A Toxic Embrace

Aimee Hinds Scott reviews Robert Eggers’s remake of “Nosferatu.”

By Aimee Hinds ScottJanuary 11, 2025

• Film

• SF

THE VAMPIRE, ever the shape-shifter, has wormed his way through time as a suave and charming aristocrat, a bat-like monster, even a sparkly teenage heartthrob. Beneath the most alluring of these bloodsuckers, however, has always lurked his more bestial cousin, and the sickly haunting terror conjured by Robert Eggers in his new film Nosferatu represents the pinnacle of this latter breed. Ostensibly a remake of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), Eggers’s film also draws heavily from Werner Herzog’s 1979 version Nosferatu the Vampyre, as well as from Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and its lesser-known predecessor, Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla, to link the yearning sensuality of the vampire with the repulsive horror that skulks beneath.

As in Murnau’s treatment, Eggers’s Nosferatu centers on a young German woman, Ellen Hutter (a transcendent Lily-Rose Depp). Ellen has, since childhood, suffered from convulsions and fits of somnambulism, which her family and doctors wrote off as hysteria. These unexplained paroxysms are alleviated by her marriage to the hapless estate agent Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). Seeking to improve their fortunes, Thomas reluctantly accepts an assignment to travel to the Carpathian Mountains to retrieve the signature of the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Consigned in his absence to the care of the chauvinistic Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin), Ellen begins to experience the return of her youthful malady, for which Friedrich seeks the help of Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) and the eccentric Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe). Having delayed and accosted Thomas in his ruined castle, Count Orlok descends upon Wisborg, bringing with him misery and plague. Understatedly set at Christmas, the film feels strangely appropriate to its festive release, with characters huddling together in the flickering candlelight.

Nosferatu represents the perfection of a visual language Eggers has been developing since his celebrated 2015 debut The Witch. Echoes of the director’s previous works, including The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022), resound in Jarin Blaschke’s eerie cinematography, with its skillful use of tracking shots and atmospheric manipulation of ambient light and darkness. As in those previous films, Eggers crafts an exquisitely realized historical fantasy with a meticulous—not to say fanatical—attention to detail. Eggers’s direction and the work of his collaborators, particularly Blaschke and costume designer Linda Muir, make the fictional world of Nosferatu feel both true to life and otherworldly.

As in Murnau’s, Eggers’s Nosferatu is pervaded by images of sickness and disorder. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was released in the wake of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918–20, and contemporary audiences doubtless read its vision of a city succumbing to plague, spawning an endless parade of coffins, as a reflection of the deadly toll of that disease. Eggers’s treatment, coming on the heels of COVID-19, likewise assumes its audience’s familiarity with pandemic disease and social discord. His Nosferatu pulses with festering wounds, spittle and vomit, and, of course, blood. In Thomas’s queasy hallucinations, blood runs from Ellen’s eyes and mouth; a feverishly grieving Friedrich disgorges blood onto his dead wife’s tomb; and the pale, drawn face of wasted Ellen reflects the toll of her disease, as much social as it is corporeal. An unholy virulence seeps through Eggers’s film, vividly incarnated in the figure of Orlok, a filthy revenant who crunches through the breastbones of his victims to noisily slurp their blood.

Nosferatu belongs firmly to a post-COVID world. The film treats contagion simultaneously in its medical, social, scientific, and folkloric aspects, reflecting the competing tensions of expert knowledge, communal ritual, and fake news that characterized the unfolding of the pandemic in 2020 and beyond. Reminders not only of the menace of contagion in general but also of the specific characteristics of COVID-19 are present throughout the film, in its narrative, visuals, and even sound design. Skarsgård’s revoltingly magnificent depiction of Orlok is underpinned by his labored, phlegmatic breathing, an aural reminder of the sometimes-fatal shortness of breath that formed (and remains) one of the most awful and recognizable symptoms of COVID-19. The scarcity of medical resources caused by the coronvirus’s rapid spread are recalled in a brief scene in which Sievers despairingly calls for the hospital to close as it becomes overwhelmed with the dying. Both the misdiagnosis of Ellen’s hysteria and the actuality of her affliction serve to remind us of those who suffered and died not from COVID-19 but due to lack of knowledge and medical supplies.

When Orlok finds his way to Wisborg, carried on a plague ship that wrecks and spills its cargo of rats, his physical presence is barely necessary for the spread of the disease and its resulting devastation. One of Murnau’s most chilling innovations is his preoccupation with disease and infection; Stoker’s text simmers with an undercurrent of disquiet about contamination, but Murnau brings this dread to the fore through the invisible threat of contagion. In our current context, the arrival of plague from the mysterious reaches of the “East,” and its association with a shadowy outsider, is reminiscent of xenophobic anxieties about COVID-19 as the “China flu.” Eggers deftly blends themes running through Stoker’s work with the threat of literal infection added by Murnau, complicating the scenario via the character of Friedrich, a pompous entrepreneur who is the human mirror of Orlok. Another brute for Ellen to overcome, Friedrich is in deep denial about the supernatural element to the plague ravishing Wisborg; he can thus be read, allegorically, as an evocation of our own pandemic doubters, with their mask refusal and vaccine hesitancy. Orlok, meanwhile, is a hazard that must be dealt with on home turf, rather than chased back across Europe as in Stoker’s novel. Eggers thus follows Murnau and Herzog in emphasizing that the vampire must meet his fate in Wisborg—his is a contagion that cannot be driven out and destroyed off-screen.

Eggers’s conjuring of fears about disease and contagion are channeled via a masterful evocation of fine art. This deployment of recognizable artistic imagery is characteristic of his films: Sascha Schneider’s 1904 etching Hypnosis forms the blueprint for a scene in The Lighthouse, while Goya’s Witches Sabbath (1798) and Henry Fuseli’s The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches (1796) provide clear inspiration for the atmosphere and visuals of The Witch. Nosferatu likewise mobilizes specific artworks for their symbolic resonances. Fuseli’s The Nightmare (1781), depicting a sleeping woman with a demonic creature squatting on her chest, becomes a visual touchstone, elicited in Orlok’s cramped pose as he accesses a victim’s blood. In the film’s searing final scene, Eggers presents an almost painterly display of Ellen and Orlok locked together, his own take on the popular Renaissance theme of Death and the Maiden, depicted with the exquisite detail of a Dutch vanitas painting. Orlok’s body, already rotting, oozes blood and fluids onto Ellen’s immaculate flesh, the theme of the fragility of life further enhanced by the wreath of lilacs carelessly tossed onto the bed.

In an essay on the popularity of the danse macabre as an artistic reaction to historical epidemics, Luisa Rittershaus and Kathrin Eschenberg argue that the double trauma of the Spanish flu and the First World War prompted a turn toward minimalism in interwar art. Their analysis explains the spare expressionism of Murnau’s film, including his skeletal, rat-faced Orlok. In the years that followed, as the world healed from the collective wounds of the 1910s and ’20s, Dracula and his ilk had their extravagant allure restored. Cinematic depictions by Bela Lugosi in the 1930s, Christopher Lee in the ’50s and ’60s, and Frank Langella in the ’70s cemented a romanticized portrait of Dracula, one that has steadily eroded the theme of otherness endemic to Stoker’s novel and thus paved the way for the emergence of the vampire boyfriend, exemplified by the tortured Edward Cullen of Twilight fame. These were all clean, hygienic vampires, not a hair out of place—they even sparkled!

Nosferatu completely overturns this tradition, reverting to Murnau in its focus on disease and contagion, its eponymous fiend a ghastly, wheezing monstrosity. Yet Eggers also retains a thread of sensual allure in Ellen’s perverse attraction to Orlok, and the film’s most memorable image is their literally toxic—and mutually lethal—embrace. Nosferatu is a hauntingly effective example of a post-COVID film that returns the vampire to his hallowed terrain as a plaguing specter that invades and transforms us in the most intimate and disturbing of ways.