise ech Juror #2). But that love does not match the intensity with which she desires Orlok, and the man can, she says, never please her the way the vampire can.
There’s a cuckiness to Hoult’s role, but I think he elevates it above that. Hoult is playing a guy who wants to be the romantic hero, and he really almost gets there. He’s brave and dashing and doing his best, but the minute Orlok mounts him in front of the fireplace and begins to very erotically suck the blood from his breast the guy’s whole jig is largely up. That he fights through the confusion, the queasy state of nightmare fog in which Orlok envelops him, that he shows up at a castle with a big ass metal stake to drive into the vampire’s heart, are all testaments to the chivalric qualities of a gentleman. Too bad none of them matter in the end, because no amount of civilization can ever eradicate the beast heart that beats in our breasts.
And no amount of reason can stand against the occult. In my favorite performance in the movie (where he gets to deliver the one single joke in the whole thing), Willem Dafoe’s Van Helsing stand-in says that perhaps the age of reason did not allow us to see but blinded us with its light; by relegating the supernatural to the dark we have given it power and space to grow. It’s a compelling argument in an era when materialistic science feels more and more powerless to approach the most fundamental questions about what it is to be human, what it is to be alive, and what it all means. Yes, we can tell you how atoms interact and molecules bond but we cannot tell you why, and perhaps that’s the biggest and most important question of all. Dafoe has a foot in both worlds - he has science and he has the occult, and he holds them as equals, and as in all the best Dafoe performances, it makes him come across as more than a little unhinged.
By the way, speaking of the way rules have restricted our genre storytelling, there’s a very great and very small moment in Nosferatu where Dafoe is asked how to kill the vampire, and he doesn’t know because there are so many methods from so many different places. I was thrilled by this - he’s not saying one method is more correct than another, he’s simply noting that there’s no universal rule on how to do it, that it’s going to vary from region to region, and he doesn’t know which one is going to work in Orlok. Technically this is a rules-based situation, but the fact that there is no large, objective set of rules is what is so delightful.
At last we come to Orlok himself, played by Bill Skarsgard. This might be one of the most radically intensive performances in years; there is no Skarsgard here, only Orlok. It’s chilling how complete the transformation is, how natural the physicality and the deeply creepy - and yet wonderfully silly - voice are. This is a being here, summoned for us on film. You can smell the grave on him, and he is disturbing and odd and off-putting in all the best nightmare ways. What’s truly great about this Orlok is that he looks like he is from the 1400s; his big mustache and his sumptuously ratty Romanian coat mark him as a thing out of time. This is not a handsome count, this is a sub-Hapsburg monstrosity, his grotesque pallor and twisted features recalling the inbred genetics of Europe’s royal families.
Eggers has made a movie that has the veneer of a dream and the grit of reality, a period piece that comes across as more accurate than some movies set in the modern day. He has not added heavy-handed speeches about the treatment of women or the atrocities of medical care at the time, he simply lets it all play out on screen and trusts us to get it. His Nosferatu is rather faithful to Murnau’s, but it’s so much bigger and expansive, so much deeper and creepier. The very atmosphere of this film is at times suffocating, and the tension that Eggers wrings from scenes is nothing less than the work of a master. His camera work alone is astonishing, with the camera itself a player in the scene, drifting and moving through the location, sometimes motivated not by the motion of characters but by itself. More than once I gasped at an audacious camera move, a switch in perspective or a sudden drift down a long table. Eggers is one of the greatest filmmakers working today, and he’s certainly at the top of his age bracket and weight class. I make that caveat because we do still have old masters turning out epochal work, but what Eggers has done over the course of only four movies is incredible. His body of work is unassailable, his consistency undeniable. Each film has its own concerns, its own themes, its own aesthetics and yet each of them has one thing in common: the director’s obsession with accuracy and truth, which allows him the freedom to give us the most fantastical and bizarre images and concepts imaginable.
The practice of ranking films for the year is one I never liked and now have the luxury of ignoring, but there’s still a little part of me that wants to slot movies into their right and proper places. Were I to give in to that nagging little accountant in the back of my brain, I would say that Nosferatu is the best movie of the year 2024, a true masterpiece. This is a great work, one that is fertile ground for revisit and exploration in the years to come, a gorgeous and off-putting work that is not just a great genre piece but is simply a great movie. This is one to which I will return again and again, because no matter how many times I experience its psychosexual depravity, its opulent costumes, its awe-inspiring camera work, its performances of truth and horror, I cannot be sated.