Analysis

The new Nosferatu seems to me very much like the old Nosferatu—a cult classic 1922 silent film, and subtitled A Symphony of Horror. To save you the suspense, if you’re looking for something truly terrifying to keep yourself awake at night, look elsewhere. On the other hand, if you can find yourself a dark theatre in which to watch this impenetrably dark film, you’ll find yourself in the perfect place to catch a few hours’ sleep.

If I were being kind, I would consider the many factors which made the original infamous: a genre-defining German expressionist film with a sordid history of its own; no shortage of mystique, mythology, and nostalgia to spice up its legendary reputation; and its having become an absolute cult classic of cinema history. Creating something to rival that is daunting indeed. If even Werner Herzog reverted to the original story, borrowing only from a few titular and visual cues, that tells you something. Let’s also consider that converting a silent film from a century ago into something modern cinema-goers might enjoy would presumably mean making something entirely different—and, yet, the finished product is remarkably, probably too, similar in many respects. The film also boasts several exterior landscape shots which I found to be quite beautiful.

On the Other Hand

If I weren’t being so kind, I’d say that the film is an overreach of colossal proportions which which engages in a conspicuous degree of what its director, Robert Eggers, would undoubtedly consider homage but is more accurately described as a rudderless thematic miasma which thoughtlessly reinforces hackneyed tropes (particularly in regard to sexualised violence), and engages in some outright visual theft. And I’m not even specifically talking about the original Nosferatu either; it borrows liberally from Francis Ford Coppola in particular, and perhaps unsurprisingly those appropriations are amongst its most interesting and striking elements.

The rest of Nosferatu is a mess of bizarre and often quite clumsy composition, an over-wrought cinematography which deploys a cheap black façade which seemingly attempts to obfuscate its lack of imagination. The film suffers a particularly laborious plot and the laughably ye-olden-times dialogue is symptomatic of a tepid and ungainly script (which not even the charisma of Nicholas Hoult, nor—lost in this carnival of incompetence—the usual gravitas of Willem Dafoe, could even wrangle, much less rescue). It aims for Shakespeare but ends up at Showgirls. That might actually be a bit harsh, but not much.

What is objectively true is that Nosferatu is possibly the most boring film I’ve ever seen. The characters spend an awful lot of time droning on and on and on, to what end I’m not sure—I stopped paying much attention once it became insufferably self-important; each successive scene seemed determined to recreate the same tedium as the one prior. It occurred to me that perhaps it was a mercy that the original was silent. This one should have been, too.

No use nepo-babies crying over spilt blood

Johnny Depp’s kid clearly tries her best but unfortunately herein elucidates little in the way of discernible talent other than for glaring and putting on a persnickety accent (she is competent at both). To be fair, she is offered paltry scraps to work with: her character, Ellen, is reduced to a very standard vessel for male character motivation; her dialogue, like that of all the cast, vacillates between dreary, awkward, and unintentionally amusing; despite a great deal of attention both within the story and in promotional material such as the trailer, her character ultimately endures a variety of problematic symbolic associations rather than developing anything close to a compelling character. So as for the actress herself, like most of the cast she should probably not be judged on this performance alone. She appears to have little in the way of charisma and no chemistry whatsoever with Hoult. Which is uncanny because both also seeem to do their very best to sell the idea of their mutual infatuation. It’s lost, though, amidst countless sterile and repetitious iterations of “oh yes, my dear, I love you so terribly much!” Not even Colin Firth at his peak could rescue this shit.

Ellen is thrust into figurative centrality in the plot, but is then obtusely left behind for half the film while her husband goes off to sell some real estate. It’s almost as though Eggers wanted her character to hold more significance (fair enough), but was perhaps too afraid to modify the droll source material enough to actually make her more important. By making her, oh I don’t know… have some actual agency over her own fate, for example. So what we end up with are the same signifiers as before; that is, she exists only as a passive victim. More screen time does nothing unto itself to remedy this, nor does making one of her few acts of agency a de-contextualised invitation to the vampire in the prologue.

What actually drives her? Sex? Not until she reveals her humiliation during an incongruous and quite jarring scene—amusing, perhaps, if it did not so obviously invite the audience to join in shaming her desire—before she reveals to her husband the source of her secret, sexual, shame. Prior to that point she’d spent more time touching her cat than her husband, Thomas. It’s an extraordinarily bizarre ten minutes, but not in an engaging, expressive, or revelatory way. Ellen seems suddenly determined to demean herself: by that I mean she doesn’t just express sexual desire; she does so in a way which casts off her own dignity and that of her husband. With even a modicum of foreshadowing (her momentary whimpering in the opening scene is of a completely different tone), her sexual arousal and expression could have been empowering or liberating. Here, it acts as an expression of “possession”, or “madness”, as though if it weren’t for the repressed trauma of the vampire having raped her, she’d just be lovely little Ellen for whom a polite servicing every Sunday night after church might be more than enough. It’s incredibly disappointing and retrograde for a film made in 2024, and disturbing in all the wrong ways.

So this apparently overwhelming lust just comes and goes… and then that’s that. Clearly Ellen is not actually motivated by sex at all, or it would have been demonstrated throughout. So what, then, are her interests other than her marriage and her shame? Two things, it’s worth noting, which are centred around the men in her life—coincidentally the protagonist and eponymous villain of the film. Ellen herself is very much secondary to both of them: we’re very clearly shown as much.

The vampire, Orlok, is a figure whom Ellen is apparently (though, like a great many things in this film, it’s unclear) unaware of prior to his arrival to assault her. Are we meant to wonder if she was an active participant in that assault, misunderstood or problematised? Or is she meant to be a victim ignored and failed by various individuals and institutions who should have helped ease her trauma? Is she legitimately mad? Are we meant to wonder if she is completely controlled or possessed by the vampire, completely against her will? Is she a willing agent of Orlok? So many questions.

And yet, we shall never know because this film is strangely inattentive toward its own mysteries. Eggers simply connects one requisite narrative dot to the next without pausing to wonder how those threads might intersect with more nuance, much less how they might do so differently than they do in the source material, or how they might manifest in a more compelling way.

Remind me again how Orlok’s plague rats are transferred unnoticed from Transylvania, a landlocked region in north-west Romania, all the way to a port presumably on the Black Sea and on to the boat which eventually crashes into Wisborg’s own port, to release them in truly epidemic quantities. Cool idea, wretched logic. Magic, perhaps? Your guess is as good as mine.

Ignorance is neither bliss, nor an excuse

In my view this incuriosity is inseparable from other aspects of the film, such as the effort to make Ellen a more “important” character without actually doing anything about her agency, or her signification within the text.

She expresses a great deal of requited love for her husband—that’s an awfully big chunk of her stilted dialogue right there—but most of the rest consists of an inconsistent confusion veering between lust and disgust toward the vampire. Are we meant to explore—via Ellen’s experiences—the terror of a kind of irrational post-assault attraction to one’s own violator? Or are we to perhaps consider the horror of revisiting the site of a serious trauma—which, don’t forget, is still often a powerful and confusing emotive event—by expressing a literal desire to relive it? If the film is meant to be a metaphor for the variegations of sexual desire itself, it’s horrifically—literally, not thematically—misguided.

Ellen’s opinion of, or desire for, the vampire is vague, confused, and seemingly inconsistent. Much of what we see of Orlok earlier in the film are either “dreams” (those of Ellen or Lilly), wherein one of the women is attacked, but later discovers it hasn’t necessarily happened. It’s heavily implied, but factually uncertain. To me, this reeked of sexual grooming—Orlok was suggestively preparing each of his victims for how he was intending to treat them once they were inured to it. In both cases, he enacts the previously implied assault. So despite the fact that we cannot tell how the female characters feel about it, we know darn well how he actually behaves.

We are never placed within Ellen’s perspective in the same way as we are allowed insight into her husband’s experience. Where’s the equivalent of the shot where Thomas wakes up after what might be interpreted as a fever dream only to see his muddy feet sticking out of the end of the bed? Both of Ellen’s assaults happen from a perversely voyeuristic position—that is, from a perspective designed for aesthetics over any desire for us to, for example, feel pinned and helpless beneath the strength of this supernatural being pressed upon us. We see Ellen from a detached male gaze, not from her own.

She isn’t alone, either. Her friend, Lucy, dawdles around either worrying about her husband or, later in the film, feeling anxious about her earlier despoilation at the hands of the eponymous vampire. This film makes a mockery of the Bechdel Test; neither woman has an interiority of her own and both exist only in relation to other men, whether mortal or monstrous. Any kind of physical intimacy between them is quickly stripped of warmth or closeness, but not (as you might expect) by a societal expectation consistent with the early 20th Century period, but the oppressive regard of the cinematic tone and its enclosure of the mise en scène. It is, like all of the film’s sexualised content, framed perhaps not as, but for, a form of pervy gawking rather than an expression of genuine desire.

Nosferatu seems only vaguely interested in even asking its various questions, and shows no effort whatsoever in answering them in any meaningful way. The disgust I felt watching this film had little to do with the actual craft of horror filmmaking or the appearance, say, of the vampire himself, and more to do with the offhand use of sex—and sexual assault in particular—as a kind of cheap titillation. A mere plot point: something to get the story started, allow for some moaning and groaning, and then immediately reinforce the tired old trope of women quite literally inviting the predatory sexual attention of men.

Let’s recap: a girl is lonely, possibly a bit randy, calls out for company—whether this a prayer or a ritual or spell is, lo and behold, unclear—and is answered by a vicious supernatural predator. She reconfigures his assault as a lifelong guilt, because how dare she be lonely, or express some desire of her own. Shame on her. Literally. Then, to top it off, she is later made by the pseudo-academic of the film to re-enact the rape in order to save the day, only under a discourse which forces it to be “consensual” because she must unequivocably invite him in by stating her desire for the vampire very plainly. In other words, she is required by plot to proactively invite, and then submit to, his assault because that’s what some dusty old book said. It’s only the light which will destroy the creature (though it wouldn’t hurt the cinematography). Perhaps in more deft hands this might have been reconfigured as a metaphor for, say, the traditional leniency of the legal system when it comes to male sex offenders, but here it’s just off-brand apocrypha.

If all that wasn’t bad enough, the film practically revels in its distasteful contempt of Eastern European traditions and culture, casting the local Transylvanians with strong accents, yet rendering the educated, urban Menschen with a more refined accent. The film is set in Wisburg, a fictional German city, and yet everyone speaks in a proper English accent. Vhere, zen, ist ze German Klischeevorstellung? The eerily unwelcoming gypsies have accents, perhaps, because their bumpkin Christian rituals are a little too pagan-inflected for the sophisticates who dominate the film. That is, those who created the film—or the original, since thematically Eggers has added practically nothing of his own—and the century-old stereotypes that go with them. Some very old, very tedious, Roma stereotypes reduce these people to little more than sinister, untrustworthy cultists; that’s how Thomas apprehends them, and the audience experiences the story through his perspective. He is the protagonist here, no matter how many emphatic scraps have been thrown Ellen’s way.

But faithful reproduction to the hallowed original alone cannot be the justification for all this dross, because the precursor was silent; it had no accents at all. More to the point, why isn’t this film also silent? Or at least in black and white, particularly given Eggers apparent success with The Lighthouse? The film at least superficially seems to lean heavily on homage—yet why the need for a naked virgin as part of the vampire-cleansing ritual? In the snow. At night. A remarkably specific—not to mention utterly impractical—requirement, that one.

Why the extra runtime, why Ellen’s inferred complicity, why change the vampire’s distinct appearance… I could go on. The point is that several distinct changes were made to the original already (albeit with limited or inconsistent impact), so there’s no need to uphold problematic aspects of the traditions which go along with the genre, especially when the progenitor was quite literally the source of no small number of those tropes.

Quite a Bad Boy

Regarding the villain, Orlok; oh boy, where to start? It is perhaps unsurprising that the infamous, rodent-toothed appearance of the original Orlok was replaced, notorious as it was at that time as a racist stereotype for Jewish people. Somehow Eggers had enough foresight to avoid that particular trope.

Yet the vampire, as the most perverse of all the Othered Transylvanian folk, is perhaps appropriately belaboured with the most ridiculous drawl of all, overplayed by a mile and full of trilling tongue-rolls. Orlok apparently suffers severe emphysema; an unaddressed and inexplicable condition which is much more irritating than it is disconcerting or frightening. He wheezes through every scene he is in, though it could be a subconscious masterstroke perhaps—encouraging the audience to dream that his breath will just give out entirely; cue the credits. The real horror here is that it does not.

Orlok is inarguably monstrous, covered in lesions and completely hairless… except for an epic nineteenth century moustache of truly Nietzschean proportions. Whenever he is unclothed, it becomes uproariously ridiculous, nigh on hilarious, incongruous as it is with the rest of him. The same could be said for other aspects of his form; he looms, enormous, in the shadows when cloaked, but is generally depicted in close-up as gaunt and withered.

In the source material it ripped off, Dracula, the vampire is able to manifest in different forms, so it makes sense that the Count at times seems ancient and withered, young and virile, monstrous and horrific. In Nosferatu, Orlok is just Orlok; his influence is represented via shadow and he clearly has some kind of mystical ability, but he is a lazy cypher without context, history, or motivation. It’s the J.J. Abrams “mystery box” theory of storytelling: show the audience a box, and they’ll want to know what’s in it. Here, Orlok is the box, but Eggers falls into the same pitfall Abrams often did: forgetting to show what’s in the fuckin’ box. Unlike, say, the film Seven, which is a masterclass built around a similar conceit, written by someone who actually knew what they were doing. Instead, Nosferatu’s audience should rightly feel betrayed, because the promise of the premise is that this mysterious vampire will be revealed. Spoiler: he isn’t.

The closest thing we get is the outcast occultist doctor—sorry, Professor von Hels… sorry, von Franz—banished from polite society for his interest in taboo topics like vampirism, returned to the fold by narrative necessity, and latterly shrouded in the guise of “truth-teller”. Incidentally, the professor embodies the very line between solemnity and ridicule which this entire film dances along, and eventually topples over; Dafoe seems to flit between moments of the most dire seriousness and a tone which suggests he has just delivered a punchline. Yet his sole narrative function is to implicitly understand (yet not actually explain) all the mysteries which have eluded every other character, not to mention the audience.

Unlike the concise and incredibly effective prelude in, say, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which in a few taut minutes sets up the vampire’s entire character, his tragic motivation, and even generates audience sympathy, all in one super-stylistic, bad-arse sequence, there’s no origin story nor reasoning behind Orlok’s existence, despite the discovery of grimoires and a whole lot of monotonous exposition debating his potential defeat. It’s another stupidity of the film’s already stupid plot that these dusty tomes are discovered somewhat arbitrarily; one should also wonder why the sycophantic cultist followers who wrote them would craft both a history of Orlok’s great and grand power, and also include footnotes—found literally nowhere else, apparently—about how to destroy their master. Oh, that’s right, because exposition. The run-time is tight, after all. Wait… no it’s not.

So who knows what Orlok is; the filmmaker clearly has no idea. The vampire isn’t tragic or morally complex, he doesn’t challenge expectations, he isn’t frightening; he a one-dimensional caricature. When feeding—slurping away atop a victim’s chest, Orlok’s chosen technique has none of the sexual suggestiveness of the neck—he is a mess of gangly arms and a distinct hunched back. His motivations appear to revolve around little more than an animalistic need to feed, and his sudden obsession with this girl he once fucked. That’s it. There is a potent disconnect between efforts to fashion him as a physical threat—such as when he bursts dramatically out of his coffin after Thomas goes snooping around—and at other times as ancient and desiccated—as when he is convincing Thomas to sign his needlessly convoluted paperwork. Contradiction is not complexity.

So great is this contrast that, in the cinema where I saw the film, when Orlok’s pathetically shrunken body is shown in the final shot of the film, someone in the back actually burst out laughing. Instantly offered more catharsis than anything afforded by the actual film, the rest of the cinema followed suit, myself included. In my opinion, the last thing you want in a sombre horror film is for the audience to piss themselves laughing at the denouement. Yet it was probably the best moment of the film for me personally, and I couldn’t help but feel it was a release, at least in part, of the burden of having had to endure the whole tedious film.

Bad, Bad, Bad

Nosferatu prefigures Orlok as some kind of ultimate evil, an adversary par excellence to be destroyed at any cost. Because he’s, y’know, bad. The know-it-all, deus ex machina professor expresses this very clearly; blithely musing that, yeah, it’s a real shame that Ellen needs to invite her rapist back in for round two, but tough shit… that’s just how it’s done (according to volume four of the esteemed McGuffins of Recently Established Lore). As the resident plot-authority, we have little choice but to believe this expert in the occult and the books he’s found. Even as his revelations turn the stomach and invite all sorts of questions about why—in a film made in 2024—this particular sacrifice might be necessary.

In the original, Orlok was a literal demon, but here he’s basically just a supernatural serial killer, and the film makes no effort to even suggest what Orlok as a figure even represents. Threats of bodily harm, maybe? So, if he left people alone would he cease to be “evil”? Nah… too many grim portents and summoning circles for that and, in one of the film’s best moments, he nonchalantly discards a child’s drained and broken corpse while feeding in a mausoleum. There’s no coming back from that.

Does Orlok symbolise the suppression of class consciousness? Nope. The film has no interest in offering a social critique of any kind, and is arguably reductive to a poisonous degree. Could he represent the dominance of corporate hegemony, perhaps, and the seemingly overwhelming power of a greedy, insatiable force which can publicly and brutally suck your labour from the seat of your form without so much as a whiff of concern in regard to retribution? Apparently not. This lack of imagination is so complete that it can’t even summon so much as a nod to something like Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. Orlok is evil, the film is banal, but the comparison ends there.

Vampires in other media often represent elements such as aristocratic parasitism, or sexual threats in the form of bodily harm or death, and the transmission of disease (including, in some iterations, the ability to transform victims into vampires, thus further spreading the “disease”). There’s none of that here: carnality becomes brutality; other than uncomfortable physical closeness, there’s no intimacy at all; sex largely exists as some form of assault, and Ellen actively invites it yet without apparent agency; it’s striking how ignorant to sensuality the film insists on being.

Is it possible all of this is the pioneering of some burgeoning movement which I, because of generational circumstance, cannot comprehend? Perhaps it is a cunning means of expression apropos of the repulsive formulaic repetition of dating apps, here represented within similarly tedious conversations full of mansplaining, where women are possessions without agency. Cinema mirroring the real. That would also explain the ridiculous moustache (though if so, they forgot to give him a mullet).

Perhaps Orlok is meant to represent some kind of incel, as a reclusive and repugnant individual living in squalor and cast as largely invisible and inadequate, desperate for legitimate intimacy but only able to express it through misogynistic violence, and yet rendered completely one-dimensional and transformed into a literal monster.

Maybe the film cannot decide whether it prefers to exist in the realm of reality or absurdity precisely because it targets a generation whose understanding of physical sensuality is largely dislocated from any actual experience of it (perhaps appropriately, multiple young people in my theatre were actively on their phone throughout the film). All these motifs have a vague potential, yet none at all manifested. To modify Hanlon’s razor: never ascribe to genius that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.

Style over Substance

Nosferatu throws a variety of heavy-handed stylistic elements around without perhaps understanding how they work, or at least not prefiguring what their effect might be. An example of this is the repeated use of wide panning shots which halt abruptly; it’s interesting the first time, when it seems novel—if not especially adept (Eggers is no Jane Campion)—but the third, fourth, fifth time, it becomes a distraction. Is it meant to reflect the sluggish and wooden movement of the vampire? Who barely, in fact, moves at all? It makes no obvious thematic link that I could discern. Like much of the rest of the film, Eggers appears to be grasping for the avant-garde, but signals his lack of stylistic control, leaving the whole production feeling decidedly undergraduate. The whole thing is overwrought, over its head in ambition and exposed as underqualified in its execution.

The lingering, looming, clawed hand motif is a great example of this; it is quite striking, and more than once it works well, such as when the mere fingertips of the shadow-hand manage to twist Thomas about-face to confront Orlok. The device is lifted directly from Murnau; not just from Nosferatu but also Faust. It’s been borrowed before, of course, perhaps most notably in Fantasia and also Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which perhaps unsurprisingly also takes elements from the 1922 Nosferatu. Repetition itself is fine, even appropriate, particularly given that it’s a remake. Yet, Eggers uses it obsessively—the motif becomes quite dry even before its most dramatic deployment after Orlok arrives in Wisborg and his ‘reach’ visually spreads across the entire city. What, in another film, might have been visually astonishing simply becomes the latest escalation in a long line of the same thing; a cliché of its own making before the film has even finished.

Jarin Blaschke, the cinematographer, seems content to drown the film in a brute force underexposure, with the usual false-night tinge of blue to generate a sense of permanent dusk. Only, it makes the film incredibly difficult to watch. It isn’t a high-contrast, thematically appropriate, Fincheresque stylistic rendition like silver retention; it’s just bog-standard night-darkness dialled up to eleven.

If you’re wondering what ‘silver retention’ means, Fincher’s cinematographer on Seven, Darius Khondji, utilised a bleach-bypass process to retain some of the silver typically removed from physical film stock during post-production. This creates a higher contrast; the silver creates a luminous effect in the light tones, and a greater depth to darker ones. It also generates a measure of desaturation before colour grading has even been done. Anyone familiar with these techniques will likely also be able to tell the difference between the variegations of “black” which we interpret on the screen (most of them aren’t even close to black at all; they simply read as darker than the rest of the colour in our visual interpretation, and this can be seen particularly clearly when the actual-black letterbox format is involved). The point of this process is to create higher contrast, to draw out the depth of that blackness rather than simply imply it.

Blaschke has worked with Eggers on his previous films, so they likely understand one another. From trailers alone—I’ve not seen the film—The Lighthouse superficially seems like it approaches the limitations of black and white film with interesting ideas. Certainly, a discernment not applied in the same way here; it’s hard to feel tense when it’s almost impossible to see what the fuck is going on. Fincher’s films, in contrast, make the dark seem deep enough to be an existential void, but the minimal light is often bright—that’s what contrast is for—and instead of the horror-inspired muddy mire of generic pseudo-blackness, its noir-inspired disparity instead draws the eye to what is important, whilst simultaneously allowing the imagination to craft what is not—becoming disturbing by virtue of the fact of its utter absence.

Despite this ineptitude, I shouldn’t complain too much. It was likely that very same dark, inadequate lighting which allowed me to fall asleep twice during the film. That likely saved me about twenty-odd laborious minutes or so of its excruciating two and a quarter hour runtime. This is an indulgent, bloated film. In contrast, the 1922 original was a much more merciful hour and a half long.

Are we talking visigoths, ostrogoths, or mall goths?

Part of my English Literature Honours thesis focused on gothic fiction which, whilst not directly related to the cinema, certainly informs it to a degree. The history of gothic literature, and the cinema which in part succeeded it stylistically, and the pop-culture iterations which embraced aspects of that form and carried it in new directions, all had one overriding thing in common: they were subversive.

Gothic literature became significant because it offered women in particular an outlet for sexual fantasy and frustration, to give them a degree of agency, and to spit in the face of the enlightenment “reason” which dominated the way the world was run, by men, whose vaunted rationality was often the justification for their supposed superiority. After all, women were just these distraught things who fainted and became hysterical at the first sign of trouble, not clear-thinking philosopher-kings who bent the fate of the world to their will. So in gothic fiction—part of both the Romantic and Expressionist traditions—apparitions and ghostly creaking doors and the shadows in the corner are all legitimate things to be fearful of.

Likewise, gothic cinema has always been expressed effectively in the horror genre, and it would not be hyperbolic to suggest it was quite substantially defined by both the original Nosferatu as well as Fritz Lang’s iconic Metropolis (and in this specific context, another German remake; Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre). The genre—particularly vampire films—eventually descended into pretty tame schlock and remade itself into a formulaic, camp and kitschy style. However, it originated as something legitimately destabilising, and spoke directly to subconscious fears. Now it’s often some novelty take on the same bland recipe of Last Girls and jump scares, usually with the violence dial turned up a few notches more than usual. But a more appropriate contemporary successor to the gothic tradition would be something like the Lovecraft mythos; skirting a mysterious conspiracy in the form of an unknowable cosmic horror beyond imagining. The stuff of otherworldly dreams and cults and insanity, inextricable from an unseen and unfathomable power so vast that it could blot out human life at a whim.

Considering all of these myriad influences should further elucidate why the Eggers Nosferatu fails as a piece of cinema: it signals, to those who likely don’t know any better, that it aspires to some high-minded magnum opus. And to a degree that’s actually true; it certainly screams ambition at the top of its lungs. What it lacks is the intelligence and execution to actually achieve anything close to that. It repeatedly, and exhaustingly, falls back on a range of worn clichés and doesn’t add anything stylistically fresh. It lacks intellectual credibility most obviously on the conceptual level—it is undeniably a technically proficient film in simple production value terms. While the Murnau Nosfteratu might now seem hackneyed, that’s because it was legitimately avant-garde and has itself been copied endlessly since (in the same way as, say, The Matrix might seem full of sci-fi tropes—because it originated half of them). It should also be noted that Nosferatu’s historical cinematic value should only be nested within the nascent “horror” style (which was not even a thing at that time) in the sense that it arguably instigated it in the first place.

In contrast, the Eggers Nosferatu has nothing new to say. Nor even a particularly interesting way of saying it—because it certainly feels like a lot is said. But almost none of it is memorable. The film’s sheer tedium is both the most notable of its many flaws, as well as its most consistent thematic force in the absence of pretty much anything else of stylistic or symbolic value.

Yet, I can understand why confused modern audiences might mistake it for something quite good, which—judging by the almighty wisdom of the internet—seems to be fairly common. After all, to those whose vampire myth touchstones are Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Twilight, it tells an older, more original iteration which hearkens back to the genesis of the myth itself. The supreme irony here is that the film is such a weird kind of remake. It’s not even a reimagining. Ironically, it’s more like a rip-off of another rip-off. The original so egregiously copied Bram Stoker’s novel that his widow had most (but obviously not all) of the negatives of the film destroyed as part of a successful copyright lawsuit. After which, Nosferatu entered into the realm of many cult classics: a hard-to-find, culturally transgressive icon of a bygone era, able to feed on controversy and nostalgia in equal measure. Along the way, perhaps its connection to the Romantic and Expressionist movements were lost to its latterly fans—Eggers obviously among them—within that growing cultural myth.

This modern iteration engages in an indolent form of personalised “expressionism”—mere idiosyncrasy, a powerful example of the American obsession with idolising individualism and turning art into a form of consumption for consumption’s sake. The result is a remarkably shit movie which is ultimately little more than a director’s pet project. Rather than, say, challenging audiences with a subjective rejection of rationality—even reality itself—in favour of an unguarded, weeping, shrieking, desperate disclosure of an internal emotional experience.

The film resigns itself to the monotony of contemporary horror. Which, in my opinion has (with a few notable exceptions) been stale and puerile for the best part of half a century at least: blood, guts, darkness, sexual and sexualised violence; nothing we haven’t seen in many forms before. Eggers has remade Nosferatu in the guise a chef, but he is following a basic recipe for the same kind of cheap crap that can be found in cinemas every year. He’s just garnished it differently.

And by “horror” here, I mean the typically formulaic, rigid and aesthetically sterile movie format which has become all too familiar. Trite genre junk, not a stylistic phenomenon which might have interrogated, or even embraced, a genuinely transparent interiority and touched something sublime—and, in doing so, elucidated the genuinely horrific, the essence of what we fear, and why. Instead, Nosferatu is just a crude simulation, a distillation of trope and mechanism: flat and dull and opaque. It’s enough to put you to sleep.