What Does It Mean to Remake Nosferatu Instead of Simply Dracula?

Dracula is back.

Dracula hasn’t been away for very long (last year saw two reinterpretations: the corny comic misfire Renfield and genuinely innovative horror film The Last Voyage of the Demeter), but he’s back again—in Robert Eggers’s long-awaited Nosferatu remake. The lesson to take from this is: no matter how many times he returns, and dies, Dracula will always come back again.

We love Dracula. We need Dracula. But more than this, I think, we are curious to know Dracula. I personally doubt that there has been a single character in the annals of our culture who has ever undergone so many different reinterpretations as Dracula, and certainly in little more than a century’s span. Bram Stoker published his novel Dracula in 1897, spawning a creation destined (or doomed) for perpetual, and nearly kaleidoscopic reanimation.

I theorize that this is because the first few mainstream adaptations of Dracula are so different from one another. F.W. Murnau’s (illegally adapted) 1922 film Nosferatu presented the vampire as a sickly, batlike elf. The 1931 Universal Studios film (based on a 1924 play Stoker’s widow licensed to combat the popularity of the copyrigt-infringing Nosferatu) presented him as a suave foreign nobleman. Neither interpretation matches the character in the novel. Thus history of the story Dracula—and therefore the history of the character Dracula—begins with a general sense of incoherence and inconsistency regarding the theme of identity.

Who is Dracula? What is Dracula? These are the questions that have guided more than one hundred years of derivatives and interpretations. They guide Eggers’s new film, as well, though his is one of the only Dracula films in recent memory to offer any substantive answers to those questions.

But first, plot. Nosferatu is the story of a young couple, Ellen and Thomas Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult), who live in Wisbourg, Germany, in 1838 (though, as my historian friend pointed out after we left the theater, there was no such thing as “Germany” in 1838; then again, I guess there were no such things as “vampires” then either). Thomas receives a promotion that will require him to travel to a remote region in the Carpathians to facilitate a real estate deal with a wealthy nobleman, Count Orlok; his supervisor, Mr. Knock (Simon McBurney), a secret occultist, knows that Orlok is an old and ancient vampire, and wants to assist in his infiltration and ultimate destruction of civilized society. Ellen has mysterious psychic powers, and has a very bad feeling about what will happen if Thomas goes on the trip; she, though, is unaware that she is the purpose of the vampire’s trip to Germany. They had connected psychically, long ago, and Orlok longs to finally possess her. In the flesh, that is.

Thomas is insistent that no harm will come to him, and drops Ellen off at a friend’s house before he leaves. Anna (Emma Corrin) and her brash husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) are determined to calm Ellen’s nerves while he’s away, but they only grow worse and worse. And so does Thomas’s trip, especially once he is welcomed into Count Orlok’s castle and meets the man himself (Bill Skarsgård). Even though the general story of Dracula is more than old enough to gird it against spoiler alerts, I’ll stop my descriptions here and simply say that the film neatly, tensely builds from there, braiding together its numerous narrative arteries and seeing them through to a pulsating and worthwhile crescendo.

This mounting tension and creeping ambient dread are made possible through several very good performances, especially Depp as the tortured, brave, and tragic Ellen. But the film’s crowning achievement is its cinematography, designed by Eggers’s longtime collaborator Jarin Blaschke, who, if he does not win an Oscar for his work here… I can’t even finish the sentence, I can’t even think what might be fair compensation. Anyway, the film is carnival of lapping, leaping shadows. The original Nosferatu was subtitled “A Symphony of Horror,” and this seems to have been the mantra for the visuals of this new one.

It is ambitiously designed, with two color palettes: scenes filmed in regular life are fully chromatic, while scenes that fall in a kind of “vampire time” are in black-and-white. Purposefully, the black-and-white scenes pop more than the color ones; the contrasts and exposures so perfectly calibrated that they, alternatingly, can create a jarring depth of field, or can completely obscure the visage of the man seated directly in front of the camera. This latter technique is used handily to capture the vampire Orlok, whose silhouette is Boyar-esque but whose precise features are concealed from the viewer until the film’s end. Until then, we only get glimpses… long, bony, angular fingers capped with long, splintery, ungular nails… a thick dark mustache under a grayish hooked nose… two black, forlorn, and greedy eyes.

Yes, in case you’re wondering… all of these little details suggest that the Orlock of this film doesn’t look much like the point-eared, sallow goblin in every other Nosferatu film. Nor does he look exactly like the stereotypical Count Dracula.

It’s worth digressing here for a moment, to ask: is there a difference between a Dracula movie and a Nosferatu movie? Yes, there is! Nosferatu movies are dank, dreary, somber movies in which the vampire is a bringer of plague, pestilence, and misfortune (and looks the part). Dracula films are often bright, gothic melodramas about wealth, power, and sexuality. Occasionally, a Nosferatu film claws open a vein of erotic themes (like Werner Herzog’s 1979 adaptation). Conversely, a Dracula film might embrace the Disgusting (I’m thinking of the Moffat/Gatiss 2020 miniseries). But usually, this is the divide. Eggers’s Nosferatu, though, is literate in all of its source materials, not merely the ones that share its title. Willem Dafoe, who played the actor Max Shreck playing Count Orlok during the making of the original 1922 Nosferatu in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, plays the Van Helsing character in Eggers’s film, for crying out loud.

Later on, we will find that, under his cloak, Orlock does resemble Shreck’s skeletal, gremlin-esque progenitor. But he also bears features from Stoker’s novel… notably, the enormous, swarthy mustache absent from nearly every single screen interpretation of the character. So, too, does the film contain references to Stoker’s novel (including the shame-filled cries of “unclean!” yelled by Mina Harker), as well as many major adaptations since.

And, of course, Nosferatu is invested in honoring its 1922 forbear, a film without which, modern cinematography might never have come as far as it has. Murnau’s Nosferatu‘s most famous scene is a shot of the count’s shadow creeping up a flight of stairs; Eggers’s Nosferatu plays with this aesthetic, even interweaving the count’s abilities to exist in, and project, his shadows into the plot. (He comes to Ellen as a shadow, as a voice, long before he ever meets her.)

This is the beauty of Eggers’s Nosferatu; he is a highly knowledgeable, literate director, whose films often read like syllabi of major texts in their own genres while they simultaneously stand alone as innovative achievements. But Nosferatu‘s procession of visual and narrative allusions is a perfect technique for handling such a commonly viewed story, such a frequently remade project. Orlock can’t die from a stake or holy water and can only be burned to a crispy death by exposure to sunlight. His reach and his accessibility are the results of his ability to project shadows of himself across space. Orlok is cinema. Nosferatu is cinema.

I’ve wondered why Eggers has chosen to adapt Nosferatu instead of Dracula when he clearly knows both canons equally as well, and this is my answer: Nosferatu, pirated from the novel and regarded as an illegitimate version for a long time after its inception, is not only one of the first feature movies ever made… it is also one of the best movies ever made. Cinema and cinematography were built on Nosferatu’s fragile bones, and Eggers knows that. And with his Nosferatu, Eggers has fashioned not merely a tribute, but an entire altar from which to pay his respects.