The Nosferatu press tour is keen on branding this film as a gothic romance, too. I think the narrative leans more into the former—considering the stalking, the haunting—but the romance aspect shines through in the movie’s visuals, which will appeal to a particular corner of the melancholic blog generation, where things are aesthetically feminine and already hypnotized by religious imagery and still lives of dripping candles, baroque dressing rooms, strings of seed pearls—but also antique knives, cigarettes, and controlled spillage of blood. Movies like Black Swan have had their essence live on via film stills and memes associating various goods with the aesthetic. The final scene in the movie is a shot of Depp curled next to a decrepit male figure like Pompeiian victims, surrounded by flowers. I already see it reblogged for years to come.
Speaking of digital romanticism, the visuals were what stuck with me while watching Herzog’s Nosferatu a few weeks ago—five black coffins in a funeral motorcade, or Isabel Adjani, apple of the internet’s eye, in all white—since compared to Eggers’s version, the 1979 Count Orlok seemed anachronistically campy. Is Eggers’s the scariest because I’m jaded and over-exposed to gory content of all sorts—fictitious or otherwise?
Eggers’s Nosferatu does pay homage to versions past: Many initial glimpses of Orlok are of his shadow, a technique that expounds upon German Expressionism. The castle’s bleached, sparse interior also looks a lot like the one in Herzog’s film, and this new Nosferatu’s recurring motifs—swarming rats, Catholic totems, a beach pock-marked with wonky graves—simultaneously pays tribute and blows dust off the hundred-year-old story.
But maybe the dust is subjective, because my friend Maia Wyman, who critiques movies for a living, says Murnau’s 1922 film is her favorite version. We saw Herzog’s version together, and post-screening we talked about Nosferatus past—Murnau’s version visualizes the contagion, exoticism, and sexual fluidity emblematic of its interwar context, she told me. Some people on X are saying that Herzog’s version predicted AIDs, was all I could contribute. Sounds like a lot of legacy to live up to. But Wyman noted that our current moment shares a lot of similarities with the Weimar era. “Our briefly permissive culture is increasingly fearful and restrictive,” she said, sagely. And there are folk devils being made all around us, so maybe another Nosferatu adaptation is more necessary than ever.
