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When Bram Stoker died in 1912, Dracula remained his most successful and lucrative creation, a crude way of looking at a writer’s corpus but, in this case, informative about the financial circumstances in which his widow, Florence, was left, and how the property of Dracula was handled. As executor of Stoker’s estate, Florence had exclusive authority over Draculaits use in any medium, whether plays or nascent films. In 1921, FW Murnau and Prana Films, co-founded by producer Albin Grau, had completed a complicated shoot of a German film titled Nosferatu (the production could only use one camera, which meant there was only one negative to work with), a dramatically raw reinterpretation of Dracula released with little fanfare.
Neither Murnau nor Prana asked permission to use elements of Stoker’s most famous novel in Florence, a concern made less clear by regional differences in copyright laws but which Stoker’s widow nonetheless considered plagiarism. flagrant. Florence, together with the British Society of Authors, soon launched a legal campaign to sue Prana Films for damages. In the end, Prana declared bankruptcy and, instead of being able to pay restitution to Florence, resigned NosferatuThe rights and all copies of the film belong to the Stoker estate. The fiasco lasted about three years and in 1925, NosferatuThe film’s market value had fallen so precipitously that Florence set out to destroy as many existing copies of the film as possible. Five years later, Universal bought the rights to Dracula of Florence and also reportedly purchased an existing American copy of Nosferatu which they later studied for the 1931 adaptation of the novel starring Bela Lugosi. Of course, existing copies of Nosferatu It survived in other countries, mainly in France and the United States; These and other copies are shown in revivals and eventually restored over the years.
The enduring appeal of Nosferatu It is in what it conveys about adaptation and artistic interpretation. A small but significant trait, the vampire’s deadly aversion to sunlight, is a detail taken from Nosferatunot Bram Stoker’s novel. Count Orlok, Dracula’s double, is a grotesque, skeletal figure whose seductive powers are made even more mysterious and disturbing by his inability to blend into normal society, while the popular presentation of Count Dracula is that of a mild-mannered nobleman. elegant. Orlok is a creation of Belial, a demon, while Dracula is a centuries-old undead warrior, no longer strictly human but still derived from an earthly lineage. Orlok’s departure from the Carpathians toward civilization triggers a devastating plague, an invasion from East to West that sublimated anti-Semitic fears of infection with new memories of the Spanish flu. Perhaps the most important thing is that Nosferatu is set in the fictional German town of Wisburg more than half a century before Draculawhere the main action takes place in London at the beginning of the century. These seemingly minor narrative and aesthetic differences result in dramatically different films, stories, and characterizations. In fact, to adapt Nosferatuas Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski did in 1979, or fictionalize the making of the film itself, as E. Elias Merhige and Willem Dafoe did in the 2000s. shadow of the vampireis to represent a completely different character and scenario.
Given the gothic landscape and occult trappings, and the fact that Hollywood makes movies no one asked for, it’s no surprise that an auteur as lauded as Robert Eggers, screenwriter and director of A24 hits the witch and The lighthouseHe would finally get his chance to adapt. Nosferatu for a new era. To be fair, the feeling that Eggers would be a long time coming to this version was supported by the announcement in 2015 that Nosferatu It would be his second feature film. Postpone production to work The lighthouse and 2022 The northernerEggers’ first project with Focus Features delayed Nosferatualong with cast changes, notably the departure of Harry Styles and Anya Taylor-Joy. That delay has only strengthened Eggers’ reputation as a laudable filmmaker in a film landscape depleted and lacking in originality or vision. The veneer of auteurism discards cynicism about the retread of familiar territory. As boring as the talk about Hollywood’s lack of originality has become, there are still pockets of hope, usually filled with singular talents like Eggers, who has only made four features, and would-be underdogs like A24, a production chasing the spirit of the time. company whose recent astronomical valuation, injection of private capital and the incorporation of a Kushner to its board of directors have completely distanced it from its independent origins.
In an era where companies like Netflix seemingly exist to produce forgettable movies and TV shows that end up deliberately buried on streaming platforms, Eggers, along with contemporaries like Ari Aster and Brady Corbet, position themselves as representatives of all that’s worth worth praising about American cinema: Unique storytellers using old-school filmmaking methods who want to challenge their audiences.
There are admirable qualities in the aforementioned directors, but their work may obviously derive from their influences and their aspirations are clearly conventional, no matter how cleverly their films are marketed. This mass appeal in itself is neither good nor bad, but it clashes with the independent sensibility they have garnered and the resulting overdetermined praise their films receive, often even before their release. In general, films made by ambitious directors seem much better if the mainstream audience hasn’t seen that many films to begin with. What Eggers specifically has going for him that few others don’t is an aesthetic fastidiousness that suggests a filmmaker fond of reading novels and exploring the rabbit holes of Wikipedia. His films are rife with period-specific affect and vernacular, a form of artistic control that is reflected in the tight, long-take cinematography he often employs. The success of these techniques is often overlooked in favor of their existence. Which makes the idea of a remake of a seminal genre film by a celebrated genre director like Eggers even more loaded, to the detriment of the resulting project.
Repeating the blue-gray monochromatic night scenes of The northerner with the inner shadows illuminated by candles the witchEggers Nosferatu is often a dreamlike film, more akin to a Grimm fable and NosferatuIt has German expressionist underpinnings than a monster movie. This is perhaps most obvious in the film’s travel sequences to Count Orlok’s estate, filled with austere shadows, misty roads, and vaporous elisions of time and motion, carriages appearing out of nowhere, and characters floating through the night. There’s also a series of strange performances, where each player, from Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter to Ralph Ineson’s Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, appears to be acting in a different film. Hoult, prone to speaking too quickly, is accompanied by nearly every other cast member instructing him to break through dialogue as quickly as possible, only to lead to wordless passages at a glacial pace. There are exceptions. Lily-Rose Depp, who at certain angles evokes an early-career Keira Knightley with equally tormented demeanor, navigates her way through a script that requires her character, Ellen Hutter, to convey a psychological and emotional depth that movie doesn’t seem to have much. time for. Meanwhile, Bill Skarsgård, whose most ardent fans would dub him the Boris Karloff of the 21st century, adopts a low register and slow cadence in his speech as Count Orlok, with his early scenes opposite Hoult passing as if he were receiving dialect training in real time.
Eggers values historical authenticity and scrupulous attention to production design details, and provides Nosferatu with worn, beautiful sets and costumes and an ever-present, almost paralyzed atmosphere, as if each scene were slightly dimmed, a persistent hum giving way to quiet scenes that are punctuated by sudden sound effects. It’s a redundant juxtaposition with the film’s frequently loud soundtrack, which peaks during moments of heightened drama, not so much supporting what’s happening but trying to convince the audience that it’s worth noting. In fact, throughout Nosferatuit’s hard not to feel like the viewer is waiting for the actual movie to start and that that movie started long before the title card. There’s a disjointed, sloppy quality to the editing, simple scenes of exposition and lore slapped onto more abstract and digressive sequences where the dialogue doesn’t matter as much.
One of the main focuses of the Nosferatu The marketing campaign was the film’s eroticism, the psychosexual extreme of vampire lore filtered through Eggers’ particular auteur lens. It’s been a minute since a mainstream film based on sexual subversion fulfilled its promise. For a movie that has a lot of moaning and writhing, plus an implied necrophilia scene, in Nosferatu There’s a floating detachment to the narrative, a sense that nothing that’s happening is all that shocking, even if it should be. Some of this could be due to the fact that Depp, whose character is constantly besieged by episodes of alternately ecstatic and tortuous possession, plays these scenes with an unimaginative pornographic tremor and Skarsgård, as the psychic catalyst for his affliction, is buried under elaborate makeup. . and then hidden in the shadows. This suggestive shyness is a good microcosm of Nosferatu All in all, a film with many moments of potentially shocking violence, disturbing behavior and magnificent production that nevertheless constantly undermines its own momentum and atmosphere. What, in a more convincingly extravagant effort, would be seen as a major coup, turns out more like an upheaval.
The public is left wanting something more subversive, more twisted and more fucked up. This becomes even more evident when Willem Dafoe appears in the back half of the film as Van Helsing’s substitute teacher, Albin Eberhart Von Franz. Dafoe’s macabre, creaky, deceptively terrifying turn as Max Schreck/Count Orlok in shadow of the vampire stands firm on Skarsgård’s comparatively flat attempt. He’s obviously relishing the opportunity to work with Eggers for a third time, but even Dafoe’s comedic, slightly unhinged performance isn’t gonzo enough, ironically hampered by a relative creative freedom that isn’t extended to anyone else in the cast. As it is, Eggers Nosferatu It feels neither memorable nor completely forgettable, a damning liminal quality that gives the film a superficial air. It’s strange given how many words Eggers has devoted to his enthusiasm and hard work on it. The final shot, a possible grotesque knockout before a predictable cut to black, recapitulates that familiar feeling of anticipation that hangs over the film, the feeling that something more must come next than what you’re really expecting. It’s just around the corner. Whatever it is, it never comes.
