Nosferatu (2024)

I am an appetite, nothing more.

I watched Robert Eggers' "Nosferatu." Would you mind doing me a favor? It won't take too terribly long. I really want you to think about what Dracula would be like. Indulge me. I don't mean Bella Lugosi, or Count Chocula, or Sesame Street's The Count. Not the tamed, sad, misunderstood versions of him we keep around. No rubber bats or "I vant to suck your blood." I mean the unholy monster that existed before cliches swallowed him up. The predator itself. Dracula. The unspeakable thing that Stoker hints at in the book, but cannot stare at directly. The last thought of death we cannot sweep away. Eggers got him right.

"Nosferatu" is ostensibly a recreation of the 1922 silent film, the template for all horror movies. Back then, the Germans couldn't get the copyright to adopt Dracula, so they called him Count Orlok and gave him bat ears. But Eggers' film is something more than a remake.

Think of how hard it is to create the feeling that audiences had when they read Stoker's book or saw the Count for the first time. Imagine what those tough people thought and felt about him before a century of mass media domesticated him, made us believe we knew him. Eggers and Bill Skarsgård have recreated, for a cynical modern audience, how Dracula must've felt. Watching him, you start to understand what sunset meant in the old days, before electric light vetoed the night

There are a few jump scares here, but this is a higher kind of horror. It is fear based on understanding, not on glandular reaction. Eggers is a master of dread, and every shot ratchets the creepiness up. I’m convinced he must make "Blood Meridian" very soon.

But my thoughts return to the Count. There's no sympathy for the devil here. Skarsgård plays him right: a cruel, depraved, abhorrent piece of shit. An obscenity. Harvey Weinstein in a rotting immortal husk. He looks right, too: he moves, he speaks, like a dead Romanian warlord. You can watch him decay in real time.

May I tell you what I think the dread Count represents? Probably everyone reading this is descended from peasants. I am, you are. Dracula is not. He represents power which endures through blood. He is *the* aristocrat. He rules by birth blood, and he endures through stolen blood, a feudalism that will literally not die. He is a perfect embodiment of what the oligarchy was and is: monsters who feed but do not work. The old world's claws are still sharp and its heart is stone; the Count comes from the timeless time that our clocks will not measure. He dies at the end of the book. He dies at the end of the movie. But here's the real question: will he ever die here?