In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, the vampire is reincarnated. He has shed his sparkle, his languid melancholy, his cobweb-speckled absurdity. He comes for you now – yes, you – as the murmuring voice in the dark, the one that calls your desires perverse and your soul unnatural. This creature feeds on shame, of both the faithful and the faithless. And he is as true to us as he was to FW Murnau, director of 1922’s original Nosferatu, or to Bram Stoker, whose novel Dracula provided the (unofficial, legally ruled as copyright infringement) source material.
“Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” asks Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), the convulsing, hysteric target of vampiric attention. Eggers’s interpretation of the classic novel, via the classic silent film, is not only a luxurious, Gothic revelation – it’s also one of the most profoundly, seductively frightening horrors in years, all because its terrors seem to crawl right out from our own stomachs. In 1838, Ellen’s bland but well-meaning husband Thomas (a perfectly tuned Nicholas Hoult) is sent out to the Carpathian Mountains in order to facilitate the purchase of a property in his German hometown by the enigmatic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).
