This article appeared in the January 10, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here.

Nosferatu (Robert Eggers, 2024)

“Come to me.” So begins Nosferatu, Robert Eggers’s new film and the latest cinematic retelling of Bram Stoker’s iconic 1897 novel Dracula. A girl on the precipice of womanhood, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) casts out blindly for someone who can understand her—a guardian angel. Her psychic call reaches not a savior but the vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). A hulking and virile walking corpse, Orlok speaks in a trilling basso profondo. He lurks, pounces, and tears at the neck—but there are no fangs in sight, no elegant puncture marks. Instead, Orlok hoists his victims by their throats and bites out their jugulars in splatters of gore. He is not evil, says Professor von Franz (Willem Dafoe); he is death itself.

Eggers has said that his aim with the new Nosferatu was to make vampires scary again—to recapture the horror at the folk roots of their legend. In the long shadow of Interview with the Vampire (1994), Blade (1998), the Twilight series (2008–2010), and the rest, we expect our vampires to go down easy. Whether humanized as stern heartthrobs and boys- and girls-next-door or recast as action flick baddies and campy pastiches, the vampires that abound in our pop culture are more often than not approachable. They seduce, subvert, and symbolize. With each new generation, they increasingly lose their bite. A century-long cinematic tradition weighs like a pleasant dream on our brains, burying the raw savagery of folk legend under layers of reinterpretation.

“The folk vampire is not a suave dinner-coat-wearing seducer, nor a sparkling, brooding hero,” Eggers says in the press notes for the film. “The folk vampire embodies disease, death, and sex in a base, brutal, and unforgiving way.” It is this vampire Eggers says he wants to exhume, just as he has excavated dread, veneration, and wonder from the premodern substrata of European culture across his career. But mere anthropological finesse cannot explain the menacing power of his Nosferatu. After all, the vampires of traditional folk legend haunted only the peasantry—their victims were local, and they fed on livestock as well as people. Insofar as they terrified, they remained provincial. It was Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula that made the vampire a thoroughly global and modern figure of psychic terror—according to the anxieties of a declining British empire. It is within and against this template that Eggers makes his mark.

Stoker’s novel traverses the geographical and cultural distance between Britain and Transylvania. A young solicitor journeys from his comfortable Exeter home to Dracula’s castle, where he is inducted into a world of evil. At the time of Dracula’s writing, Transylvania stood at the frontier of an imperial Europe that depended on the raw materials, exploitable labor, and captive markets of its colonies to the east. Dracula guarded this frontier. In the centuries before the story’s action, Stoker writes, Dracula had repelled the Ottoman Turks, thus preserving Christendom—but he had exceeded his bounds, crossing the Danube in a rapacious attempt to expand his domain. Thwarted on the battlefield, he turned westward, toward London, visiting his parasitic violence upon Victorian civilization, and the distance between metropole and periphery collapsed. This is the real terror of Stoker’s text—that the hegemonic British empire carried within it the seed of its own destruction.

By the time F.W. Murnau made Nosferatu (1922), his notoriously copyright-skirting adaptation of Dracula, European politics and culture had been transformed by the First World War and the Spanish Flu. Three key figures in the making of the film had experienced trench warfare firsthand: Murnau himself; Albin Grau, the movie’s producer and set and costume designer; and star Max Schreck. The world had changed, and the vampire changed accordingly. Beneath his gentlemanly mien, Stoker’s Dracula is a “filthy leech” “of criminal type” with a “selfish child-brain,” in line with physiognomic and eugenicist theories prevailing in turn-of-the-century Britain. Murnau’s Count reverses the equation. Bat-eared, rodent-toothed, and stiff with rigor mortis, Schreck’s Orlok is grotesque in appearance but sympathetic in his longing. He pursues the conquest not of London, but of Ellen—the wife of the solicitor Thomas Hutter. Where Dracula’s pure, contemptible evil is vanquished by a fellowship of crusading bourgeoisie, Orlok’s irresistible desire spells his own doom in the form of Ellen’s ultimate sacrifice, a willing submission to the monster. Nosferatu modernized Stoker’s story by leveling its morality.

More than a hundred years later, Eggers crafts a Nosferatu for our time. He rids Orlok of Schreck’s iconic look: the gaunt, bald, chalk-white, and ambiguously gendered reaper who creeps like a shadow and bewitches his victims. Bill Skarsgård’s version is closer to Stoker’s original depiction of the Count as an aged military commander, complete with a thick, period-appropriate mustache. But where Dracula’s aristocratic airs inspired Bela Lugosi’s decorous performance, Skarsgård projects a raw power onto the character. Upon the arrival of Thomas (here played by Nicholas Hoult) at Castle Orlok, the Count appears only as a forbidding, shadowy mass, his features barely discernible. His manner is tyrannical; the very ground seems to tremble when he speaks. Not until Thomas, tormented by strange visions and wounds, descends to the castle’s cellar and opens the Count’s coffin do we finally behold the monster, supine and nude in all his putrescent glory.

Back home, Ellen experiences her own fits and visions, sensing impending danger—though she only provokes exasperation in her warden, the shipping scion Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who ties her to the bed, binds her in a corset, and drugs her to prevent her thrashing and sleepwalking. Still, she writhes and raves: “He is coming!” As a child, Ellen had prayed for deliverance. Orlok’s answer, consummated violently in nightmares, became her darkness, her secret, and her shame. As she reveals eventually to Thomas, it was only his love that loosened Orlok’s hold. Yet Orlok finds his way back to her to collect on her adolescent pact. She spurns him as a deceiver: he was not the deliverance she prayed for.

Dafoe’s von Franz, a doctor banned from medicine due to his occultist interests, confirms her intuition—only she can end the plague that Orlok unleashes upon her fictional German hometown of Wisborg. She resolves upon her sacrifice. Orlok returns for his final visitation, sharing with Ellen the film’s first tender kiss. She draws him to her bed. He feeds till the first cock’s crow. Dazed, he looks up in disbelief as the sun hits him like a laser beam. Blood presses from his orifices. His carcass withers; Ellen lays dying below him. The film’s final shot shows the brute—previously supine, now prone—bathed in an angelic Art Nouveau glow. Revealed and mastered, he presents a feast for our eyes, like a preserved specimen.

Ellen’s decision to sacrifice herself is surrounded on all sides by ambiguities and ambivalences. She loves Thomas, but his bourgeois world represses and rejects her. She destroys Orlok, but only through communion. And though Eggers uses Murnau’s fairytale framing, his drive to psychologize his protagonist within her social context—and replace the workings of fate and prophecy with something like agency—is thoroughly contemporary. Where Murnau takes Ellen’s self-sacrifice for granted, Eggers dramatizes her choice.

Murnau’s Orlok represented the rotten fruits of Europe’s centuries of conquest and exploitation for Europeans who no longer had to imagine the taste, having sampled it firsthand. His reflective, perturbed mood culminated in Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, where Klaus Kinski’s Orlok practically vibrates with existential torment, waxing philosophic on loneliness and eternity, drawn almost helplessly to his victims’ blood. Eggers’s Nosferatu refashions this inheritance for a modern-day America—an empire of domination, consumption, and spectacle, which instills illusions of freedom while denying us the power to decide our fates. In place of self-determination, we find only the base and brutal power of violence.

If Eggers’s Nosferatu has succeeded in making vampires frightening again, it is not because of jump scares or gory kills, but because the movie projects what the Count has always projected: a corrupted self-image of empire. It’s perhaps no accident that Skarsgård’s Orlok resembles, more than anyone else, The Undertaker—the Trump-endorsing former WWE wrestler known for emerging from a ringside casket to chokeslam his opponents to the ground.

Garon Scott is a writer and organizer based in Brooklyn.