Nosferatu (2024)

Year 17, Day 286 - 10/13/25 - Movie #5,169

BEFORE: Another film we had at the theater for a guild screening, I think it was back in February and the director showed up for a Q&A panel, along with the production designer and I think the costume & make-up people, probably all vying for those lesser nominations. It's notable that cast members did NOT show up, it could mean that they knew at that point they didn't have much chance at Best Actor or Best Actress. Of course I didn't get a chance to talk to Robert Eggers and tell him that I've seen ALL of his movies, well, the important ones anyway - but I'm not allowed to bother the talent. 

Ralph Ineson carries over from "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" and he's really been the link that made this whole mid-section of the horror chain possible, he should do well in the year-end wrap-up because he's been a presence in a fair number of horror films. 

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Nosferatu" (1922) (Movie #2,745)

THE PLOT: A gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her. 

AFTER: I just re-read my review of the original "Nosferatu" film, which is now more than a hundred years old, but I watched it back in 2017, so not that long ago. At the time we were just a year into the first Trump presidency, so I drew a bunch of connections between Count Orlok and Donald Trump. I could do the same thing tonight, but, well, it's been done. It's not as funny the second time around, but then, neither is Trump as President. But you see the connections, right? They're both gross, very old creatures who live in castles, and drain people of their resources while seducing young, beautiful women. Plus they both want to buy real estate in other countries, so they can put up hotels and casinos (I assume that's what Orlok has in mind...)

At this point, I don't know if we even NEEDED another filmed version of "Nosferatu", because the original film was just "Dracula" with all of the names changed, and filmed in Germany instead of Hollywood. Somebody back in 1922 just changed Mina Harker to Ellen Hutter, Jonathan Harker to Thomas Hutter, and Abraham van Helsing to Albin von Franz. The stories are otherwise (mostly) the same, including the vampire buying land in another country so he can relocate there, in "Dracula" that's the U.K. and in "Nosferatu" that's Germany, because in this case the vampire wanted to try some German food, and I mean actual Germans. I get it, the food in the U.K. really sucks, so their citizens' blood probably doesn't taste much better. 

In "Dracula" the vampire has his familiar, Renfield, charter a ship called the Demeter to take his coffin to Whitsby in the U.K. and in "Nosferatu" the vampire has his agent, Knock, charter a ship to take his coffin to Wisburg in Germany. Same, same, same. Then in each case the vampire sets his sights on the wife of the solicitor who visited him in Transylvania (or Carpathia, whichever) and really, didn't they have copyright protection back in the 1920's? Tell me there were at least a few lawsuits filed against the film "Nosferatu" - but I think by now Bram Stoker's novel has fallen out of copyright protection, so perhaps that's the real reason for this new version of "Nosferatu", they didn't have to pay for the original rights. Anybody can make a Mickey Mouse cartoon now (if they use the "Steamboat Willie" version) and anybody can make a Dracula movie now, so again, why remake "Nosferatu" when you can just remake "Dracula"?

NITPICK POINT: How did Orlok get a ship to pick up his coffin and take it to Germany, when there's no ocean that borders Transylvania? Did he travel a fair distance to the Black Sea, pass through the Mediterranean and circle around Spain, then through the English Channel to the North Sea? That's a LONG way to go, maybe it would have been faster to take a boat on a river and connect to the Danube, which flows out of Germany INTO Romania, so that would have meant going against the current, more difficult prior to the invention of steamboats. 

The first real difference I could see in the story came at the ending, because in the Stoker novel, Count Dracula flees back to Transylvania and Van Helsing, and the Harkers follow, they gain control of Dracula's coffin, decapitate him and also drive a stake through his heart. But here in "Nosferatu", Count Orlok stays in Germany (enough with the traveling, already) and Ellen sacrifices herself by having sex with Orlok and allowing him to feed on her at the same time, which keeps him in bed long enough to be killed by the morning sunlight. Yes, this is very German, let's get the kinky vampire sex in there somehow, otherwise what's the point? Another difference is that the best friend character (Holmwood) survives and helps kill Dracula, but the best friend character in "Nosferatu" (Harding) dies from the plague while violating his wife's corpse. (Again, Germans...)

You can really tell here that the vampire story is really a plague story, perhaps it always was and we didn't really look at it that way. In a post-AIDS and post-COVID world perhaps this makes more sense, vampirism is a type of virus that gets passed from person to person via bodily fluids, after all. Ellen is upset that Thomas didn't heed her warning to stay home and instead he got tricked by a European count, and the flipside of that is that Thomas can't understand how his wife could overcome her "melancholy" but still be attracted to that same older gentleman, who looks quite nasty. It's an age-old conundrum, the lovers are jealous and controlling, but opening up their relationship isn't going to solve that problem, it's just going to make things more complicated. 

But the big problem here is that this is supposed to be scary, and despite being gory and disgusting in parts, I didn't really find this scary. Orlok's voice and exaggerated Eastern European accent didn't help, it just made Orlok into a caricature, and some of his statements, such as "I am an appetite!" are meant to be insightful, but just come off as nonsense. Then all of the other characters are so ultra-serious about everything that the film goes way past serious and loops around to silly, if you know what I mean. They tried to make Orlok scarier by having him appear as a walking corpse, but is that really what we want to see? And then Ellen's attraction for the Count causes her to have violent reactions that are akin to demonic possession, which is more disturbing than scary, again it's all about tone at the end of the day. 

The first "Nosferatu" film was where someone first depicted a vampire dying because of sunlight, that's a movie-maker's invention and is NOT in the "Dracula" novel. Similarly, this "Nosferatu" remake has an invention of its own, where Orlok bites people in the chest and not the neck. I don't see the point, because that's just not that sexy at all. 

EDIT: I learned that whoever was supposed to file the U.S. copyright on the novel "Dracula" back in the day screwed it all up, so the book NEVER had protection, which might be why there are so many filmed versions of it, and so many bad sequels over the years, because anyone could use the character without paying. This seems like a counter-intuitive path to success, if you want your work to really take off, just don't protect it and let everyone have fair use, you may not get rich but your work could become super popular - is it worth it? 

Directed by Robert Eggers (director of "The Northman" and "The Witch")

Also starring Lily-Rose Depp (last seen in "Voyagers"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "Superman" (2025)), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Allegiant"), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (last seen in "Kraven the Hunter"), Willem Dafoe (last seen in "Kinds of Kindness"), Emma Corrin (last seen in "Good Grief"), Simon McBurney (last seen in "Boogie Woogie"), Adela Hesova, Milena Konstantinova, Stacy Thunes, Gregory Gudgeon, Claudiu Trandafir, Gherghina Bereghianu, Jordan Haj, Katerina Bila, Maria Ion, Tereza Duskova, Liana Navrot, Mihai Verbintschi, Karel Dobry (last seen in "Child 44"), Andrei Sergeev, and the voices of Ella Summer, Meredith Digings

RATING: 4 out of 10 vomiting sailors