Robert Eggers' 'Nosferatu' Is a Dark and Delicious Feast

Women just wanting to live deliciously have always had a hard time of it. Look no further than this year’s U.S. election if you need proof of that. And apologies for bringing that up, and why would you need to anyway—it’s been the central push-pull of our puritanical culture war since we started snatching rules out of thin air in order to control one another. No need to be so bluntly precise with this past month’s horrors.

Thankfully (because we need a damn distraction) that conflict has proven fertile horror movie territory for filmmaker Robert Eggers two times now—first quite literally with the Puritans in his 2015 debut film The Witch, which saw Anya Taylor-Joy finding her only attainable solace from mad nude fire-dances in the forest. And now nine years later Eggers is back to shredding corsets with righteous indignation again, with his frostbitten and fear-struck spin on Nosferatu, a ruthless and rot-hearted round of cinematic skullduggery that claws its ice-veined way straight in among Eggers’ best work to date. Gorgeous like lace that’s also foul to the touch, Nosferatu 2024 is every shade of repressed nightmare all at once—gray, blue, blackest blacker black. It’ll put a plague on you, and you’ll shiver, not unlustily, with every second.

Nosferatu stars Nicholas Hoult and Lily Rose-Depp as the just-married and very much-in-love young couple Thomas and Ellen Hutter, living in storybook picturesque Germany, the year 1838. (Think lots of wooden steeples and clocks of the cuckoo kind.) Having just returned from their honeymoon, Thomas has got to get back to work—even if Ellen keeps pulling him back into bed (and who can blame her; he’s Nicholas Hoult). Unfortunately for everybody the first item on Thomas’ work docket has him being sent off on an ill-fated journey to a remote corner of the Carpathian Mountains in Ye Olde Transylvania, to meet there with a sickly old Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) who’s considering buying himself up some property just down the street from the Hutters.

Sound familiar? I should certainly hope so since it’s the plot of a century’s worth of Dracula stories. Nosferatu (a word which comes from an archaic translation of “the insufferable one”) started its life as F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent-film rip-off of Bram Stoker’s novel—and they got sued by Stoker’s estate as such. Nevertheless, a masterpiece of haunted impressionistic imagery that still feels cursed today, it feels important to also note that Nosferatu / Dracula was birthed into our cultural imagination thanks to two gay men (Murnau and Stoker), who were each using it to scream against the constraints of the Victorian era and its dizzying aftermath.

They knew from wanting to shred a bodice and be free—I suggest you read one of Bram’s letters to the poet Walt Whitman if you need a good blush today—and their respective vampires (whether refined gentlemen or Post-War rotten) represent all of those repressed urges snaking their way out of the dirt to knock knock knock on our bedchamber doors. The horny allure of the forbidden. Which naturally hit a nerve then and has found eternal life feeding off our inhibitions for a century plus since. Our suppressions prove to be an endless feast.

Eggers, tackling his dream project here (he’s been wanting to make his own Nosferatu since childhood), improbably manages to straddle his adaptation across the sweet spot chasm that separates two of its most notable forebears—his film feels like all the best aspects of Werner Herzog’s cold and dream-like Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) injected with all the lurid and horned-up bloodlust of Francis Ford Coppola’s delicious Bram Stoker’s Dracula from 1992. Simultaneously hot and cold to the touch, this movie feels like a perverse spasm; an uncontrollable quiver in the loins seizing hold of us until our collective teeth are chattering. Delectably degenerate to its core, Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu gets its rocks off with rot, decay, and necromantic corruption.

It’s a movie that lays the vampire myth bare—you wanted to fuck a corpse? Fuck your corpse, baby, and live your best everything. (Cue Udo Kier screaming, “Fuck life in the gall bladder” in Paul Morrissey’s Flesh For Frankenstein for a similar effect) Eggers’ Nosferatu is the platonic ideal of this story, as far as I’m three-viewings-down concerned—it puts the pumping-hot perversion that’s kept ol’ Count Orlok’s foul heart beating all these years under a gorgeous glass dome for all to see, fragrant to the point of ill-making pungency (lilacs, so many lilacs). Awash with fairy tale malevolence and romance novel histrionics that slam violently up against the sort of steely formal tableaus that Eggers has always trafficked visually in, its frisson is baked right in. This movie is repression given cinematic form.

Never has Orlok felt more incorporeal, more like a ghost, than he does here—this Nosferatu is practically a possession picture, with Rose-Depp’s Ellen twisting up in orgasmic contortions as awful as they seem freeing, given the constraints they’re rubbing up against. All the well-meaning men seeing to Ellen’s fraying wellness under the weight of Thomas’ extended absence—Thomas’ good friend Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and the doctor in his employ (Ralph Ineson), for starters—can only strap Ellen down (cue lots of literal corset-tightening) and dose her with ether.

But her urges, so disturbed and dirty to her—and remember that Eggers always meticulously frames his stories as messages beamed out from the times they’re set in, making that in-period personal sense of moral failure the point—will not be strapped down or drugged away. Much to the contrary, her urges are putting on their big traveling boots and fur coat and jumping on the next ship sailing straight to her backdoor.

Ellen’s so-dubbed hysteria then takes center stage, and Count Orlok—with Skarsgard giving him a voice so deep it would rattle your nethers if they screened this movie in 4DX—taps straight into it like a, well, vampire. They’re parasitic perverts for each other basically, feeding off one another up into orgiastic furies. He gives her baser instincts a soil-rich garden in which to grow. That the garden is also a cemetery is our main source of friction—a friction that Eggers & Co. rub out good and raw.

There are scenes here that we’ve seen staged a dozen times before that Eggers still manages to tap the sweet stuff from and shoot hot across the screen—take for example Thomas’ trip to Orlok’s castle. Any vampire lover worth their garlic salt knows these beats by heart by now—the Romani village down below whispering its unknowable prayers. The coach ride chased by shrieking beasts of the night. Midnight dinner with the Count, wine and a bloodied finger. And yet Eggers stages it all with an intensifying sense of truly palpable seeming madness—the darkness, the shadows, the licking of flames all close in around us. Never has it felt more infernal, more hellish. It earns our short-breathed panic and then some.

Time and again this Nosferatu weaves its incantations insidious-like, straight down to the old occult heart of this tale. Spinning every former iteration up into its web; finding what feels like a totally enlivened curse for us to feed upon. Eggers has dredged fresh hell for us to sup, making the dead meat between our fangs burst with sweet and sticky and suffocating flavors—the stuff of life, which is to say the stuff of death, itself. And dare I say it tastes so good you just might want to die forever, toes curling up into its beautiful dark embrace. So strap in—tonight we eat well!

Focus Features is releasing Nosferatu in theaters on Christmas Day.