Eggers Report: Nosferatu

"That's not how I would'a done it". 7/10

The reason Nosferatu fails, or doesn't work, or doesn't quite come together, is because it relies on the audience knowing what a vampire is. It relies on a cultural meta-understanding and pre-familiarity with the concept of vampires, and, to a minor degree, as a remake, with the original Nosferatu film and other remakes. This is a mistake of timing mainly, because in 2025 everyone is deranged and insane and there is no shared cultural understanding of anything. If “we” can't agree on what men and women are - we also can't agree on what a vampire is, and you as a writer cannot presume. You need to tell me exactly what you mean by "vampire”.

What this leads to is a figure that never feels like the omnipresent horror he is portrayed as in the plot, as the characters in the movie describe him: “he is a plague, a fog, an omnipresent looming danger”, but is just frustrating and confusing, because the characters tell you one thing, while your own lying eyes clearly show you another.

We live in a world where we all have to clarify "I'm not racist but-" to have a conversation with your own parents, so, I need the filmmaker to spell out exactly what he means by vampire, and not leave it ambiguous and up to a shared cultural understanding that no longer exists.

The film becomes a Rorschach test for the viewer. Is it about the horror of your girlfriends ex being more Romanian than you? Is it about girls fantasising about fucking their ex Just One Last Time? Is it about girls wanting to get killed by a sexy true crime cannibal? Is it a Morality tale about modern women being sluts unfit for marriage because she secretly loved it, she loved it that dirty slut? Is it about modernity vs tradition? Is it about science vs magic? No one has any clue because the movie is made for 1922, not 2025. The movie is made for before You, dear Reader, became insane.

I went in with expectations. Either it was going to be a based and redpilled anti-modernity message and Eggers is /our guy/ and I would be in on a secret and feel excited, or, it was going to be a female empowerment/cuckoldry thing, and I would be disappointed. It was neither. A lot of this comes from people who are listening to what the characters are literally saying, and not believing their own lying eyes about what they are watching transpire on the screen.

People claim a anti-modernity angle to the film and Eggers work in general. I don't think that there is an truly anti modernity streak in Nosferatu except for at a Rorschach level. There are tiny bits of it but it is not central to the movie as a whole.

The allegedly anti-modernity is all formal and explicit, in dialogue, but the movie itself does not support the mythological/magical perspective. A lot of characters and dialogue express "modernity vs tradition" ideas, Willem Dafoe and Dracula both state it formally: Dracula is real and exploiting the naiveté of modernity that doesn't believe in the supernatural. People take this line and run with it, because it goes along with their own preconceptions. But, the crisis: the movie itself does not support this view, only the characters within it. It is dramatically dissonant with this theme.

If that what we were doing, it that was the point you wanted to make, you would be making a Dracula remake, not Nosferatu. That's the point of Dracula! It's not the point of Nosferatu. For this theme to be central and resonant, you would need to portray the vampire as an omnipresent mythological force of nature. But you see his face and decrepit body (and penis) within the first 20 minutes of the movie.

The Nosferatu twist on the Dracula story is portraying the vampire as a romantic, tragic figure. He is a lust personified, and is powerless to resist his prey, even as he knows he is a mouse walking into the mousetrap. That's why he dies from sunlight, and not from being staked, in the original Nosferatu. Incapable of love, in the dramatic conclusion of the film the monster is revealed as impotent and pathetic all along. Nosferatu is the real incel. That’s not my opinion about Nosferatu 2024. That is a Film History Fact about Nosferatu 1922.

The original Nosferatu twist is humanizing the villain and giving him a tragic romantic (in the art history sense) end, defeated by his own contradiction. He is in the end pitiable and pathetic. Eggers’ Nosferatu is a true remake, he is going for this, but here the vampire is essentially pathetic for 90% of the movie, after the character is first revealed to the audience.

What should be mysterious is spelled out, and what needs spelling out is left mysterious. Showing full frontal vampire penis in the first 20 minutes clashes with the idea of the horror of "the unknown and forgotten, the magic of the medieval ages, contrasting with gay modernism"

In this, both sides just come out gay and pathetic. I don’t think thats the based reactionary take you people really want to get behind.

I see e-christians complaining that “the characters in the movie is stupid, because it shows that church works and prayers work, and yet none of them use God to kill the vampire”. This is a childish surface level critique, a symptom of a much deeper technical issue with christianity:

No one is redeemed in this movie. All character arcs are static. In the same way orlok is a slave to his nature and is ultimately defeated by his own contradiction, no one else overcomes themselves. The female lead, I forget her name, is supposed to be the core character arc, the emotional and thematic center of the movie, but even her journey of seizing agency is ultimately foiled and she sacrifices herself for nothing.

The idea is that she sacrifices herself to distract Orlok. But here, the plot explicitly states that he needs his coffin to go to bed, and the guys successfully destroy it and burn his whole house down. At that point, Dracula is defeated, the rest is just a waiting game. The film furthermore makes explicit that she is making a conscious choice of self sacrifice, Willem Dafoe talks her into it.

If she saved someone it would work, but it's one of a million things that are ink dots. Because it's an autistic remake, it relies on cultural consensus to fill in the blind spots, that just doesn't exist any more.

"Who is she saving? Is her sacrifice worth it? Is it tragic and in vain? Is she just a dumb slut and she wanted to be cannibalized all along like my ex wife, the hot girl in class I am ordeal of civility crushing on and hate?" I don't know, because Eggers won't tell me, he just wanted to make a remake of his favorite old movie.

I think in every situation where he directorially had to make a creative choice between a vision/idea/personal expression, and "making an authentic remake of my favorite movie" he chose the latter. The quote on twitter about him envying medieval artists working for the glory of God is not him declaring his conversion: I say, for him, in Nosferatu, "respecting the original work" is his God, which let's him escape his "own personal psychological expression".

People claiming it’s about bodycounts and women being unredeemable sluts, are ultimately just saying “why is this movie conspiring with my doctor who always shows me all those finger paint drawings of my wife cheating on me”. That’s not what Nosferatu 2024 is about. Nosferatu 2024 is “about” Nosferatu 1922. It’s about “Hey guys lets have fun at the movies”. It’s almost a Tarantino movie in this sense. It is about love of cinema and the art of moviemaking. Everything else is just a vehicle to enable this, the real central theme.

There is a lot of really cool, exciting stuff. It’s very engaging, and its “fun to watch”. Eggers is a great filmmaker, I think the best currently working. Ton of memorable fun scenes. Everyone I’ve talked to agrees, the castle bit was the best part - thats essentially just the male lead running around a spooky castle looking scared, but all the little movie tricks are excellent and exciting.

The finale that people are all worried about will be scott pilgrim vs the world for goth girls, I think everyone is being total pussies about. That could have been so much more gratuitous, if that’s what the movie was trying to do. It is not a pornographic ending. In fact, it probably should have been more gratuitous, to contrast with the pathetic turn and death of the vampire - or to fully condemn the female lead, as the “real monster all along”. As it stands its just kind of nothing, in-between, not satisfying or overwhelming in any way. It’s ambiguous and mysterious.

The dramatic core of the more is ambiguous and mysterious, while the “thematic motives” are put literal in direct “actors speaking directly to the camera” monologues. It’s all topping, no ice cream. And that’s because it’s a remake of Eggers favorite silent movie, it’s not about sluts or gender wars or body counts.

Now for my harshest critique:

I absolutely hated the opening act in Germany with the titles, with the male lead running through the German streets to get to work. It looked and felt like the intro level in a shitty Assassin’s Creed style 3rd person video game. Camera movement, direction, shot composition, scene transitions, “Oh my God I’m late for Work!! Run to the objective marker, and be wowed by the hustle and bustle of our finely designed city full of simulated historical hustle and bustle”. It felt like a video game trying to be a movie. Horrible. I spat on the top of the head of the guy in front of me in the cinema in disgust.

I still have high hopes for The Knight. It will be the best movie of all time.