Nosferatu is a frightening wake-up call

F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu is a landmark of early cinema, memorialized in the Catholic world by its inclusion on the 1995 Vatican Film List. In the opening title card, the film calls itself “a symphony of horror,” but it would scare few if any viewers today. Nonetheless, the vampire lore which Murnau adapted from Bram Stoker’s Dracula has become deeply ingrained in Western culture ever since. My colleague David Paul Baird describes the film in our book Popcorn with the Pope as “an enduring testament to humanity’s lasting fascination with evil, as well as an indirect insight into what it takes to overcome it.”

Murnau’s film is set on the cusp of the industrial revolution in the late in 1830s, and the story exposes what lies beneath the early triumphs of technological progress. In the shadows of our enlightened good fortune lurks a monster of the old world, an ancient enemy poised to prey upon people who have been born into ignorance of the metaphysical ground on which their ancestors stood. Murnau’s film, along with most vampire stories, reminds us that every so often, a plague of spiritual sickness descends upon us in our weakened state of decadence. And although evil is ever-present, we continue to exclude it from the mythos of scientific and political advance at our peril.

In 1979, another German director, Werner Herzog, re-made the film as Nosferatu the Vampyre, maintaining Murnau’s Teutonic setting, but reverting to Stoker’s English character names, which Murnau had avoided for lack of the rights. Murnau’s Count Orlok once again becomes Count Dracula, played by the infamous Klaus Kinski. The naïve newlywed estate agent is no longer Thomas Hutter, but Jonathan Harker, played by Bruno Ganz. Isabelle Adjani replaces Murnau’s pure-hearted Ellen with the ravishing Lucy, who attempts to relieve the burden of evil for her husband and community by sacrificing herself to it.

Herzog’s film, like Murnau’s, is a tribute to the Romantic vision of pre-modern Europe, appropriately accompanied by the music of Wagner; but it also falls into a caricature of Romanticism that leads to baptizing anything-goes passion. Herzog’s critique is not solely of modern technology, but rather of the bourgeois values at the heart of Liberalism (rightly so); but the end of the film is deeply cynical, not conveying any hope of defeating the forces of darkness, but proposing an inevitable acquiescence to them. Like the original, Herzog’s Nosferatu is beautiful and not scary–it is even comical at times but it is also sympathetic to the villain, Dracula. He can’t help his desires and, supposedly, nor can we.

American director Robert Eggers now offers us a third Nosferatu, sharing the perspective of his predecessors in many respects, but deviating from them, and especially from Herzog, in significant ways.

Eggers has made a name for himself in recent years as a filmmaker who focuses on mystical elements of the past as a way to reveal the depth of reality still present among us in the twenty-first century. As I wrote in 2022 about his film The Northman, Eggers’ work “takes the supernatural seriously, rejecting the disenchantment that the Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor has rightly identified as the water we swim in today.” There was once a time when our Western forebears completely took for granted the omnipresence of the gods and then God. Without abstraction, people simply lived as if every conversation, interaction, struggle, and battle were governed by activity in the spiritual realm. And apart from Eggers’ work, very rarely in the realm of big-budget American entertainment do we encounter anything like this supernatural view. As the 41-year-old Eggers said in a recent interview, “You know, I’m not making Marvel movies.”

No kidding.

It is appropriate, therefore, that Eggers is now able to offer his own Nosferatu to the same movie-going public that might otherwise buy a ticket to the latest Avengers copy of a copy or run-of-the-mill horror film. And as for the latter category, while his film is not exactly jump-out-of-your-seat terrifying, it is a whole lot scarier, not to mention gorier and more sexually explicit, than its two predecessors. Most importantly, Eggers’ Nosferatu is a major artistic achievement that engages with the realm of the spirit even more profoundly than his previous efforts.

Eggers sticks with Murnau’s version in using the German instead of English names for the characters. He also broadens the Romantic-era female passion of the character of the young bride, Ellen, played in a show-stealing performance by Lily-Rose Depp. We learn early on that Count Orlok is drawn from Transylvania to the German town of Wisborg (a fictionalization of Wismar on the North Sea) precisely because of Ellen, who had had an erotic experience with the demon count in a moment of juvenile longing. The theme of the danger of sexual awakening is only hinted at in Murnau’s original and ignored completely in Herzog’s remake, but Eggers is right to make more of it than his predecessors. He invites the audience to think about how, even in our disenchanted age, the few spiritually sensitive souls around us may not only be in danger themselves, but may also bring risk to the rest of us. Without a culture-wide understanding of good and evil, their passions make them sitting ducks for dark opportunists.

And yet, while it may have been Ellen’s confused pubescent desires that initially made her susceptible to Orlok’s sorcery, the door is open for her passions to be redirected to good. There is a tender conclusion to a brutal scene in the film where Ellen confesses her shame to her husband, played by the excellent Nicholas Hoult, and she thanks him for giving her the appropriate avenue in holy matrimony for her God-given fervor. In the end, Ellen takes the opportunity to redeem the world around her, just as the female protagonist in Murnau’s version does, only more dramatically. The final sequence between Count Orlok and Ellen is a shocker, but Eggers pulls out all the stops to show how the light ultimately knows no equal in the darkness. By sacrifice, darkness is banished and order is restored.

Unlike in Herzog’s film, Eggers makes no mistake about how the audience should feel about the vampire, played by Bill Skarsgård, who had previously appeared as Pennywise the clown in Andy Muschietti’s two-part screen adaptation of Steven King’s It. Skarsgård, muscular and covered in morose prosthetics, conveys pure evil in Nosferatu.

In the same vein, a significant character in Murnau’s original who is missing from Herzog’s version is restored to the story in Eggers’ film, and greatly expanded. Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, played by Eggers’ alumnus Willem Defoe, is an occultist and alchemist who has been kicked out of the respectable academy–cancelled, as it were, for unconventional methods and beliefs. The town physician, Dr. Sievers, turns to his eccentric former teacher as a last resort, representing the common phenomenon of “God in the gaps.” That is, in the modern world, we tend only to explore spiritual explanations when we have exhausted every other possibility. But it is Franz who declares the plain truth, “If we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.”

On the battle of light and darkness, good and evil, Eggers distinguishes himself not only from Herzog’s moral vision, but more broadly from the annoying turn in much modern story-telling. If we can just understand people’s histories and experiences, we are told, we might sympathize with them. We are encouraged to rethink whether the conventional good guys are actually on the right side or not. One finds this paradigm shift in Wicked, another film in theaters at the moment. Likewise, recent vampire fiction, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has attempted to complicate the question of what constitutes real spiritual danger. At the very least, such offerings make light, so to speak, of shadowy things that must, in reality, be treated with the utmost seriousness. (And I say this as a big Buffy fan!)

Eggers’ Nosferatu is beautifully shot, with intricate practical effects and the director’s characteristic unorthodox natural lighting. The collected performances of Depp, Hoult, Defoe, and Skarsgård are as good as I’ve seen on screen in more than a year. And more generally, Eggers has once again done a brilliant job constructing a pre-modern world that reveals the flaws in our misplaced religious zeal for the next big thing on the horizon. As in Murnau’s and Herzog’s films, Eggers shows us in Hutter’s hard journey to Transylvania, along with Orlok’s sea voyage to Wisborg, how the world was about to get a lot smaller, more connected, more comfortable, and more prosperous; but not necessarily better. Indeed, we are left to wonder from what other forgotten places a plague of darkness may attack an unsuspecting population next.

Eggers’ retelling of a familiar story challenges the audience to entertain an ensouled, humane alternative to our present dilemmas. Nosferatu is a frightening wake-up call, the vanguard of a new Romanticism for a new enchanted age.

• Related at CWR: “The new Nosferatu is spooky, exciting, and God-less” (Dec 29, 2024) by Nick Olszyk