The 2024 movie year ended on a high note. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa brought in the kids while adults sampled more mature fare like A Complete Unknown and Babygirl. Almost every movie overperformed at the box office, but there was one film out of them all that surprised everyone: Nosferatu. Robert Eggers’ dark take on the classic Dracula story isn’t your typical Christmas fare, but it appealed to enough lapsed goths and film geeks to make over $50 million (and counting).
It helps that the movie received acclaim from critics and audiences alike. But amid all the praise for the film, there are a few people who didn’t like it so much. I’m one of those people. As a longtime fan of the vampire horror subgenre, I was looking forward to Nosferatu and thought Eggers was the right director to update it for 2024. But as the credits rolled, I was left feeling underwhelmed. Nosferatu could’ve been great, but it had one big flaw that ruined it for me: Nosferatu himself, Count Orlok.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for the 2024 version of Nosferatu.
What worked before can work again
Let me explain by taking a brief trip back to the past — 1922, to be exact. That was when the original Nosferatu premiered in the Netherlands and soon became a film classic. Subtitled A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized take on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula introduced the world to Count Orlok (Max Schreck), a rodent-like vampiric creature who brings chaos and death to a tiny German village.
The film’s signature image is of Orlok feeding off a young woman’s neck and looking up, his gaze finally resting on the movie audience who is watching him. In his thirst for blood, he realizes he’s been tricked by his victim; the sun is rising, and he is about to die. It’s a stunning visual and look that’s inexorably tied to the movie, and helped make it one of the few silent movies to leave a lasting impression on a mass audience.
Flash forward to 1979, and German auteur and occasional Star Wars actor Werner Herzog made Nosferatu the Vampyre, a masterful remake that added color, sound, and a foreboding sense of dread that made it vastly different from Murnau’s original. This time around, good doesn’t triumph over evil in the end; instead, it merely mutates into a different form without anyone realizing it.
Herzog had the balls to change things up to suit the film culture of the late 1970s, which favored downbeat endings and a willingness to show more violence and bloodshed than before. But the one thing he didn’t change was the look of Orlok. Now played by Klaus Kinski, Orlok looks pretty much the same: bald head, long nails and teeth, and pale, hairless skin.
Like the diseased vermin he brings with him everywhere he goes, he’s a rat who preys on what’s good and innocent, which is embodied in the film’s heroine, Ellen. Orlok’s look is what makes Nosferatu Nosferatu; otherwise, he’s just another Dracula ripoff, one who is less threatening, less imposing, and less memorable than all the others. Herzog knew what worked before could work again; what he changed instead was the plot, which had gotten moldy, and the visual language of the story, which needed a modern update.
Eggers’s vampire lacks bite
So why on earth did Eggers change the one thing that sets Nosferatu apart from other films? In an interview with Variety, he revealed that he did extensive research into vampire folklore to get his Orlok as close to reality as possible.
“The question then became, ‘What does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?’ That means this complex Hungarian costume with very long sleeves, strange high-heeled shoes and a furry hat. It also means a mustache. No matter what, there’s no way this guy can’t have a mustache. Try to find a Transylvanian person who’s of age who can grow a mustache that doesn’t have a mustache. It’s part of the culture. If you don’t want to bother Googling, think of Vlad the Impaler. Even Bram Stoker had the sense to give Dracula a mustache in the book.”
OK, that’s great, but the Orlok the director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman ultimately delivers isn’t nearly as scary as what Murnau and Herzog came up with; in fact, he’s not scary at all. It’s a big problem in a vampire picture when your main villain isn’t intimidating so much as he’s disappointing. Saddled with a ridiculous handlebar mustache straight out of a 1970s coke-fueled disco party and milky blue eyes that make him look like a White Walker from Game of Thrones, this Orlok feels anonymous and toothless. He could be any movie monster, and that takes away from what makes Nosferatu so special.
The execution of this updated look also leaves a lot to be desired. Orlok’s actor, Bill Skarsgård, is unrecognizable under all the layers of makeup and prosthetics. Why hire him if you can’t tell who he is or, more importantly, allow him to show us what he’s capable of? After all, Skarsgård has experience creating a supernatural monster while wearing plenty of makeup. His Pennywise in the It movies was effectively creepy and evil; his killer clown was different from Tim Curry’s iconic version in the 1990 ABC miniseries, yet still retained the same sinister spirit.
That’s not the case with his Orlok, though. When he’s not cloaked in shadows or smoke from nearby chimney fires, he comes across less as a character who actually exists and more like a special effect that’s been clumsily put together. That’s especially true in the film’s final image, which has Orlok, now fully exposed and dead due to the morning sun, lying on top of a dying Ellen. Eggers at last shows us Orlok in all of his rotted corpse glory, but the effect is muted because you get the sense that what you’re looking at isn’t a creature at all. Instead, it’s just a pile of makeup, rubber, and other materials, lying on top of an actress who just gave a full-bodied, deeply unsettling performance.
What was meant to be a poetic image of two enemies locked in an eternal embrace instead becomes a visual that shows off the movie’s special effects budget. I doubt that’s what Eggers intended, but that’s what I left with as the movie ended.
If ain’t broke, don’t mess with it
Look, I’m not advocating that Eggers, or any filmmaker for that matter, shouldn’t change it up when remaking classic stories or movies. But change is only good when it’s for the better, not to simply do it because no else has done it before, and the director’s new take on Orlok’s appearance just doesn’t work. It robs Nosferatu of its antagonist’s distinctness, it’s disturbing iconography that’s echoed throughout the horror genre for nearly a century, and replaces it with a mustached villain who never really comes alive (pardon the pun) as a truly menacing vampire.
Will Eggers’s Orlok replace the versions that came before it? I don’t think so, and that’s why the movie just doesn’t reach the heights of its predecessors or any of the other great vampire movies like Tod Browning’s Dracula, the Hammer versions with Christopher Lee, or 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
When I reflect on 2024’s Nosferatu, I think of Francis Ford Coppola’s frenzied, lush, and erotic take on Dracula, and I can’t help but compare the two. Both movies used real vampire lore to inform and update their vampiric big bads, emphasized the sexual undertones present in their heroines’ fascination with their undead adversaries, and utilized detailed costumes and elaborate makeup to put their own unique stamp on their villains.
The difference between them is that Coppola never lost sight of what made Dracula so scary and, in the end, so pitiful. In his quest for realism, and desire to separate himself from previous versions of Nosferatu, Eggers failed to retain the one thing that made Orlok so memorable all those years ago and so terrifying even today.
Nosferatu is playing in theaters nationwide.
