Eggers Remakes Murnau: Nosferatu 2024

Nosferatu (2024) is Robert Eggers‘s Gothic horror remake of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic Nosferatu (1922). Eggers wrote and directed it, drawing on both Henrik Galeen’s 1922 screenplay and Bram Stoker‘s Dracula. Bill Skarsgård plays Count Orlok as a rotting Transylvanian nobleman with a mustache and a booming voice. Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen Hutter, a young woman who has been psychically bound to him since childhood. Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin and Willem Dafoe co-star. Eggers had wanted to make it for almost a decade. The film became the biggest hit of his career, grossing $182 million worldwide, and earned four Academy Award nominations.

At a glance

Release date	December 2, 2024 (Berlin premiere); December 25, 2024 (US)
Director	Robert Eggers
Writer	Robert Eggers
Based on	Nosferatu (1922), written by Henrik Galeen, and Dracula by Bram Stoker
Starring	Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Willem Dafoe
Runtime	132 minutes
Rating	R (US), for bloody violent content, graphic nudity and some sexual content
Budget	$50 million
Box office	$182 million
Franchise	Remake of Nosferatu (1922); see also Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Plot summary

As a lonely girl, Ellen prays for a companion and accidentally reaches a powerful being, the Nosferatu, forming a psychic link with it. In 1838, she is married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a young estate agent in the German city of Wisburg. His employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), secretly in league with the creature, sends him to Transylvania to sell the crumbling Grünewald Manor to the reclusive Count Orlok. Thomas leaves Ellen with his friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Friedrich’s pregnant wife, Anna (Emma Corrin).

After a terrifying stay at the castle, where he wakes with bite marks on his chest, Thomas escapes, sick and terrified. Orlok sails for Wisburg in his coffin aboard a ship full of plague rats. In Wisburg, Ellen suffers seizures and sleepwalks. Her doctor turns to his disgraced mentor, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe), a Swiss scholar of the occult. He recognizes that she is under the vampire’s power, just as plague begins to spread through the city.

Spoiler section: the ending

Orlok tells Ellen in her dreams that Thomas unwittingly “sold” her to him with the house contract, which he could not read. He demands she submit within three days. When she refuses, he kills Anna and her children, and Friedrich dies of plague at their graves. Von Franz’s research suggests that only the willing sacrifice of a pure-hearted woman can destroy the Nosferatu. While Thomas and the others are at Grünewald Manor, where they accidentally kill Knock, Ellen summons Orlok and lets him feed on her until dawn. Sunlight destroys him. Thomas comes back to hold her hand as she dies, and von Franz confirms that her sacrifice has freed the city.

Production and behind the scenes

Eggers fell in love with Nosferatu as a child. In high school he staged an adaptation that later transferred to a New York theater. The remake was announced in July 2015 as his planned second film, but he delayed it, saying it felt “blasphemous and egomaniacal” to do Nosferatu so early in his career. Anya Taylor-Joy was attached to play Ellen from 2017, and Harry Styles was cast opposite her before leaving in 2021. In September 2022, Skarsgård was announced as Orlok. He had originally been offered Thomas, and his success as Pennywise in It and It Chapter Two helped the recasting. Depp replaced Taylor-Joy at the same time. Dafoe joined in January 2023, his third film with Eggers.

Cinematographer Jarin Blaschke shot on 35mm color film with special filters to achieve a desaturated look. Filming ran from February to May 2023, mostly at Barrandov Studios in Prague, with locations at Pernštejn Castle, Rožmitál pod Třemšínem Castle and Prague’s Invalidovna. Eggers used rain machines, wind tunnels and vintage lenses instead of relying on digital effects. Skarsgård lost weight, spent up to six hours a day in prosthetics and refused to have his voice digitally altered. Instead he worked with an opera singer to lower it, adding elements of Mongolian throat singing. Makeup designer David White partly modeled Orlok’s withered body on the ancient mummy Ötzi. Costume designer Linda Muir drew on Transylvanian military dress of the 16th and 17th centuries. Around 5,000 trained rats were used. Robin Carolan’s score deliberately avoided typical horror music in favor of melancholy.

Release and reception

The film premiered at the Zoo Palast in Berlin on December 2, 2024. Focus Features released it in the US on Christmas Day, with IMAX, Dolby and some 35mm screenings. It made $40.8 million over its five-day opening and went on to gross $95.6 million in the US and Canada and $182 million worldwide. Deadline estimated a net profit of $70 million. It holds 85% on Rotten Tomatoes and 78 on Metacritic, although audiences gave it a “B−” CinemaScore. David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter called it “exciting, repulsive and beautiful,” and IndieWire’s David Ehrlich called it the “richest and most fully realized” of Eggers’s films. At the 97th Academy Awards it was nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Blaschke won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Cinematography.

Legacy and influence

Nosferatu became Eggers’s highest-grossing film, Focus Features’ second-biggest domestic release and its third-biggest worldwide. More than a century after Max Schreck, and 45 years after Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, it gave Orlok a whole new generation of fans. It keeps the 1922 names, including Hutter, Ellen, Knock and Orlok, while restoring characters and ideas from Stoker’s novel. Von Franz stands in for Van Helsing, Knock for Renfield, and the Hardings for the novel’s Arthur Holmwood and Lucy Westenra. Far from the aristocratic Dracula of Dracula (1931) or Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), Eggers’s Orlok is a corpse-like nobleman out of Eastern European folklore, suggested to have once been a Solomonar, a kind of sorcerer, cursed by the Devil. Dafoe’s casting also closed a loop. He had played Schreck as Orlok in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), and at one point he was slated to play Orlok for Eggers himself.

Trivia

Orlok speaks a reconstructed form of the ancient Dacian language.
Eggers gave Orlok a mustache because “there’s no way this guy can’t have a mustache,” reflecting old Transylvanian custom.
Thomas’s arrival in the Transylvanian village is a single shot, rehearsed in a Prague warehouse and filmed in about 30 takes.
Depp kept Ellen’s locket as a gift from Eggers.
The casting director initially doubted Depp could play Ellen, but changed her mind after the audition.
Eggers considered Daniel Day-Lewis and Mads Mikkelsen for Orlok before choosing Skarsgård.