Vampires have kind of become a joke. Hotel Transylvania, Count Chocula, What We Do in Shadows, and those hunky teenyboppers in the Twilight movies have turned the once terrifying bloodsuckers into lovable punchlines. So here comes Nosferatu, the new movie that aims to put these monsters back on the fear pedestal that Bram Stoker, Anne Rice, and Werner Herzog built.
Helmed by writer/director Robert Eggers, Nosferatu looks amazing. If in Eggers’ fantastic previous movie The Northman, every frame looked like it could serve as the cover of a 1970’s prog rock album, any random shot of Nosferatu could serve a 2000’s nu-metal band. The production design really digs into the nineteenth century German and Transylvanian settings.
And the movie starts off great with a young woman’s blood curdling wet dream. Her husband is given the assignment to make the six week journey to get a signature from a reclusive Count in Transylvania. It feels like we’re in for an adventure with so many wonderful visual motifs. There’s the maniac sitting in a pentagram surrounded by lit candles. Bearded gypsies play the fiddle on snow covered tundra. And then we have the dark castle that our title character calls home. Our vampire can barely breathe as he lurks in the shadows, with only in his grotesquely, long fingernails fully visible.
The slow reveal of a monster to audiences has a noble history. We don’t see the shark in Jaws until the movie’s almost over, same with the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park.
But the payoff has to be worth the anticipation.
The hairless, misshapen Nosferatus of the 1922 and 1979 versions of this film are unforgettably creepy. These are beings that would haunt your nightmares. The bearded Nosferatu we get in this 2024 remake looks like a dissatisfied elderly customer at a delicatessen looking to return his soup for not being hot enough.
There are still plenty of scares in Nosferatu. But the story kind of falls apart once Nosferatu shows up. The rules of this world of what exactly Nosferatu is are never really explained. Screen time is divvied up to too many characters, so it’s unclear whose movie we’re watching. By the end the ticking clock you’re concerned about is not when the sun will rise, but when the closing credits will roll so you can get out of the theater.
