"Nosferatu" - Count Orlok proves looks don't matter if you've got rizz.

Josh
Jan 6, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Apr 24, 2025

Robert Eggers (2024)

Succumb to the darkness.

Straight out of the gate, I am not huge on the classic movie monsters. Maybe it’s the corny nature of their old presentation but I find them bland. The Mummy, Wolfman, Creature from the Black Lagoon (Visually the most interesting for me), Frankenstein and Dracula, don’t do anything for me. I understand they all tend to represent a wider fear amongst society at the time, however, stale presentation fails to keep me engaged apart from a few iconic images I can now point at and say “I know where that’s from”. So my experience with vampire media is limited within the classics but varied in pop culture: Dracula (1931), Twilight (2008) (although I can’t even remember if I finished it), The Lost Boys (1987), A girl walks home alone at night (2014), From Dusk Til Dawn (1996), Blade (1998), Interview with a Vampire (1994) and What we do in the shadows (2014). So coming into Nosferatu, I have little knowledge of the source material and the accompanying adaptations (such as the 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre by Werner Herzog). Still, I did enter the cinema as a Robert Eggers stan. As one of my current favourite living directors, I got exactly what I had hoped from Nosferatu. Spoilers, ahead.

Some of the most iconic imagery from the original 1923 F.W. Murnau film comes from the use of shadows. The creature of the night exploits man-made light to dress the walls with the darkness of his haunting shadow. And shadows carry the atmosphere here, opening in nothing but darkness and whimpers fading into low-lit Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp as a standout performance. Deep in the night, we get our first glimpse of the wonderful muted colour palette with Eggers and Jarin Blaschke showing off once again their skills with night-time cinematography (with what I could find, these scenes were shot during the day and colour graded, amazing). Lonely, she calls out to an unknown force, who responds as a disembodied voice and appears as a shadow. They express devotion towards each other as we watch Ellen writhe on the ground in ecstasy, to then just cut to numerous years later as a married woman to Thomas Hutter, Nicholas Hoult. Running late for work as a realtor, she tries to pull him back into bed in hopes of a morning sesh, but he lovingly neglects the advances.

Eggers doesn’t hold back on the historical sexual nature of vampires in pop culture. Taking place in the year 1838 within the fictional German town of Wisberg, we see the oppression of women sexually expressing themselves not just in a way to bear children. Ellen even calls Count Orlok her shame, as if having these fantasies are a negative until they get subdued by her white bread husband, who is dedicated to giving her everything he thinks she should need. Admitting to him that she had called upon The Count when she was younger, it’s done in a way that is almost taunting her husband's manliness, saying that “he could never make her feel the way he did.” While not by her husband's side she’s infected by these visions in her sleep that have her moaning and thrusting in bed, yet the men around her at the time resort to suppressing her movements via early “medical science” by chloroform and tightening her corset. The end even has her make the ultimate sacrifice where she willingly sells herself to the monster (similar to the end of The Witch but less hopeful) to defeat it.

Thomas Hutter is set up with the task from his boss Knock, played by Simon McBurney who starts mild-mannered but then ends the movie chewing all the historically accurate scenery, to get Count Olark from Transalvania to a house in their small town. To take the journey, he palms his wife over to his friend and his obedient wife, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin. And this is where we see the increase of abstraction and callbacks to the original German expressionist visuals. With all the beautiful cinematography, as the camera glides from character to character as smoothly as butter to then suddenly snaps on a focal point, the simpler set piece is what stuck with me the most. In an amazing sequence, Hutter walks down a tree-covered road silhouetted and rim light by moonlight, watching as a phantom horse-drawn carriage races towards him. Or watching a shadowed hand fly over the German town (which looked like a miniature but more than likely it would all be CG). All these are elevated with the general production design as well. If you’ve been following Eggers throughout the filmography you’ll know he’s never slipped on this aspect as goes for the accurate dialect (despite everyone in Germany speaking English).

However, a slightly contentious topic was the look of the monster himself. Going back to the drawing board of how the original folklore described The Count, the rotten Romanian figure dressed in a varied array of animal skins. And of course, with a moustache. This confused me at the start because I first thought I was imagining it as we barely get to make out what the figure looks like for almost the entire introduction. Bill Skarsgård truly immersed himself into the role from the way he carried himself and spoke in such low tones I had to keep reminding myself, “Oh yeah, it’s the type cast monster guy” (watch out Doug Jones). Within the universe, his presence influences reality, where editing and the order of sequences make you feel as insane as Hutter where you don't know what’s a dream and what isn’t. And through clever blocking, we see small clever moments where The Count will exit from frame left from a distance but then enter in a close-up from frame right. And of course, the creative use of shadows where you can feel his presence in the darkness even when he might not be there.

Skarsgård wasn’t the only actor that you lost within their role as Eggers regulars Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe. Dafoe plays the outsider doctor, Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, who’s fallen into occult practices and is as eccentric as he is open-minded, pushing back on recommendations from the other Dr. Willhelm Sievers (Ineson). However, once Dafoe enters the picture, Ineson takes a bit of a backseat and ends up following him around with little to do. As does Taylor-Johnson's character, he doesn’t have all that much to do instead acting as more of a vessel to drop information on. And despite being underutilised, there wasn’t a weak performance amongst the leads or side characters, another strength of Eggers to bring out the best in everyone.

As an Eggers Stan, I’m almost required to rate this movie on two different levels. How does it rank next to the rest of his masterful filmography and how does it rate just in general? With The Lighthouse (2019) still being his masterpiece in my eyes, I would sit this slightly lower if not on par with The Witch (2015). It could change upon rewatches but I can confirm it is better than The Northsman (2022). Keep in mind that this is like ranking your favourite child because, against the cinematic landscape, Eggers is a voice that stands out amongst the sea of average. And as Eggers's first remake, I would recommend checking out Nosferatu as it will double as both a good creepy atmospheric Halloween movie and as this takes place during the holiday season, a new horror Christmas movie.