Just whispering the name strikes fear into European hearts. Those famous long fingers which appeared as shadows on the wall in 1922 remain an indelible image of German expressionism and of all silent cinema, but their dark history casts a curse over the rest of the 20th century.
Max Shreck was the actor in the role of Count Orlok, the original Dracula, in FW Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (usually translated as a Symphony of Horror, but for me the word comes with more dread and foreboding, tinged with shades of grey and regret).
The OG vampire, then, is back with Robert Eggers’ new version of Nosferatu and Eggers himself is climbing up on a table and hunching down behind me to illustrate how he filmed the fingers. “I couldn’t just ignore them,” he says. “But could I make them frightening? Or would they just look silly…”
He springs back off the table and back into his chair. “They did it for real in 1922 so why the fuck would I use CGI – but we really were spending a lot of time on this shot. The producers were getting angry with me as I kept setting up test shots, different angles, different hand shapes, different prosthetics. Sometimes it just looked too big, or too small, or it was warping. But I figured, if I don’t get this shot right, the whole film’s going to fail.”
Thing is, Eggers’ film is both scary and slightly comical. There’s a rich vein of camp in this genre, and he acknowledges the Hammer House tradition, especially in his use of British actors including Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor Johnson as grandees of the fictional German port town of Wisborg.
In one scene, Willem Dafoe appears smoking a pipe the size of a bassoon, a shot so comic it could have come out of an Airplane! movie. Eggers sniggers. “Well, it was a big, pipe-smoking age and I felt it was true to the social status of these intellectual types.”
I’m not sure he likes it that I think his film is funny. I assure him it’s intended as a compliment and that I often laugh at horror instead of screaming. “Yes, I did want elements that release the tension,” he says. “You can’t have it dread-filled and suspenseful the whole way but I haven’t heard a lot of laughs in the screenings I’ve attended.”
Eggers’ films are of a particular tang. They’re florid and gothic and he’s already a director of distinction, but the work is infused with a high seriousness that I’ve struggled to take seriously – his debut film The Witch has a talking goat called Black Phillip; The Lighthouse has Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe trading Melville-style dialogue above screeching seagulls, and The Northman is a hyper-violent Norse saga with Björk as The Seeress and a mossy music video sensibility.
“I do deal in archetype stories,” he says. “These are fairytales and myths and people can always project their modern feeling on to it, so there’s room for interpretation. That’s why the stories endure – because they demand interpretation.”
So, what’s he done with Nosferatu here, and why is now the time to resurrect this vampire story? There’s definitely something post-pandemic about it all, about this town where the plague arrives brought by rats off a sinking ship.
But that’s surely not enough, to remind us of the Covid era. Eggers is tight-lipped when asked for his interpretation, which is a thing I understand with directors, but a little something wouldn’t go amiss.
He’s been dreaming of making this movie for years now, having put on a production in school and then in a local theatre. He says he’s always been obsessed with Soviet cinema, citing “Sergei Parajanov, Alexander Dovzhenko and, of course, Tarkovsky” as big influences.
But his real affinity, he says, is with German Romanticism and with an era rarely documented in cinema but captured in Biedermeier art, the movement that flourished in central Europe between 1815 and 1848, and adopted by the growing urban bourgeoisie.
“See, I’ve never thought of Nosferatu as a work of expressionism, but one of romanticism, or neo-romanticism,” he says. “And the romantic artist wears his heart pinned on his chest, not his sleeve and I’ve always related to that.”
Consequently, his Nosferatu is stuffed with details, all very accurately and lovingly created. The interiors of the Wisborg houses are immaculately decorated, the mantelpieces and desks all in high style, the Christmas trees festooned with decorations as was the new fad.
Hence the big pipes and the concerns about social status of Hoult’s Thomas Hutter. Anxious to secure an income for his new life with bride Ellen (played by Lily-Rose Depp), Hutter accepts an assignment from his estate agent boss Herr Knock – a deliciously evil Simon McBurney, and, yes, you pronounce all the Ks – to journey to Transylvania to deliver papers to Count Orlok. Orlok, says Knock, wants to purchase a huge property in the town and Hutter must seal the deal.
Not quite knowing it, Ellen has become possessed from afar by Orlok’s desire and evil. She finds herself deep in nightmares and melancholy and senses Orlok is coming long before the Count possesses a lock of her hair.
So as the winds of change sweep through Europe, is Orlok’s engulfing shadow some kind of political metaphor, and if so, of what? Eggers won’t say.
We know the original Nosferatu now strikes a note of encroaching Nazism, but I’m not sure it did at the time, and in any case, the 1922 film was plagued with copyright issues in basing its action on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and was pursued in the courts by Stoker’s widow. The company that made the film went bankrupt and was supposed to have destroyed all prints of the movie, although some, like vampires, survived to haunt again.
Did Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979 have any wider significance as a European fable? That one starred Klaus Kinski and Isabelle Adjani, with Bruno Ganz as the young husband but do we need to look at that revival of the myth as anything more than just a juicy tale?
Eggers’ attention to detail is admirable. Orlok, played by an unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård, speaks a language based on ancient Dacian while his long robes are based on the garb of a 16th-century Transylvanian lord. The covenant itself is written in Romanian calligraphy and an ancient Balkan alphabet, while several scenes were shot in real castles, such as Corvin Castle in Transylvania and Pernštejn in Moravia.
“You want new locations though,” he says, a little frustrated. “I didn’t want to show things that have been seen before. Creating an atmosphere for a movie is an accumulation of details and that build-up is paramount. The more you build, the more details, the more transportive and atmospheric it can become for an audience.”
Hence his insistence on using CGI as little as possible, although, he says, the fictional town of Wisborg, which we see in rooftop shots, is an amalgam of Gdańsk and Lübeck. He also insisted on real rats, of which there are indeed many on screen, although he is also slightly disappointed that Herzog apparently had more rats on his set.
“A thousand rats actually doesn’t look that many on camera,” he sighs. “We had to corral them into plexiglass and then you can use CGI to make them look more numerous and infinite, but we had plenty of rats on set. The smell is terrible because they’re incontinent.”
One of the big surprises of this Nosferatu is the biting, which isn’t in the neck but goes straight for the heart, which is sort of sexier and more visceral. And yet it’s not a very sexy film. Personally, I find the possessive, envious and panting desire of Orlok for this young woman thousands of miles away rather creepy, and I don’t mean in a scary horror way.
This is what I’m wondering. If you don’t have a political or social parallel for your movie, surely you’d update the sexuality of it all? But Depp’s poor Ellen is a stricken figure, an object to be prodded and barked at by Dafoe’s colourful Professor Eberhart. There’s nothing wrong with her physical performance, which sees her contort and bend and arc into quite wince-inducing poses – no CGI, I’m assured – but it’s just hard to know what you want for Ellen. Can she fight the demon or must she submit to this violent, powerful masculine evil which seeps into every nook of her village and her being?
Nosferatu is an intense visual experience, a real nightmare and a juicy slice of gothic with which to kick off the year and blow away a hangover. There are jump scares and impressive design and style, particularly in the expressionist, sorry, romanticist camera work. The peasant village beneath Orlok’s castle is brilliant, the inn a flickering tableau of strangeness and superstition.
But for a film about desire, jealousy and sexual violence, it somewhat misses a large point. I wanted it to reek of pain and blood and power. I wanted to cower at the ineluctable might of it all. I wanted to feel the cold touch of those fingers on my soul, to have my heart scratched out by nails like talons, to feel my blood drain away.
I guess what I’m saying is that a Nosferatu for our times shouldn’t really be this much fun.
