Emma Corrin and Lily-Rose Depp in Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024)
During a recent visit to the Criterion Closet, Robert Eggers pulled down a copy of The Innocents, the 1961 adaptation of Henry James’s 1898 novella The Turn of the Screw written by playwright William Archibald and then, at the request of director Jack Clayton, rewritten by Truman Capote. “I watch it, like, twice a year,” says Eggers. “I love Freddie Francis, the cinematographer—and his work with David Lynch, particularly on The Elephant Man—but his work with Jack Clayton is, I think, his best work. They really pushed each other to have the most sophisticated and elegant staging that doesn’t draw attention to itself but just pulls you into the story.”
Deborah Kerr stars as Miss Giddens, an inexperienced governess hired to watch over a pair of precocious orphaned siblings on a spooky country estate. “Clayton opted to downplay the ghosts,” noted Maitland McDonagh in 2014, “thus committing to emphasizing the uncanniness of the real, like the gothic contrast between shadow-shrouded interiors illuminated by flickering candles and exteriors in which the white-hot sunlight is blinding. Poor Miss Giddens is quite literally unable to trust the evidence of her own eyes.” As Eggers puts it, “your imagination is on fire with the disturbing shit that you don’t see. It’s awesome.”
The Innocents is one of many films Eggers has cited as inspiration for his work, beginning with The Witch (2015), set in seventeenth-century New England and exploring, as Justin Chang put it in Variety, “some dark corners of the Puritan psyche.” In The Lighthouse (2019), two nineteenth-century wickies lose their minds to the elements, and The Northman (2022), starring Alexander Skarsgård as a Viking prince, is shot through with Norse mythology.
For Film at Lincoln Center in New York, Eggers has now put together a wide-ranging series, Conjuring Nosferatu, which opens on Wednesday with a screening of a 35 mm print of Eggers’s reimagining of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent milestone of German Expressionism. Refused the rights to Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, Murnau and producer Albin Grau tweaked a few details, but not enough for Stoker’s widow, who won a court order to have all copies of Nosferatu destroyed.
Fortunately, several prints survived. When the great critic and curator Lotte Eisner, the author of the first monograph on Murnau, visited the set of Werner Herzog’s remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), she said that “Werner is somehow like Murnau brought back to life.”
Among the eight works in the FLC series that Eggers credits with inspiring his own Nosferatu are widely recognized classics such as Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast and David Lean’s Great Expectations, both from 1946 and both admired for their meticulously determined mise-en-scène. But there are also rawer, looser, and more rarely screened gems such as Sergei Parajanov’s debut feature (codirected with Yakiv Bazelian), Andriesh (1954); The Eve Before Ivan Kupala (1968), directed by Yurii Illienko, an accomplished filmmaker who worked as a cinematographer on Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors; and Đordje Kadijević’s The She-Butterfly (1973), a folk-horror story made for Yugoslavian television that Eggers finds “visually naïve and yet terrifying.”
“The folk vampire is not a suave dinner-coat-wearing seducer, nor a sparkling, brooding hero,” says Eggers. “The folk vampire embodies disease, death, and sex in a base, brutal, and unforgiving way.” The quote comes by way of Garon Scott, who writes in his review of Nosferatu for Film Comment that it is “this vampire Eggers says he wants to exhume, just as he has excavated dread, veneration, and wonder from the premodern substrata of European culture across his career.” Stoker’s novel “made the vampire a thoroughly global and modern figure of psychic terror—according to the anxieties of a declining British empire. It is within and against this template that Eggers makes his mark.”
“Eggers, along with his craft technicians and the actor Bill Skarsgard, has created the grossest-looking, ooziest, most cooked, most rotted, most mustached, least-living Dracula I can recall,” writes the New York Times’s Wesley Morris, who nevertheless finds that the new Nosferatu is ultimately “a costume drama that’s compelling only when it’s under assault.” It’s “an emotionally empty film,” writes Greg Cwik at Reverse Shot. “The main reason Nosferatu disappoints as anything beyond a display of technical virtuosity is Eggers's inability to capture love—its spirituality, its ungovernable, life-or-death power.”
At Little White Lies, though, Charles Bramesco argues that the “harmonious meeting of artist and material isn’t just the most faithful rendering of Stoker’s text, but the rare vampire picture to enter the bloodstream of the genre and engage it on the cellular level, reducing the mythological mainstay back to its original-sin essence of sex and death so that modern viewers might experience the attendant flushes of attraction and repulsion anew. Behold: an immaculate feat of craft coursing with and in delirious thrall to a malevolent power, as unknown as darkness itself yet as central to human impulse as a heartbeat.”
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