A vampire movie with ‘a lot to sink your tooth into’

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

Many folks have seen loads of vampire movies, however what if we hadn’t seen any? What if we would by no means heard of Dracula, and we had solely the vaguest concept of what a vampire could be? Welcome to the world of Nosferatu, written and directed by Robert Eggers. A remake of FW Murnau’s silent traditional – which in itself was a reasonably trustworthy, 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 unique was launched in 1922.

Eggers is the best man for the job. Before 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 youngster. He can be recognized for placing his personal stamp on horror movies by capturing 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 among the indoor scenes are illuminated solely by candlelight. At the beginning, when a top-hatted Thomas Hutter is hurrying by way of the bustling streets to his musty workplace, you possibly can simply mistake him for Bob Cratchit in A Christmas Carol.

If you are not acquainted with the identify Hutter, that is as a result of the makers of 1922’s Nosferatu modified among the particulars of Stoker’s story, in a useless try and 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, relatively than London within the Eighteen Nineties. But 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 type). In order to safe a promotion, Hutter agrees to journey to distant Transylvania for a gathering with a sure depend. 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 good friend Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Harding’s spouse Anna (Emma Corrin). Before 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 journey by way of wintry forests and over rocky mountains is stuffed with breathtakingly lovely vistas, and Eggers makes the terrain appear so wild and inhospitable that Hutter would have earned his promotion regardless of the vacation spot. But, in fact, the vacation spot is a crumbling fort occupied by the Dracula-like Count Orlok. He is performed by Bill Skarsgård (It, The Crow, John Wick: Chapter Four), not that anybody may 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 bought his soul to Satan 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 all the time on the far finish of a tunnel, and the loudest wheeze since Darth Vader. He might 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 another, 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 a little bit an excessive amount of as a hearty, moustache-twirling eccentric who goes round chirping: “The night time demon has supped of your good spouse’s blood.” And Taylor-Johnson’s strained try at an upper-crust English accent might have you ever chuckling by way of the movie’s gravest scenes. But general, Eggers takes his doom-laden story bracingly critically. Almost everybody commits themselves to the temper of gothic melodrama, and nobody makes any ironic wisecracks about garlic or bats.

Hoult is very poignant as Hutter, a would-be hero who’s lowered 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 depend 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 together 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 stricken 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 relatively than sexiness, ie, it isn’t about vampires being devilishly enticing, it is about males controlling girls’s our bodies. One shrewd level made by Eggers is that the docs of the interval may very well 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.

Still, nonetheless multi-layered and modern Nosferatu is, there is not any escaping the truth that it is nonetheless a Dracula movie, which implies that acquainted issues preserve taking place 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, you might admire the intelligence and painstaking craft that has gone into it, however you may additionally have the sensation that you just’re watching actors taking part in time-honoured roles relatively than actual folks in mortal hazard. Horror followers needn’t fear, although: Nosferatu has its share of ugly shocks. And after so a few years of cool teen vampires, it is refreshing to see a horrible previous vampire once more. But 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 tooth into.

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