Fans of horror and the supernatural will have much to celebrate on Christmas Day when Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu” premieres in cinemas. This fourth film in Eggers’ career is the most indebted of his work to previous properties. In it, an obsession between a young woman (Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter) and an ancient Transylvanian vampire (Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok) is exacerbated in early 19th century Germany. Eggers’ film is a remake of F W Murnau’s 1922 silent German expressionist vampire film which was famously produced as an unauthorised and unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” novel from 1897. Werner Herzog would remake the film in 1979, this time with the character names faithful to the original novel, but in the century since Murnau’s film, the tale of Count Dracula has endured in many forms. It’s the kind of awareness that makes Eggers’ commitment to developing this project, since the mid-2010s, so intriguing.
The darkness is inevitable in ‘Nosferatu’
