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The director Robert Eggers dares you to feel seduced in his take on the classic vampire tale, starring Bill Skarsgard and Lily Rose Depp.
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‘Nosferatu’ | Anatomy of a Scene
Robert Eggers narrates a sequence from his film featuring Nicholas Hoult.
“Hi, I’m Robert Eggers, the writer and director of “Nosferatu.” Nicholas Hoult is on a journey to Castle Orlok, and he is stopping in a Transylvanian village that we built in the Czech Republic outside of Prague. We went to a lot of vernacular architecture museums in Romania, in Transylvania, to study what we would be building, and this is based on all that. It was a very difficult sequence to cast. We have Roma non-actors and Roma musicians and dancers from Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Romania. It was challenging to work with everyone speaking a different language, but also very enjoyable. These musicians are from Romania, so it was the woman who was just clapping with the red kerchief on. You may have noticed, or maybe not, that this is all one shot. This sequence was very carefully choreographed and rehearsed ahead of time in a warehouse in Prague. And then we had to bring everyone here and get it right. And I think we did about 30 takes of all of this. This guy Radu, is a dancer who does kind of traditional Roman dance combined with hip hop. But here he’s just doing the traditional thing. And this gentleman with the Golden tooth is Jordan Haj, a Czech pop star. Why are they laughing at him. Is it the hat or is it something else. But it certainly is meant to make you feel uneasy as an audience member, because he doesn’t know why they’re laughing at him.
Dec. 25, 2024Updated 9:50 a.m. ET
Anytime we get a new Dracula movie, all people want to know is whether it’s scary. That’s always seemed like the wrong question. These films have never scared me, at least, not in a conventional horror-movie-suspense sort of way. A truer test for one of these things is a matter of carnal morality. How hideous can the filmmakers make their vampire — how cadaverous, satanic, ratty, rasping, raisiny, rinded — until he’s just too unsightly, too unwieldy not simply to behold but to be held?
Can an actor so transform the effects, prosthetics and rococo that we give up and give in to the gnarled, murderous pestilence towering over everybody? That’s one barely concealed conundrum in this new, Robert Eggers Dracula film, “Nosferatu”: What do you do when evil kisses better than your husband?
Nothing, I’m afraid. You just whirlpool around the feeling, like the movie’s at-risk Victorian-era heroine, until you’re sunk, crying out for a scratch of the dark lord’s claws. That terror feels like the movie’s achievement. Eggers, along with his craft technicians and the actor Bill Skarsgard, has created the grossest-looking, ooziest, most cooked, most rotted, most mustached, least-living Dracula I can recall.
And yet what this Dracula radiates — the scariest thing about him — is greater than any of that totalizing power. Alas, after more than two hours of chomping, impaling, infanticide and telepathy, I was so queasy with sympathy for all the sexual manipulation, so susceptible to it, that I’m ashamed to confess that I wanted my turn. Do me, baby.
Here’s a shrewd approach to Bram Stoker’s 127-year-old novel: a vampire movie that feels configured to our renewed attraction to the strong man. The character and location names have been changed to match “Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror,” the silent chiller F.W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen made of the same material in 1922. But the story proceeds more or less intact. This remains the tale of a spooky real estate transaction in 1838. A young, newlywed, inexperienced solicitor named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels from his made-up German city of Wisborg to Transylvania. One Count Orlok (Skarsgard) has his eye on a property in the region but demands the closing paperwork be signed via house call.
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