Nosferatu (2024)

Come To Me, My Melancholic Baby

or

"He's Italian!?"

Robert Eggers' new remake of F.W. Murnau's classic 1922 silent horror film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, is respectful of the original—it's on the director's list of favorite films—but allows for Eggers' darker interpretations of myths, his sexualization of those myths, as well as his emphasis (as with David Lynch) on texture. 

 

Murnau's original (if we can use the phrase ironically) was a knock-off of Bram Stoker's "Dracula", the names changed to protect the filmmakers from copyright considerations—although they were sued by the Stoker estate—and is genuinely creepy, owing to the German Expressionist manner of lighting and filming. Plus, Murnau was an extraordinarily clever filmmaker who could use rudimentary special and camera effects to create arresting images. But, then, so is Eggers, and his version of Nosferatu* is respectful, but also tries to achieve Murnau's evocation of dread through its own means, given the advantages of modern cinematography and (something Murnau didn't have access to) sound. More on that in a bit.

Eggers also has an advantage in that he's had over a hundred years of cinema to be inspired by in the years between Murnau's version and his. Watching his Nosferatu one can see the debt he owes to Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (with its shadow-play and use of miniatures), but also in the addition of making the attraction between Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) a predestined certainty—Ellen has been diagnosed as "melancholic" for her sleep-walking and agitation in her youth and it only intensifies once her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) falls into the orbit of the Count. This "love for the ages" concept wasn't originally part of the "Nosferatu" heritage.

The other major influence is from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining. Eggers shares Kubrick's love of framing his shots with the one-point-perspective, but here he employs it the way it was done in the Stephen King adaptation—that one-point-perspective leads the eye to a negative space, which is why the effect is so creepy and audience-disorienting. Here, all those tangential lines may lead only to an empty spot on the horizon...or a castle in the distance. There are whole sequences that give you a vertiginous feeling, as if one could fall into that screen, pulled by gravity and it's not a pleasant experience. For a horror movie, it's ideal. Unnerving, but ideal.

And he does something else: his camera may be fluid, but it's also austere. He'll frequently do a 360° turn of the camera and do it slowly, determinedly, placing the audience in the perspective of the character watching his environment, dreading whatever might be at the edge of the frame. It's been awhile since I've seen either movie, so I can't remember if it was Murnau or Carl Theodore Dryer's Vampyr where the camera makes similarly slow circular movements that, rather than make you wonder why you're making the trip, fill you with dread. They're nice touches and are nice little updates to the story-telling.

And it's a familiar story—anyone familiar with Stoker's "Dracula" knows it. A solicitor is sent to the castle of a count to finalize the selling of an estate. The man is sent through the machinations of his boss who is under the throes of the Count's influence, as the man is, in fact, a vampire. He makes his way to the new estate and begins to set upon the citizens there, most prominently, the woman closest to that poor solicitor.

This leads to visits by doctors, who, being scientists, cannot explain the malady and so a specialist in the "unconventional" is called upon, and it is he who deduces that the plague in their midst is a vampire and must be dispatched. This being Nosferatu, the names are changed, but the situations are basically similar. "Dracula" takes place in England; Nosferatu takes place in Germany. All the arcana we associate with vampires is stripped to the bone—no silver bullets or crucifixes (much in display but ineffectual), not even a clove of garlic is to be seen. Those killed by vampires die and stay dead, and although a stake through the heart is effective to kill them (if one comes prepared), the surest way is to distract him with a nice virginal meal until the sun comes up and...that vampire's toast.

The acting is quite good, with particular nods to the three leads, Hoult, Depp and Skarsgård. Hoult has the unenviable task of having to act like he has no idea what the audience is fully expecting to happen, but manages to make his Thomas Hutter still sympathetic when he makes the effort to complete his job even after all the signs tell him him should just turn around and go home. And Depp's performance is just plain scary. Her fits look truly traumatic with her eyes rolling back in her head and her body contorting and spasming into Exorcist-like exercises.

And Skarsgård's Count Orlok has been carefully distanced from Max Schreck's rat-like vampire. Described as "very old and very eccentric...he has one foot in the grave already" Orlok is a hulking figure, stooped and wrapped in a dark bear-like coat with a coarse, brushy mustache. He is barely visible in his first scenes, just a overpowering presence, but the more you see, the more he resembles a rotting corpse, his skin flayed off in places and as far afield from any semblance to a romantic figure (ala 1979's Dracula) as you could get.

But, it's his vocal performance more than anything that's fascinating. Speaking in a low, rattly and sepulchral growl (augmented electronically so it fills every speaker in the theater) every syllable is e-nun-ci-ated slowly only to be broken off by the driest asthmatic breath-intake you can imagine this side of an iron lung. If the theater allows such things, I would take a big bag of cough-drops or lozenges. Super-size the soft-drinks.

Face it, it's those new approaches to things are what you're looking to see the movie for, because the story has been done to death...and after...and has more lives than Christopher Lee's Dracula. Just when you think you can't squeeze any more blood out of the thing,** it comes back to haunt you. So, just remember: you're the one who invites him back.

 

In the meantime, Eggers' version will do...and do quite well...until the next vampire movie rises from the grave.

* His version? There have been other versions of Nosferatu—aside from the official remakes of the Dracula novel—including one that was released just a year ago. There's also Werner Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre and also 2000's Shadow of the Vampire, which told a tale of the making of the original with John Malkovich as Murnau and Willem Dafoe (who's also in Eggers' film) as Nosferatu player Max Schreck. Plus, little nods to the original can be found in vampire designs of the 1979 TV-version of "Salem's Lot" and in Taika Waititi's original What We Do in the Shadows.

 

** Geez, I didn't even mention the ghastly sucking sounds he makes when he's feeding on his victims.... 

It: Chapter Two

(Insert Witty Verb) It
or
Pennywise and Poundfoolish

Well, you can tell Halloween season is approaching because the movie-theaters are starting to get an infusion of horror movies in anticipation. I'm not a fan of the genre (although I do my time in the dungeon during the month of October), but lately, things have been mighty thin in the "Coming Soon" department, so there's no way I can avoid it. It's Horror or Nothing.

It: Chapter Two would have been seen, anyway, although I hadn't seen the "First Chapter" in the theaters. Frankly, I wasn't interested. I'd been a devotee of Stephen King's writing in his first couple decades, then around about the time of "Needful Things" and "It", I stopped reading him, mostly because I would have had to do daily bicep curls in order to read them—"It" clocks in at some 1400 pages, and if I wanted to read something encyclopedic, I'd've read the encyclopedia.*

There'd been a TV mini-series here in the States, and I turned it off after 30 minutes. Because..."clowns." My favorite books of his are still "The Dead Zone" and his novella collection "Different Seasons."

But, I did catch Andy Muschietti's Chapter One the other night on cable, and was pleasantly surprised by what I saw. Screenwriters Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga (he's directing the new Bond film even as we write this) and Gary Dauberman scraped away some of the fat and sillier gristle from the book and hacked away at King's flashback structure to present the "kid version" of the "Derry Disappearances" story and made it a tough little diamond. Then Muschetti, who's Argentinian, did some remarkable casting for the kids (with an eye to who would play them as adults) and had the truly inspirational idea of putting Bill Skarsgård in the make-up as "Pennywise" the clown, in a performance that isn't camp but devious and manic and truly creepy. 

Chapter One is a good, scary movie because it concentrates on the worrisome fears that takes the innocence out of childhood and starts us on the straight path to neurosis rather than adulthood. The best part of the movie isn't the horror bits, it's the kid-bits, and the way that like-minded "Losers" can bond over the little tragedies that may mean nothing to adults (and more often than not be caused by them), but can make a kid question whether the sun should come up in the morning. Skarsgård is great and all, but one wanted to spend more time with the "Losers" because they were funny, squabbley, human...and loyal. Led by Jaeden Martell of Midnight Special and The Book of Henry, Jack Dylan Grazer from Shazam!, Finn Wolfhard, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Chosen Jacobs, Wyatt Oleff, and the remarkable Sophia Lillis.

"Here we are again in our old familiar places..."

It: Chapter One ended with serial child-kidnapper Pennywise the Clown dispatched, but with the suspicion that he would return again in 27 years, and "The Losers" promising that if he should appear again that they would have each other's back to take the "thing" down again. 

Now, in Chapter Two, it is 27 years later and the only one left in town is the one kid who couldn't fit in anywhere except for the Losers, Mike Hanlon (now played by Isaiah Mustafa, the guy who's hilarious in those "Old Spice" commercials). He lives in the library loft, working with dusty books in a town with internet, cell-phones, kindles and no library patronage. But, when he hears over the police scanner that another kid has gone missing after an already mysterious disappearance following a vicious homophobic attack at the town carnival, Mike puts out an APB for the Losers to "Come Home."

This is met with a universal reluctance by all the grown-up Losers: "Stuttering Bill" Denbrough (James McAvoy) is a horror writer (meta alert) who has a problem writing endings (real-life irony alert)—and he is told this by just about everybody including the cameoing Stephen King (HUGE real-life irony alert) and the director of his latest movie project, Peter Bogdanovich ("You said you loved the ending" "I lied."); Eddie Kaspbrack (James Ransome) has turned his hypochondriacal tendencies into a career in risk-management; irritatingly vocal Richie Tozier (Bill Hader, bless him) has become a stand-up comic; Beverly Marsh (Jessica Chastain) is a fashion designer who escaped her abusive father to marry an abusive husband—you can grow up but not grow out; and Ben Hascomb (Jay Ryan), the chubby "New Kid" with a crush on Bev has become a hunky architect ("shipper" alert). 

The one member of "The Losers" who opts out is Stanley Uris (Andy Bean) , who chooses suicide rather than confront the potentially deadly threat. Everybody else goes back to Derry at Mike's call and meet at a Chinese restaurant. Most of them have put those days out of their minds, but the memories—good and bad—come flooding back, challenging their wills to turn back and run away.

But, Pennywise starts to clown around and go on a psychological attacks against the Losers, they start to harden their resolve and decide to follow Mike's plan to employ a Native American ceremony to weaken and take out Pennywise, whose origins (in King's tortured explanation—I won't bother to relate it, as it's tough to type when you're rolling your eyes) have more to do with the stars than with themselves.

I prefer Chapter One to Chapter Two, probably because the first movie does the better job of avoiding the dumbest aspects of King's novel, which tries to provide a rational—relatively—explanation for what Pennywise is and why he does what he does. Frankly, King was just working too hard to bring some validity to his concept, when his readers are just happy to know there's a killer clown feeding on fear. We don't need an in-depth rationalization for why the car in "Christine" is haunted, when the audience already buys into the conceit of the supernatural and things that giggle in the night.

So, the movie follows each Loser as they track down the talismans from the days of the Derry disappearances 27 years ago: the paper boat from Billy's little brother Georgie, the postcard given to Bev by Ben (although she thinks it's from Bill), Ben's yearbook page that Bev signed when he was still "the New Kid" in Derry, the asthma inhaler from Eddie, a video game token from Richie—why these things are important to Pennywise's demise is a mystery, although, dramatically, they represent a Bonfire of Childhood Vanities. Certainly it's better than the rite of passage that King wrote of, first, in his book (and the filmmakers—wisely—left out, maybe because it's just too creepy and also potentially gut-busting). They may be important to the development of the kids turned adults, but what has that to do with Pennywise?

Was it really necessary to draw it out like this? The movie clocks in at 2 hours 45 minutes and feels bloated because of it. There are lots and lots of good "bits" scattered throughout it (or It: Chapter Two) and the performances by the cast—young and old—keep the movie interesting (Bill Hader is particularly effective both comedically and dramatically). But once the battle is taken underground to Pennywise, the movie starts to get frustratingly fussy and pretentiously woo-woo. It's not even very good action—I refrained from effecting a Monty Python accent and yelling at the screen: "Run away! Run away!" as I have less of a fear of clowns and red balloons than I do of flying buttered popcorn.

But, up until that time Muschietti does deliver on the shocks, usually by doing a standard "sting-in-the-tail" fake-out: as the person on-screen is confronted by a barrier to another room, ominous music begins to ramp up and climaxes just before the door is opened/the curtain is torn aside and they are confronted by...nothing. A moment of doubt. A moment of confusion. A moment of searching. A moment of relief. Then, they turn around and are confronted by something horrible that has been behind them the whole time. It happens enough that you learn to delay getting a firm grip on your soda by about 4 to 5 seconds. And that, friends, is a cardinal sin in a horror movie.

Still, for fans of the first movie and for fans of Stephen King, the second chapter won't disappoint—as so many King adaptations seem to do. The secret seems to be to take the main ideas of his books and burn them down to the core elements and concepts and leave his details out, because what works in his word-processor (and sent into our fearful little alligator brains) doesn't always work when projected to the screen. It takes a clever manipulator and story-teller to translate the story visually and provide the same thrills the written word does. (isn't that what all adaptations should do?). If not, then the time and money and effort are just wasted.

Muschietti, is less at fault if his Chapter Two doesn't live up to his Chapter One—he does a good job of creeping you out and clowning around, and one looks forward to what he does in the future in whatever genre he decides to pursue next.

* I haven't completely sworn him off, though: I did read his time travel novel "11/22/63," which, although a slog, was a worthwhile slog. But, I just returned his sequel to "The Shining," "Dr. Sleep," to the library (there's a movie coming out) after trying several time to "crack" it, (and developing some bursitis in my elbow) but finally giving up on it.