“Nosferatu” Asks Whether Evil Comes from Within

Count Orlok signs his contract in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

Gothic horror is, itself, an entity. A presence that possesses itself, shaped by the swarming collective of the concepts that animate it. Its tropes prove immortal, not only through their repetition but in their endless relevance. They apply everywhere and to everything people are because that is the beating heart beneath the floorboards of gothic horror: the human condition that cannot be killed.

It speaks to our deepest fears and most intimate desires. It creeps through our vulnerabilities, our guilt, and our unacknowledged truths. The fallen grandeur of decaying estates and crumbling castles; dark, disorienting woods; shadowy figures that lurk just beyond the threshold—these are mirrors of our own minds and hearts, haunted by what we cannot escape. Gothic horror refuses to be sanitized or ceased, because that darkness within us is never fully realized, never fully contained. Centuries pass, and the world churns and changes, but this entity remains. A monstrosity that lingers, immortal and insatiable, feasting on the fragility of the human soul.

Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 German classic of the same name, presents these themes so perfectly that it feels effortless. It is a visually stunning film that offers no hand holding, but Eggers’s work and all the tropes within it speak for themselves. From the meticulous design to the outstanding performances, it’s an incredible adaptation all the way through.

Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

The Essence of the Vampire

This is hallowed ground, dedicated to the confrontation of evils through metaphor. Distorted, exaggerated shadows cast by the failings of hope and faith through cold science. Disease, death. The failings of conscious ethics and morality through base urges, intimate and systematic. Oppression. Violence. Sexism, racism, ableism, classism. Power dynamics and the abuses of them. Dehumanization, reversion to beasthood—or livestock.

And among all the tropes, settings, themes, and creatures of gothic horror, the vampires reign supreme.

They are the perfectly grotesque embodiment of what lurks beneath the surface of civilization: the allure of power, humans’ bloodlust for control. Timeless, often generational greed and the inexorable decay of the soul in its presence. Vampires are the ultimate reflection of our darkest impulses and a dominating metaphor for the ever-present external corruption we face. Their insatiable hunger for blood reflects their endless desire for dominance, for ownership, for the consumption of others.

For the preservation of self, they feed on the vitality of anything pulled near them. Timeless in their appeal as symbolism of the precarious space between predator and prey.

In media, vampires often appear in a weakened state. They play-act human parts, illicit strange sympathy, charm and endear themselves as a necessity. Mesmerizing and yet, at times, pitiful. They are, however, never entirely convincing—they broadcast the uncanny and resort to trickery and manipulation. Protagonists identify from the start that something is off, though benefit of the doubt and goodwill (or desperation) overwrite this instinct. They know better. There are no fools in this dichotomy of abuser and abused. These victims intersect with vampires because they must.

Vampire lore is a mirror to us and the things that shape us. These figures reign supreme because they expose a truth we all, somewhere, fear: the potential for monstrosity that lies dormant within us.

Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter and Emma Corrin as Anna Harding. Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

A Picture-Perfect Retelling

Robert Eggers’s film presents all of the real-world weight behind these tropes without any concern that is what it does. It serves as a capsule of social anthropology, without lingering pointedly on it. This is what sets Nosferatu apart from so many other like films.

The story tells of Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), her solicitor husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), and their entanglement with the ancient and esoteric Count Orlak. Even if you are unfamiliar with the previous versions of Nosferatu or the intrinsically classic novel, Dracula, that inspired it, you probably know how this goes: Thomas is sent to meet with a mysterious foreign nobleman on urgent business. It doesn’t go well. The count enthralls Thomas in pursuit of his wife and spreads death and despair with every reach toward her.

Eggers’s story (a combination of the 1922 Nosferatu and various other tellings of Dracula) is by-the-book formulaic. The director seems totally uninterested in reinventing the wheel. He wants to revel in it. Worship it. But it never feels indulgent.

This movie is breathtakingly beautiful. It is so beautiful that a specific shot moved me to tears. Incredibly impactful visuals, yes, but something much more. Gothic horror is the genre of the oppressed, the othered and outcast. For over a century, its tropes and their symbolism have pooled into an enduring presence that comforts and champions those who find themselves in a shared place—at home with monsters.

Every shot is a completely realized, intentional composition that could serve as a standalone painting. It brims with nostalgia and familiarity and longing for this shared place, the place we who are othered go when we dream.

The pain of otherness lives in this collective imagery, in the safe distance provided by fantasy and metaphor. In looming, architectural silhouettes and majestic, murky landscapes. In candlelight, fire glow on skin and snow. In rooms of strange proportions. In cool, somnolent tones. Hallways and parlors and crypts and carriages. Ominous imagery, yet comforting. The beauty in horror. A looking glass reflecting a world that makes monsters of what it won’t understand.

Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

A Language of Horror

Eggers’s visuals are a shared language. They speak to those who feel out of place, surrounded by a hostile unknown. They speak of resilience, of survival, and of finding beauty in places where others only see bleak emptiness. He establishes an atmosphere that not only serves the narrative but invites kinship of the rejected and the magnificent. The atmosphere of Nosferatu is itself a character and that presence, one of the most striking things to me.

The sets and lighting are stunning. The costumes are phenomenal. Every lapel is rolled, every ascot arranged. The clothing, hand stitching visible and wrinkles convincingly placed, looks worn and inhabited. Just one example, one testament, to the details echoed all over this movie.

Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok is a terrible, hypnotic wonder. His may be my favorite film portrayal of a vampire to date—the sounds, stances, and movements he summons are nothing short of mesmerizing. Skarsgård is as wounded and beastly as he is aristocratic. There are recognizable and alluring components to him, somehow simultaneous with the traits that defile all that is human. He is so haunting that even the dawn of the theater lights will not repel him.

Lily-Rose Depp, though constricted in the concept of her role by design, demonstrates impressive and exhausting physical acting. Eggers darlings Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson serve their roles without dominating.

The classic elements for this sort of tale are all present, pulled from gothic horror and folklore. Superstitions. Forces of nature. The plague. Rules, decreed and enforced by … what? What commands what? Are evil things born from uncontrollable, chaotic forces incapable of logic or morality—or could these forces the product of evil?

Left to right: Ralph Ineson as Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Friedrich Harding, Emma Corrin as Anna Harding, and Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

The Role of the Other

We really cannot talk about gothic horror without talking about female objectification and hysteria. The heroines of gothic horror are traditionally vessels of purity and virtue, dismissed and devalued. Yet they are the ones who, as their real-life counterparts so often do, sacrifice themselves to quell what they are blamed for. Not for their own benefit, but for a greater good.

The opening scene of Nosferatu centers on Ellen Hutter praying for a companion. She seeks connection, understanding, a guardian. She pleads for an angel. In the context of themes of oppression, what does that mean? What is desired of a guardian? What does protection entail? Something to nullify threats, to deliver vengeance to those that have caused harm, to rebalance the scales of power and justice?

Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter. Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC

What does the othered summon in darkness? Something willing to harm what harms them? A longing for Schadenfreude? Retribution? If it is the terror of monstrous humans that haunt them, is the prayer for a bigger, more terrible monster?

And if we wish for this, are we too monstrous? Or is this idea of a proxy so appealing because the blood is on the hands of this fantastical retribution on our behalf, but not on our own?

Ellen Hutter asks the question at the core, framed by the very opening request and all the misery that is granted from it: “Does evil come from within us?”

Nosferatu offers a view on what we want—and are willing—to see. Those who want to steep in moody, fever-dream ambiance are in for a treat. Fans of creature features will not be disappointed. But there is more. There is so much viscera to claw through, so much to find, should you have the appetite for it.

Willem Dafoe stars as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz. Aidan Monaghan/© 2024 Focus Features LLC