American cinema is mired in intellectual property hell. The percentage of movies that are franchise entries, remakes, sequels or spin-offs has surged in recent decades. We are trudging through a muck of constantly recycled nostalgia and sameness, with film studios hoping to cash in on familiarity rather than invention or risk-taking. When I heard that Robert Eggers, one of the most ingenious directors living today, was remaking “Nosferatu,” the classic 1922 German vampire film, I immediately steeled myself for another exciting artist to be felled by the curse of mindless repetition.
Fortunately, Eggers has defied my expectations. His new version of “Nosferatu” is an admiring homage to the earlier film, with many references to its iconic visual language and dialogue. (F. W. Murnau’s original “Nosferatu” is a silent film, in which dialogue is conveyed through intertitles.) At the same time, Eggers’ film is a radical departure because of a shift in perspective from its male protagonist to his wife, overlaying this new point of view atop the foundation of the first one. The result is less a remake than a reinterpretation that changes the story from one about fear of the other to fear of what lies within us. Not everyone will love this film, but Eggers has done us a service by showing us how an artist can remain faithful to their source material while still subverting it to cultivate new themes.
In Eggers’ telling, Ellen is not the “innocent maiden” of the original, but a more ambivalent figure who is ensnared in a Gothic love triangle.
A short synopsis of the original “Nosferatu” — an unauthorized and loose adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” — is important to identify the specific twist that Eggers pulls off. (If somehow you have managed to avoid any encounter with this endlessly adapted classic story, a warning that this article discusses major plotlines.) In Murnau’s original, the protagonist is Thomas Hutter, a newlywed German real estate agent who journeys to Transylvania to finalize a contract for a mysterious client, Count Orlok, to purchase a property in Thomas’ hometown of Wisborg. Orlok is revealed as a vampire and becomes obsessed when he stumbles upon Hutter’s miniature portrait of his wife, commenting that she has “a lovely neck.” Shortly thereafter, Orlok attacks Thomas and then sets out to Wisborg to obtain Thomas’ wife. In his unstoppable advance, Orlok feasts on locals and unleashes the plague on Wisborn. In the end it is Thomas’ wife, not Thomas, who is able to stop Orlok after she sacrifices herself to him by distracting him and preventing him from getting back to his coffin before daybreak, which causes him to disintegrate.
What’s clever about Eggers’ version is that by pulling out threads in the original, it offers its own radical reinterpretation. On a narrative level, one of the more striking features of Murnau’s original is that the unexpected hero of the story is Thomas’ wife, Ellen, even though she seems an ancillary character until the climactic scene. Moreover, the way she becomes a hero is important. She is able to slay Orlok only through an act of deception toward her beloved Thomas: The night she sacrifices herself, she feigns illness in order to send him away from the house, so that Nosferatu can take her alone. While Orlok is ghastly, there is a sexual subtext to Ellen’s act of lying to her spouse to await her final fate alone in their bedroom.









