A vampire film with ‘so much to sink your teeth into’

With Invoice Skarsgård because the “horrible outdated vampire”, Robert Eggers’s remake of FW Murnau’s silent 1922 traditional stars Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and has its “share of grotesque shocks”.

Many individuals have seen loads of vampire films, however what if we hadn’t seen any? What if we would by no means heard of Dracula, and we had solely the vaguest thought of what a vampire is likely to be? Welcome to the world of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers. A remake of FW Murnau’s silent classic – which in itself was a reasonably devoted, if unofficial, adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula – it is a movie that restores the thriller and magic to the idea of an undead bloodsucker by stripping away the entire vampire clichés which have constructed up since Murnau’s authentic was launched in 1922.

Eggers is the perfect man for the job. Earlier than he made The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, he was so obsessive about Murnau’s Nosferatu that he staged it as a college play when he was a teen. He’s additionally recognized for placing his personal stamp on horror movies by taking pictures them as in the event that they have been arthouse interval dramas – and that is what he does right here. The costumes and props are all true to the Nineteenth-Century setting, the spectacular out of doors scenes are shot on location within the Czech Republic and Romania, and a few of the indoor scenes are illuminated solely by candlelight. Firstly, when a top-hatted Thomas Hutter is hurrying by way of the bustling streets to his musty workplace, you can simply mistake him for Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol.

If you happen to’re not acquainted with the identify Hutter, that is as a result of the makers of 1922’s Nosferatu modified a few of the particulars of Stoker’s story, in a useless try to get round copyright points (Stoker’s widow sued them, anyway): a lot of the motion takes place within the fictional German harbour city of Wisborg in 1838, somewhat than London within the Eighteen Nineties. However the define of the plot is unmistakably Stoker’s. Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is a callow solicitor who works for a cackling weirdo named Knock (Simon McBurney on hilariously frenzied kind). As a way to safe a promotion, Hutter agrees to journey to distant Transylvania for a gathering with a sure rely. His new bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) begs him to not take the journey, however Hutter insists, and leaves Ellen within the care of his rich pal Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Harding’s spouse Anna (Emma Corrin). Earlier than lengthy, they’re going to want the assistance of a diligent physician named Sievers (Ralph Ineson), and his mentor, a professor of the occult who was known as Van Helsing in Stoker’s novel, however is renamed Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) in Nosferatu.

Hutter’s lone horse trip by way of wintry forests and over rocky mountains is stuffed with breathtakingly stunning vistas, and Eggers makes the terrain appear so wild and inhospitable that Hutter would have earned his promotion regardless of the vacation spot. However, in fact, the vacation spot is a crumbling fort occupied by the Dracula-like Depend Orlok. He’s performed by Invoice Skarsgård (It, The Crow, John Wick: Chapter Four), not that anybody might recognise him beneath all of the prosthetic make-up and the layers of heavy clothes. Eggers properly retains him at a distance and within the shadows throughout his first scenes, however the creature we’re finally proven is extra like a maggoty strolling corpse than the suave seducer seen in most vampire movies.

Rumoured to be a sorcerer who offered his soul to Devil in return for everlasting life, Orlok has the style sense of Vlad the Impaler, a booming, vowel-mangling voice which makes it sound as if he’s at all times on the far finish of a tunnel, and the loudest wheeze since Darth Vader. He could by no means be as iconic as his 1922 counterpoint, and he does not appear as tragically lonely as he was when Max Schreck performed him in Murnau’s movie, however the imposing (and decomposing) fiend that Eggers and Skarsgård have created is a Dracula/ Orlok not like some other, which is kind of an achievement after greater than a century of on-screen vampires.

When Orlok begins his reign of terror in Wisborg, Eggers appears to be influenced by The Exorcist and Alien, two movies that go to unearthly ordeals on grounded human characters. True, there are smatterings of camp humour, some extra deliberate than others. Dafoe is having fun with himself somewhat an excessive amount of as a hearty, moustache-twirling eccentric who goes round chirping: “The evening demon has supped of your good spouse’s blood.” And Taylor-Johnson’s strained try at an upper-crust English accent could have you ever chuckling by way of the movie’s gravest scenes. However total, Eggers takes his doom-laden story bracingly severely. Nearly everybody commits themselves to the temper of gothic melodrama, and nobody makes any ironic wisecracks about garlic or bats.

Hoult is particularly poignant as Hutter, a would-be hero who’s decreased to a feverish wreck by his Transylvanian tour – and by his personal determined need to maneuver as much as the next social and financial class. Depp, in the meantime, is a revelation because the troubled Ellen. The uncanny connection between the rely and the heroine echoes the one in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula movie, however Eggers locations it on the darkish coronary heart of Nosferatu. Ellen is deeply in love along with her husband, however she has been haunted for years by nightmarish but erotic visions of one other man. As Orlok preys on the folks of Wisborg, she is affected by the query of whether or not he’s an precise monster or simply the embodiment of her personal emotional instability and unfulfilled yearnings.

In distinction with most vampire movies, then, this one is about intercourse somewhat than sexiness, ie, it isn’t about vampires being devilishly engaging, it is about males controlling ladies’s our bodies. One shrewd level made by Eggers is that the medical doctors of the interval might be vampire-like themselves. When Ellen begins to have matches, Sievers’s analysis is not that she is possessed by an evil spirit, however that this hysterical feminine merely has “an excessive amount of blood” in her veins.

Nonetheless, nevertheless multi-layered and modern Nosferatu is, there isn’t any escaping the truth that it is nonetheless a Dracula movie, which signifies that acquainted issues hold occurring to acquainted characters, and the inevitability of all of it makes it extra unhappy than scary.  As Eggers proceeds steadily and methodically by way of the occasions in Murnau’s masterpiece, it’s possible you’ll admire the intelligence and painstaking craft that has gone into it, however you might also have the sensation that you simply’re watching actors enjoying time-honoured roles somewhat than actual folks in mortal hazard. Horror followers needn’t fear, although: Nosferatu has its share of grotesque shocks. And after so a few years of cool teen vampires, it is refreshing to see a horrible outdated vampire once more. However what actually separates Eggers’ Nosferatu from the flock is how deeply it explores the photographs and themes of vampire lore. There aren’t many Dracula movies that provide you with a lot to sink your enamel into.

Nosferatu is launched on 25 December within the US and 1 Jan within the UK.