Pouring chocolate-flavored cereal into a bowl and calling it "Count Chocula" doesn't make it so. To be Count Chocula, it's got to have brown skull-shaped pieces, chocolate marshmallows, and a brown-tinted vampire on the box. Robert Eggers, the director, writer, and producer of Nosferatu (2024) has poured us a bowl of something very brown and very stinky and now he's trying to convince us it tastes just like chocolate.
Eggers' 2024 film Nosferatu has been described on Wikipedia as "a remake of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu," but a more accurate description would be "a Dracula story with the 'Nosferatu' name slapped on the title."
In his zealous attempt to "bring the iconic horror film into the 21st century," Eggers seems to have entirely missed the point of the original Nosferatu film: IT'S NOT DRACULA. The original 1922 film was created with changes to the names, characters, and locations with the specific intention to make it DIFFERENT from the novel Dracula, to allow the filmmakers to avoid paying the Stoker Estate for the rights.
The courts eventually decided that their changes did not go far enough, and the production company was ordered to cease exhibitions of the film and destroy all existing prints. Miraculously, one single print survived the copyright inquisition and it was subsequently restored for later audiences (after the novel Dracula had entered the public domain).
Instead of being faithful to the 1922 film and setting the story in Germany, with German-speaking characters, Eggers made a series of bizarre creative choices, leaving the audience with a very fine adaptation of the novel Dracula. Aside from the name of the movie, there is almost nothing of the 1922 Nosferatu in Eggers' movie. The film should really be described as: "a remake of the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film Bram Stoker's Dracula."
For example: Giving the vampire a mustache was Eggers' cute little nod to Vlad the Impaler. This was something Nosferatu's original creators consciously, strenuously, studiously TRIED TO AVOID.
Eggers' vampire speaks in stunted language, just like the vampire in the novel Dracula. However, the novel makes a point to explain that once he drinks the blood of an Englishman, he can start speaking English like a gentleman. Also like in the novel, the Eggers' vampire starts off ugly with rotting flesh... For some unspeakable reason, Eggers chose to keep him rotting for the entire movie instead of having him grow young and healthy from all the blood he's been drinking.
What's the point of a vampire drinking the blood of dozens of people if he's not getting any better? It's simple: Eggers wanted to have a sex scene featuring a rotting corpse humping Johnny Depp's daughter as the final scene of his movie. That's it. Literally just cinematic masturbation.
The same goes for Eggers' decision to depict the vampire stuttering like a moron who can barely string together a sentence. This idea was derived from the book, but Eggers screwed it up by having the vampire TALK WITH AN ANNOYING STUTTER THROUGH THE ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE. Where's Colin Firth when you need him?
Speaking of talking... If you thought reading the dialogue cards of the original silent film might have been boring, Eggers opted for the worst possible alternative: scene after scene of tedious, banal dialogue carried out in England's most dimly-lit drawing rooms. WHY ARE THESE PEOPLE TALKING SO MUCH? The characters drone on and on and on with pointless, meaningless drivel that fails to move the plot forward. The first rule of storytelling, which every novice student (including me) learns: SHOW US, DON'T TELL US.
Robert Eggers seems like the kind of guy who would remake the Wizard of Oz but not dress Dorothy in a pair of ruby slippers, "because it's not in the book." If you're going to deviate THAT MUCH from the source material, then don't call it a fucking REMAKE. This is perfectly analogous to creating a "Count Orlock" who isn't bald.
If Eggers had titled his film The Lust of Dracula, Dracula's Love, or even My Half-Assed Attempt at Adapting the Novel Dracula With Some of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 Movie Thrown In, then this would be a positive review. Because these titles accurately describe the film which Eggers has created for us.
What I found especially depressing about the film was the complete lack of any form of German Expressionism which made the original movie so iconic. The artistic elements were done in a conventional (i.e. boring) period style of the mid 1800s. I went into the film expecting to see a revolutionary new form of filmmaking--German Expressionism for the modern era--with production design, direction, and cinematography all carefully crafted to compliment the horror behind the story.
Eggers masterfully used this approach with his 2019 film The Lighthouse. His artistic sensibilities surrounding that film would have been right at home in Nosferatu. It would have made the rest of his bonehead decisions forgivable. If I had to guess, he chose to make Nosferatu in a conventional (i.e. boring) style to avoid comparisons with The Lighthouse. In short, because he was afraid of what people would say.
He might have done well to watch The Babadook (2014) for some ideas on how wonderfully German Expressionism can translate to modern horror films. Instead, Eggers wants his stupid characters with their horrible haircuts and boring costumes to share rambling soliloquies about love and their childhood dreams. We just have to sit there while it happens to us, all the while asking ourselves: "Wait, isn't this a vampire movie? Didn't I see this already in 1992, done much better?"
Have you ever listened to anything more boring, pointless, and annoying that a person telling you about a dream they had the other night? Robert Eggers apparently finds these stories captivating because his scenes contain more discussion about dreams than the movie Inception. SPOILER ALERT: The dreams don't have one goddamn point to anything happening in reality.
In closing... I hated this movie. But what gives me the right to critique Eggers' work?
I've watched the original Nosferatu over 100 times, and even took it with me to Romania on my iPad to watch it at the base of Poenari Castle in Transylvania. I wrote a biography of Vlad the Impaler and created a tarot deck featuring illustrated scenes from his life (the Vlad Dracula Tarot available from Rockpool Publishing). In 2013, in one of my final acting roles, I actually played the vampire Nosferatu under heavy makeup. My character spoke only in German. Finally, I directed and produced a TV series called In The Footsteps of Vlad Dracula.
There were two moments in the movie I really liked:
The naked virgin riding a horse to... Who cares why she was doing it, the scene was awesome.
The bald weirdo performing an invocation ritual surrounded by candles on the floor. This might have been Eggers' homage to me.
However, Eggers' inexplicable failure to recreate the moment where Nosferatu rises straight up out of a coffin, an iconic moment in cinematic history, boggles the mind and nearly prompted me to walk out of the theater. This, combined with his decision to let Johnny Depp's daughter have LONG, FLOWING, TOTALLY WRONG FOR THE PERIOD OR THE MOVIE hair, are two missteps which can never be forgiven.
The official website for Nosferatu (2024) is here: https://www.focusfeatures.com/nosferatu/
Ah, come now Travis. Step outside of your expectations and see this film for what it is, not what you wanted it to be. You admit Nosferatu was a failed attempt to skirt copyright, we don’t need to keep up appearances. Herzog even switched the names back in his remake. Yes, the look of the B&W German expressionism taps something deep in the psyche, but that’s all but worn out since Count Orlok’s cameo on SpongeBob SquarePants.
Yes, perhaps the dream dialog and non-period hair (?) are a drag. Those scenes are about watching actors act, and they all did a more than serviceable job. A black box theater presentation in a period drawing room. A story of lonely repression…