Nosferatu (2024)

Ironically, Robert Eggers’s version of Nosferatu takes even more elements from Bram Stoker’s Dracula than did Murnau’s delightful original example of spirited copyright infringement. In quite the move, it appears to do so via Coppola’s version of Dracula, with which it shares the erotic intensity/fixation, the emphasis on artificiality, the love for loopy accents, and the willingness to stick to an aesthetic even if this will cost you half of your potential audience, because it’s simply the right one to use for the material, damn it.

Despite this, Nosferatu 24 stands in direct dialogue with Murnau’s film. It may use very different aesthetic methods yet it achieves the same atmosphere of dreams turned haunting/haunted, while dragging to the surface certain things Murnau couldn’t quite articulate (or intertitle) concerning Ellen’s sexuality, or really, sexuality as a whole. There are yawning abysses of subtext here, and I look forward to a the next few decades of film academics coming up with ever weirder interpretations, particularly now that David Lynch has decamped.

The concept of virginity and clear-cut sinlessness saving anything or anyone is right out in this century, obviously. Instead, Eggers goes for a much more complex reading of guilt, and lust, and self-sacrifice that feels more dramatic as well as more true to the inner life of actual people. Zulawski’s Possession is an obvious touchstone here, and not only because Lily-Rose Depp’s approach to the role of Ellen Hutter seems possessed (mere inspiration isn’t enough for this film) by the spirit and hair of Isabelle Adjani from that film.

Despite its more truthful psychology, this, as the Zulawski movie – and certainly all versions of Dracula important to this Nosferatu -really isn’t interested in “normal” human psychology expressed via the often empty gestures of psychological realism at all. Every expression and emotion here is gigantic, Gothic in a sense that would make Byron and Poe nod approvingly (just don’t look at what they’re doing with their hands), creating the/a truth of life through being larger than life. As much as this is the most Gothic of horror movies, it is also a very folkloric reading of vampire mythology, not in the “folk horror” sense, but in how it treats the supernatural and its rules not as some kind of weird science, but as something truly inexplicable in its nature and its ways of being.

Visually, this is a feast of the Gothic and the macabre, full of shots that feel as if they came from half-remembered dreams that will now be very hard to ever forget again. At the same time, parts of the movie look and feel as if they were taking place in the same physical spaces as did Murnau’s original, or as physical as the also always metaphysical and occult spaces of this film can be. This never feels like Eggers wasting energy on ironic nods, quotations or movie nerd self indulgences, however, more like an evocation of the actual physical presence of Murnau’s original, if that makes any sense. Clearly, to me, this is the kind of film that invites a drift into the fanciful and the mystical, but then, this a film that left me breathless watching it for its sheer power. There are shots, whole scenes, in here my typically very forgetful self will never lose now until dementia takes me – something this shares with the original, fittingly.

Which is appropriate for a film that’s so suffused with various characters’ obsessions, all too often with Ellen as their centre, the fulcrum who eventually ends most of these obsessions by an act of self-sacrifice that’s not so much tragic than it is an act of the kind of self-actualization that also ends the self.

On a less high-falutin’ note, I find it pretty damn difficult to watch Willem Dafoe’s version of not-Van Helsing here, and not imagine him sticking a good-natured middle-finger in the face of Sir Anthony Hopkins, CBE.

In short: Renfield (2023)

Renfield (Nicholas Hoult), has been Dracula’s (Nicolas Cage) slave for many decades now as the submissive part in a pretty messed-up co-dependent abusive relationship. Well, at least he gets superpowers from eating insects, now, so I wouldn’t say Dracula never did anything for him.

Our protagonist is struggling badly with the horrors of Dracula, however, the guilt that comes with his complicity in many an outrageously bloody deed. By now, he’s at least an observing participant in a self help group for people with the less supernatural version of his relationship troubles, and feeds his peers’ abusers to his vampiric masters. In a couple of decades, Renfield might even have started on getting away from Dracula, but the vagaries of an increasingly idiotic plot drag him there rather earlier.

What’s good about Chris McKay’s Renfield is easily summed up in the words “Nicolas Cage”. His performance as this movie’s Dracula is incredible, channelling an amped up, combined version of earlier portrayals (most obviously those by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee) into the vampire as an embodiment not of some romantic bullshit, or animal magnetism, but of masculinity at its worst. There’s a sense not of actual intelligence about this version of Dracula, but some kind of violent cleverness, something so human it feels deeply inhuman even before we get to the evil vampire powers and the teeth.

Alas, this performance and the very sound and interesting basic idea are completely wasted in a movie that really rather would like to be some godawful noisy action comedy with random bouts of gore. Everything that could be thoughtful and clever is buried under reams of bad and obvious jokes and mediocre action sequences that are not improved a wit by being obnoxiously loud.

It’s just a waste, as is Awkwafina’s walking, talking plot device of a character or the usually dependable Nicholas Hoult who just looks bored and confused most of the time.

Three Films Make A Post: In a world of temptation, obsession is the deadliest desire.

Warm Bodies (2013): I suspect Shaun of the Dead will always be the best romantic comedy with zombies, so it is outright decent of Jonathan Levine’s teen romantic comedy with zombies (or rather the book it is based on) to not at all try and compete with that classic but rather to do its own thing. It’s a generally inventive, usually funny and often cute film, with a likeable romantic couple in Teresa Palmer (alive) and Nicholas Hoult (dead). It is a pretty enjoyable movie, but it’s not really made with the horror fan at heart, so if you can’t help yourself, you might be turned off by the only very mild gore, the too pat and friendly ending and the film’s general niceness.

Twisted Nightmare (1987): Being too nice is probably nothing anyone will blame Paul Hunt’s slasher for. It’s the usual thing about a bunch of attractive young things gathering in a cabin in the woods and getting struck down. Atypical for slashers of the time (and of today, really) the film features three(!) victims that aren’t white. That’s of course not terribly important in the long run, because everyone’s meat for the usual ritualistic killings anyway. These are decent but not spectacular but do run through the whole of the film instead of the last twenty minutes, which is not something all cheap-o slashers have to offer. The script even contains one or two ideas that make it possible for it to have more than one “finding the bodies” sequence and plays around with who its final girl may or may not be. There’s also a potential supernatural angle involved, lots of nudity, and the whole she-bang was apparently shot on the same set as the third Friday the 13th (though that film is certainly better shot and directed).

That’s certainly not the worst you can get out of a late 80s slasher.

Secret Window (2004): David Koepp’s Stephen King adaptation is certainly one of the decent ones, mostly living off the – sometimes rather more showy than the director knows what to do with – central performance by Johnny Depp and the sort of slick look money can buy a production even when it otherwise lacks much of an aesthetic identity of its own. It’s not terribly deep either, never quite digging into the meat of the novella (one of King’s best as far as I’m concerned) it is based on, or displaying anything but a Hollywood screenwriter’s idea of human psychology, but is coasting on Koepp’s – again very slick – rather emotionally distanced conventional thriller stylings. Curiously enough, the film goes for a darker ending than that of the not exactly chipper novella, yet still has a lesser impact than the story did, perhaps because Koepp misses out on fleshing out the other characters (as played by an underused Maria Bello and Timothy Hutton) enough to convince me the film actually cares about what happens to them.


It certainly is still a well-made, entertaining film but I never felt myself getting emotionally involved.

In short: Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)

Unless he’s going the “Superman is Jesus” route, you can usually trust in Bryan Singer to turn out a good to great bit of mainstream Hollywood blockbuster filmmaking. Personally, I hold him responsible for the fact that most of Fox’s X-Men films are actually worth watching, and actually seem to get what the better parts of the comics are thematically about.

Jack isn’t really up there with Days of Future Past, though. It’s still a fun bit of spectacle, with quite a few mildly rousing scenes of anti-giant violence, a usually fun to watch cast and assured pacing. This isn’t one of those big loud Hollywood movies that take their dear time actually starting (I’m looking at you, Suicide Squad’s never ending character introductions), either. Singer knows the hoary adventure chestnut he wants to tell, he knows which elements he needs to tell it, and he’s not going to bore his audience with stuff that doesn’t belong in it.

Still, there are some puzzling directorial choices here: why is the short exposition in form of a fairy tale shown as a bit of ass-ugly digital animation that looks as if they’d hired a handful of interns to cook something up in a weekend? Why does semi-fairy tale Olde Englande seem to be more inspired by Monty Python than fairy tales (or old England, for that matter)? What’s up with the curious tonal shifts between all ages fantasy adventure and moments of what surely must be conscious grittiness, seeing as they don’t have any thematic meaning? This certainly isn’t a film that’s trying to compare the idealistic ideas of adventure of its two young main characters with an uglier truth, nor one that’s trying to argue something about the power of the imagination trumping brutal reality, so I can see much reason for these tonal problems beyond them being the dreaded artefacts of earlier script versions that nobody bothered to get rid of. Also, why hire Stanley Tucci (whom I usually adore) of all people as a villain instead of someone who can do a proper Basil Rathbone by virtue of being British and not having to spend so much of his acting energy on his fake accent?

Again, this doesn’t mean Jack the Giant Slayer isn’t big loud fun. I certainly enjoyed my two hours with it, and am certainly not averse to watching it again in a couple of years. It’s just that Singer usually can do more working in the space Jack belongs to.