Gustav Temple watched Robert Eggers’ new adaptation of the vampire classic and missed the camp and humour of all previous versions.
Robert Eggers long-awaited version of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, lavishly funded by Universal Pictures, lacks all the essential ingredients that have made many previous vampire movies into masterpieces. The plot, characters and cast – with the exception of Willem Dafoe – are all played straight as an arrow. Coupled with the historical costume and lavish drawing room settings, Nosferatu could almost be a mediocre production of a Jane Austen novel with an added vampire.
Vampire films need either camp or genuine chilling horror to make their mark, and Nosferatu has neither. The dialogue is weak and humourless, the actors blandly stating outlandish facts about the supernatural as if reciting lists of dinner party guests. Lily-Rose Depp looks as though she took time off filming a perfume advert to play the part of Ellen Hutter, while Nicholas Hoult’s talents are wasted on pedestrian lines delivered from inside billowing dress shirts in the rain, to make them seem more interesting.
When Count Orlok enters the picture, there is a sigh of relief from the audience – at last, the film is going to become genuinely horrible. Instead, Bill Skarsgård hovers in the shadows, speaking through rattling breaths in an absurd Eastern European accent worthy of Borat. We never get to see the full terrifying face of Count Orlok until the very end of the film, Eggers using chiaroscuro lighting supposedly to make him more mysterious. That would work if he were an unknown to us, but most viewers watching this film will either have seen one of the many previous adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, on which the film is heavily based, and are therefore unlikely to be particularly scared by him. The scariest thing about him, when Orlok is eventually revealed, is his unconvincing stick-on moustache.
Nosferatu was first made in 1922 by F.W. Murnau as a silent movie with German dialogue. The names, setting and title were deliberately changed to avoid any infringement of copyright to the Stoker estate. Sadly the estate was not satisfied and demanded that all copies of the film be destroyed. Luckily for cinephiles, a few copies survived this purge. The character of Count Orlok differs from Count Dracula in his appearance and his vampiric skills. While Dracula is an elegant, cultured aristocrat with a fine taste in capes and eye liner, Orlok is a rat-like creature with a hideous face and disgustingly long fingernails. Whereas Dracula’s victims become vampires themselves, those bitten by Orlok simply die. And while Dracula is weakened by daylight, he has no need, like Orlok, to spend the entire daylight hours inside a coffin.
When compared to previous adaptations, Eggers’ Nosferatu trails far behind the original Murnau silent production from 1922, and the one from 1979 by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampyre with Klaus Kinski in the lead. But by far the most mesmerising portrayal of Count Orlok was in 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, a low-budget independent film directed by E. Elias Merhige. The film is about the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu, with John Malkovich playing the director, and Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the actor who played Count Orlok in the original film. Shadow of the Vampire adds a fictional plot device that sees Schreck becoming a vampire himself, having insisted on always remaining in character and only being filmed at night.
Dafoe steals every scene with his creepy, gangly Orlok (above), delivering in spades the missing ingredient from Eggers’ film – camp. Nosferatu, like all vampire films, needs to be closer to The Rocky Horror Picture Show than chillers like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Even western movie legend Jack Palance threw in gallons of camp in his portrayal of the Count in the 1974 TV movie Dracula.
Dracula/Nosferatu is a difficult tale to bring to the screen, because the novel is very long and written partly as an epistolary novel, with the remainder of the story told through the medium of diaries and journal entries, which drive the plot along and provide all the horror and suspense. When you strip away all those fictional devices, you are left with a story that requires extra ingredients to entertain as a film. Those were provided by the great Draculas like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and, more recently, Claes Bang. And did any of them take themselves as seriously as Robert Eggers or Bill Skarsgård? Thankfully not.
