A Country for Old Monsters

The story is so much older now, and farther away. Dracula has always been ancient, foreign, but at first he came to us: in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) he invades contemporary London, a city of telegrams, train timetables, blood transfusions, and phonographic audio logs—all of which were used, by the end, to help defeat him. It was an almost schematic confrontation between old and new, backward Eastern Europe and ultra-modern England. 

F. W. Murnau and his collaborators, adapting the story into Nosferatu (1922), pushed it into the past but also pulled it closer to home: their vampire invades the fictional German town of Wisborg in 1838. Wisborg is quaint, bucolic (and the mid-nineteenth century was, perhaps, a more plausible setting for the plague outbreak the film adds); its inhabitants are serene, sentimental, antiquated—none more so than the somewhat ludicrous hero, Thomas Hutter. Max Schreck’s Count Orlok is still ostensibly an old-world aristocrat, but he is also the most modern thing in the film, an angular, Expressionist incursion into this soft, sunny, superannuated existence. 

There is an unsettling sympathy between Nosferatu and Nosferatu, and not just because Schreck invests Orlok with a touching awkwardness. They are both in some sense products of the new world, of the rapid changes—violent, technological—of the early twentieth century. (Murnau, along with many others who worked on the film, had served in the German army during World War I, was wounded, and lost friends, something explored quite powerfully in another Nosferatu, Jim Shepherd’s 1998 novel of Murnau’s life.) The film and its monster stand together, looking back across the chasm at this vanished world with a mixture of longing and malice.

There have been hundreds of vampire films since, but I don’t think any has made it all so purely a matter of the past as Robert Eggers’s new version of Nosferatu. We are still in Germany, still 1838, but seen from a much greater distance—another continent, another century removed. There are more years now between us and Murnau’s film than between it and its imagined 1830s. The modern peeks through in the unmistakably contemporary looks of some of the actors (Lily-Rose Depp’s cheekbones, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s general swoleness), and in the fact that everyone is speaking English, but those are inevitable. 

This vampire is as ancient as he’s ever been, a tattered, fur-clad, mustachioed relic of a distant century. And yet so is the world he threatens. Eggers takes care to emphasize the backwardness of the men who oppose him. Willem Dafoe’s Professor Von Franz—as Van Helsing is here renamed—is not the open-minded rationalist of Dracula but an alchemist and occult philosopher. When Hutter’s wife Ellen (Depp) begins to have fits, induced by her psychic communion with Orlok, the doctors tie her to the bed, gag her, declare she has “too much blood.” Here, the old confronts the old. 

Eggers has never been much interested in the new in any case. His films are driven by an intense engagement with the past, an attempt to make it as present and palpable as possible. The way the deep woods stifle and tempt an isolated family in colonial New England; the overwhelming flatulence of a nineteenth-century lighthouse keeper living on canned goods and grain alcohol; the mud-smeared animalistic rites of ninth-century Vikings: these are the phenomena to which his work is devoted. Supporting these spectacles is an almost fetishistic emphasis on physical detail: the weight of the tools, the texture of the fabrics, the sound of the hinges on the doors.

It can get a bit oppressive, of course. In his first two films, that was the point. Both The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019) use their carefully recreated historical existence to hem in the protagonists, pressing it against them harder and harder until some rupture—magic, or madness—releases them. The Northman (2022), a film on a much grander scale, in a much more distant history, trades in this structure for a simpler, more familiar quest for revenge. The main character is oppressed by his enemies, but the world fits him snugly—he is, it sometimes seems, just another historical detail. As a result it is the audience who feel the weight of that detail, who begin to dream of escape.

Nosferatu can, at times, feel similarly burdensome. Its hushed, shadowy nineteenth-century Europe is unvarying beautiful—and simply unvarying. The bright, sprightly “real world” of Murnau’s film—or even of Werner Herzog’s melancholy 1979 version—makes no appearance here. Everything is dim, cold, as if the film itself had been bled half to death before it reached the screen. 

Some things do break through the murk. Thomas’s journey to Orlok’s castle, picked up in the frozen Transylvanian woods by a seemingly driverless carriage, is a wonder, with the heft of reality but the queasy momentum of a fairy tale. And both Depp and Bill Skarsgård’s performances reach deranged heights. Her Ellen doesn’t decorously sleepwalk under the vampire’s influence, or faint gently away; she shrieks, writhes, berates the men around her, moans like she’s giving birth, distorts her face until you worry she’ll break her jaw. Depp has cited Isabelle Adjani as an inspiration: not her wan, determined rendering of this same part in Herzog’s Nosferatu but the flailing, transgressive, uncontainable performance she gave a couple years later in Andrzej Żuławski’s Possession.

Skarsgård’s courtly, throat-sung malevolence as Orlok is a bizarre vocal choice for the ages—the best since Tom Hardy’s Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, like Hardy not just risking goofiness but embracing it as an expression of power and contempt. (The truly arrogant don’t normalize their voices—they sound as weird as possible, and make you deal with it.) When Orlok and Ellen meet in her bedroom, and he rolls out “I… am… an… app-e-tite. Nothing more,” one can feel oneself in a very different movie, something livelier, more primal, more surprising. 

This movie, however, ends up in the preordained place, by the preordained route: the same noble sacrifice by Ellen, the same self-forgetful death by the vampire, all in accord with the same stuffy bit of pseudo-legend about a “maiden” distracting the Nosferatu until “first cock crow.” The vampire’s feeding involves more nudity than before, but to less effect. Murnau’s version of this moment is brief and startlingly offhand, the vampire tucked “on the very side of the frame, obscenely unobtrusive,” as Shepherd puts it. Eggers manages neither that subtlety nor any kind of true excess—nothing like, say, the blood-soaked, appallingly sexual feedings by the vampire-ish cannibals in Claire Denis’s Trouble Every Day (2001). What was once inspiration is now citation.

Eggers’s film was joined in theaters a couple weeks later by another remake of an old monster movie, Leigh Whannell’s version of The Wolf Man (now just Wolf Man—perhaps in acknowledgment of its many predecessors). The werewolf is “first cousin to the vampire,” the Scottish novelist Emily Gerard wrote in “Transylvanian Superstitions,” an 1885 essay that was one of Stoker’s sources for Dracula, and in some legends they were barely distinguished. This is why Dracula, in his early iterations, can turn into a wolf and make other wolves do his bidding. The two have become separated, even opposed, over time, but the link remains strong.

So it makes sense that Whannell’s Wolf Man is a kind of mirror image of Eggers’s Nosferatu: lean, focused, contemporary, thoroughly revised. Only the basic setup of the 1941 original—an injury, a transformation, some daddy issues in the background—has been retained. In place of Lon Chaney Jr. returning to his ancestral castle in Wales, reuniting with his father, romancing a local, and falling in with a caravan of “gypsies,” we have Christopher Abbot returning with his wife and daughter to the isolated homestead where he grew up, after his father, long missing, is declared legally dead. The gossipy class-bound community of an imaginary Wales is replaced by a barely inhabited backwoods Oregon of paranoid survivalists; Chaney’s cheerful, slightly creepy Larry Talbot, an out-of-work engineer, becomes Abbot’s slightly mopey Blake Lovell, a struggling writer turned stay-at-home dad.

Eggers’s Nosferatu is a very personal project, one he struggled for years to get made. He has spoken about how important Murnau’s film was to him as a preteen; in high school he directed a theatrical adaptation of it successful enough to be restaged professionally in a local theater, an experience that “cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director.” Whannell’s film, on the other hand, is clearly an expression of corporate yearnings. Out of the failure of Universal’s attempt a few years to ago to create a shared “Dark Universe” of monster-movie remakes, his The Invisible Man (2020) emerged as an unexpected success, both commercial and artistic. That is, undoubtedly, the reason this Wolf Man exists.

But for all their differences Wolf Man is, like Nosferatu, slowly overtaken by a sense of staleness, of (I’m sorry) toothlessness. Whannell’s great strength as a director is his deft way with violence, and with physical storytelling more generally. This does occasionally jolt the film to life—in an early car crash turned werewolf attack, for instance, or a later scene of the family hiding from the werewolf atop a slowly collapsing greenhouse—but there is nothing as precise and startling as the uncanny signs of the Invisible Man’s presence in his previous film, from a puff of breath to indentations in a chair, or anything as shocking as its brutal murder in the middle of a restaurant, carried out with impossible elegance by a floating knife. 

And while that film built up a sustained, convincing amalgam of tech-bro arrogance, violent misogyny, and inescapable surveillance, Wolf Man simply states its theme of conflicted masculinity, then restates it again and again. Blake, scarred by his short-tempered, domineering father, has rejected not just his past but large swathes of his own emotional life, suppressing any trace of anger, retreating into mumbling, doleful ineffectuality at the first sign of conflict. 

Abbott plays it well, along with Blake’s fear and confusion as he starts to go feral over the course of a single night. The most interesting aspect of Wolf Man is the way Whannell renders his changing consciousness, as a kind of warped, blue-black night vision. Scenes slide sickeningly in and out of this effect, counterposing his and his family’s points of view as their ability to communicate degrades. These moments offer a glimpse of a more patient, less predictable film that might have been, an exploration of bodily alienation and grief (themes dealt with more extensively and amusingly in Whannell’s giddily gory 2018 sci-fi Upgrade). But Abbott is given nowhere else to go, nothing more to develop. It’s an oddly rushed, compressed, almost crumpled movie. 

The original Nosferatu and The Wolf Man were very different films, from very different places, but they have a similar symbolic conflict at their centers. In both, the monster is part of an older, less secular world. Schreck’s strangely modern Nosferatu is nonetheless named, served, and explained by the devoutly religious Transylvanian peasants who live around his crumbling castle. The werewolf curse is brought to town by the Roma (“gypsies,” of course, and played by non-Roma actors), whose folk rituals can help dispel its effects. 

The end result varies. The Wolf Man is deeply pessimistic; the forces of rationalism—the local constable and Talbot’s stubborn astronomer father—are soundly defeated by the folk tradition they deride. Nosferatu is ambiguous: the vampire is defeated, but by a rationalist return to religion and folk traditions. (Dracula, for its part, is purely optimistic: the unfailingly scientific Van Helsing makes use of both religion and reason, and wins the day.) But both films are driven by a suspicion of progress, a nagging worry that discarded traditions might come back to bite us.

In the new films, it is not clear there is any conflict at all. There is no rationalism to speak of—just the legends, obviously real, obviously dangerous. They are not so much confronted as succumbed to. The protagonist submits to death as the least destructive option. If these movies are making an argument, it is a profoundly negative one. But it doesn’t feel like an argument, really; none if it seems that intentional or thought-through. It feels more like a mechanism left to play itself out, or a compulsion being indulged.

Most horror films, like most genre films—like most films—are driven by wish fulfillment. They pretend to ask what we are afraid of, and we go to them pretending to seek an answer. But they are not, most of the time, about our real fears: more often the actual question is what we want to be afraid of. This is why it’s often such a relief when the monster appears. He shows us not the face of evil but the face we wish evil had. He’s here to protect us from what we really fear, to dispel the early uncertainty in which those real fears could begin to creep in—and which some horror films prolong as long as possible for exactly this reason. 

In the new Nosferatu the monster arrives almost immediately. This is one of the biggest changes Eggers has made to the original. Our first encounter with him is not when Thomas goes to his Transylvanian castle, after being warned repeatedly against it, but in a prologue in which Ellen, years earlier, calls out to Orlok, who arrives somehow and feeds on her in her family’s garden. So we know what he looks like from the start—we’ve seen his spindly, half-rotted body (intriguing as an idea, to emphasize his undead nature, but in practice probably the most weightless, least convincing image in any Eggers film). And the vampire’s journey west, from benighted isolation to urban civilization, the journey that drives the action of the story, becomes not an invasion but simply a return. It has already happened, and Ellen is doomed from the start.

The evil this Nosferatu presents is soothingly old and distant—something that comes from without, from as far away as possible. But it has also become inevitable, a process that began long ago and has long since been decided. This is something Eggers’s film shares with many much more newfangled horror movies—with Smile, with Longlegs, with Hereditary. Our own decisions barely matter: we submit to fate, or fate takes us anyway. In Murnau’s version Ellen’s final sacrifice is a personal choice, a heroic act of love for Thomas. Here it is the completion of a ritual. Her loved ones may mourn, but it had nothing to do with them. The deeper horror would be if it did—if they could have saved her, but failed; if their choices brought her to this.

Wolf Man, too, introduces a soothing inevitability wherever possible. Blake has fled his upbringing, chosen an urban, intellectual life, suppressed all anger, molded himself into the precise opposite of his father—yet he finds himself back home, turning into his father, the anger thrashing to get out. Or perhaps to get in: crucial to this fantasy is the idea that his transformation is externally caused, the result of a curse or a disease, not something he wants, or is.

The film repeatedly tiptoes up to the truly horrible and slams the door on it. When a mother tells her daughter that Grandpa was “sick like Daddy,” we don’t want her to mean any of the things that line could obviously mean—we want her to mean that he, too, grew claws and fur and started growling. And when Daddy wants to die, we want it to be because he—visibly, undeniably, regretfully—has no other option to protect his family. Just like when a young wife starts screaming curses at her husband and his friends, we want it to be because some mustachioed corpse got into her head, before she even met them; and in any case, it all happened long ago, across the sea.

These kinds of horror film don’t have subtexts that slowly reveal themselves, but blatant texts that they carefully submerge. They turn in the direction of our fears—what it feels like when a loved one changes, chooses something horrible, becomes, seemingly, a completely different person, or reveals themselves as one—and close their eyes. They are, in a sense, a way of not thinking about things.

If so, we seem to have a lot not to think about these days. Horror films have become a bigger and bigger part of the American cinema in recent years: they accounted for under 3 percent of all movie tickets sold in North America in 2014, and were up to just under 10 percent in 2024. (So far this year it’s over 12 percent, thanks largely to Nosferatu.) Hundreds more horror films are being made per year than were a decade ago. More and more filmmakers are starting out in the genre—from Eggers and Whannell to Ti West, Ari Aster, Jane Schoenbrun, Oz Perkins, and many others. Many of the major independent studios—A24, Neon, and of course Blumhouse—are based around horror. They have become to independent film what superheroes are to the blockbuster.

Siegfried Kracauer titled the chapter of From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) in which he discussed Murnau’s Nosferatu “Procession of Tyrants.” In the early 1920s, he wrote, the German public “nursed no illusions about the possible consequences of tyranny; on the contrary, they indulged in detailing its crimes and the sufferings it inflicted.” They returned over and over to “a blood-thirsty, blood-sucking tyrant figure…as if under the compulsion of hate-love.” In its ending, in which Ellen defeated the vampire with the power of love and submission, Kracauer found one of many examples of the “implication that inner metamorphosis counts more than any transformation of the outer world—an implication justifying the aversion of the middle class to social and political changes.” 

That aversion has now been replaced by something more like lethargic fatalism. For these films the conflict is over—was over long ago, in fact. They are a gesture not of denial but of self-soothing, abstention. Change is coming, and it won’t be good, but there’s nothing we can do about it; it’s not worth trying, and it’s no one’s fault. 

There are, of course, new monsters all around us, but the old ones refuse to make way. With them no defeat is final. Nosferatu and Wolf Man are just the start. Later this year will bring a Frankenstein by Guillermo del Toro, which he is describing as the first truly faithful adaptation of the book, and Radu Jude’s mysterious Dracula Park, about which little is known beyond its tagline, “Make Dracula Great Again.”