Nosferatu!

Unlike Andrew, my frame of reference for Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu was not Werner Herzog’s 1979 version of the retelling of Dracula. Nor was it F. W. Murnau’s original silent film, which I only watched after seeing Eggers’s remake. It was SpongeBob SquarePants. In one episode, the vampire is the out-of-nowhere explanation for one in a series of ultimately explicable phenomena seemingly haunting some characters. (When I was a child, his cameo, at the episode’s end, always sent me running upstairs.)

Roberts Eggers did not need SpongeBob to introduce him to Nosferatu (though he is grateful to the show for having done so for younger generations). Eggers has been obsessed with the German Expressionist film for much of his life. He staged a version of it as a high school theater production and had been interested in a film adaptation since his own film career began in 2015, with The Witch.

Knowing about Eggers’s filmmaking modus operandi makes this understandable. His efforts thus far — which also include 2019’s The Lighthouse and 2022’s The Northman — are deliberately transportive. They strive not merely to create characters, setting, and mood from the past but to simulate, as much as possible for the viewer, the mind-set and worldview of these reconstructed worlds. Nosferatu offered him a twofold opportunity: to take viewers back to the 19th century setting of the vampire tale and to hearken back to early-20th-century German Expressionism.

He is more unambiguously successful at the former task. And this is in part because his Nosferatu embraces the clash between (supposedly) archaic superstition and modern skepticism. As in William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, of which I often thought while watching Eggers’s film, doubting characters have to be forced, against their initial judgment, to accept the reality of an evil they do not fully understand. Also as in that film, one character literally invites the demonic into her life, the antagonist demon delights in the materialism of moderns, and the transcendent good such dark evil implies is present in Christianity. This clash is a through line of the film, one that gives it structure and modern resonance. (Be careful what you “manifest,” kids!)

Assessing Eggers’s embodiment of the German expressionist mood is more complicated. On the one hand, he knows it far better than I do. And some of Nosferatu’s most indelible moments capture it strikingly, such as the scene of a driverless carriage approaching in a dark, snowy forest; the titular villain stretching his hand over the town on which he has dark designs. Despite all this, I came away from Nosferatu feeling like Eggers had every opportunity for a cinematic home run — a master of mood remaking one of the moodiest films ever made, one with which he has been obsessed his whole life — and only made it to second base, perhaps in part out of excessive reverence to the material (though he does make several changes to it, such as accentuating the vampire’s assault on bourgeois norms). Long interested in, but otherwise unexposed to, Eggers’s filmography, I expected to be wowed but was merely entertained. In search of the former sensation, I’ll look not to SpongeBob but to Eggers’s other films and, on Andrew’s recommendation, to Herzog’s remake.