Spoiler alert! We’re discussing plot details from the remake of “Nosferatu” (in theaters now). Stop reading if you haven’t seen it yet and don’t want to know.
For nearly as long as there have been horror movies, filmmakers have been telling the story of Dracula.
The latest iteration is Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” a remake of the 1922 silent movie that was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.”
Those expecting a radically different take might be surprised by how faithful Eggers’ film is to its source material. But the director turns the sexual undertones into overtones, fleshes out the side characters, and makes several significant changes to ensure his version has bite.
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The remake’s largest change is its reveal that young newlywed Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) awakened Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who returns years later like a jealous ex after she marries Thomas (Nicholas Hoult). In the 1922 version, there’s no indication that she’s responsible for summoning the count. Ellen is Orlok’s target in the classic film but doesn’t have any pre-existing, darkly romantic connection to him, nor does she have a backstory of past dreams and “spells.”
Like Ellen, Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and his wife Anna (Emma Corrin), the couple Ellen stays with while her husband is away, are further developed with meatier roles. In the original, Ellen stays with Harding and his sister − not his wife − but neither has much screen time. Harding wasn’t depicted as a hardheaded skeptic before, he didn’t get into an argument with Ellen, and Orlok didn’t kill his children. The devotion of Thomas’ boss Knock (Simon McBurney) to Orlok is also expanded upon, including with an added scene of him worshipping the count surrounded by candles.
Willem Dafoe’s vampire-hunting Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz, meanwhile, isn’t in the 1922 movie. The closest equivalent is Professor Bulwer, a character in the silent film who studies the secrets of nature but has almost no role in the story and only appears in a few brief scenes.
The broad outline of the plot is the same in both versions, but with many details adjusted. Thomas witnessing the exhuming of a corpse, for example, is new. The original has him leave his inn in the morning without finding it abandoned. When Thomas arrives at the castle, Orlok is drawn to a locket containing a piece of Ellen’s hair. Orlok was also drawn to a picture of Ellen in the original, but the hair is Eggers’ addition, and Orlok now uses it to talk to her. After Thomas finds Orlok in his coffin, Eggers’ version tries to kill him. Originally, he just ran away.
Another tweak with Orlok is that he bites victims in the chest, whereas in the original, it was always the neck. Eggers tells USA TODAY this was inspired by folklore, in which vampires often drank blood from the chest.
“For a story that is a gothic romance, a tale of obsession and love, there is something poetical about the motif of drinking from the heart,” he notes.
The two films both end with Ellen’s sacrifice, but the remake adds a simultaneous mission to defeat Orlok. No such mission happens in the original. The 1922 version’s climax is more focused on Knock escaping and being hunted by the townsfolk because he’s scapegoated for the plague. Knock’s escape is less of a focus in the remake, and he’s now killed inside a coffin. Knock dies in his cell after Orlok’s defeat in the original.
Eggers makes a meal out of creating suspense about what the count looks like, keeping him out of focus for long periods. That’s a new approach, as in 1922’s “Nosferatu,” Orlok is fully shown without much buildup.
When we finally see him, the new Orlok looks less like the tall, pointy-eared creature played by Max Schreck and more like a zombie, with his flesh visibly decayed. This goes back to Eggers’ idea of turning to folklore.
“Early folk vampires were walking putrid corpses,” the director explains. “So then the question becomes, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? It looks like that.”
Orlok’s clothes are meant to look like a decomposed version of “what a Hungarian or Romanian nobleman would’ve worn in the 1500s,” Skarsgård tells USA TODAY.
Most striking of all, Orlok now has a mustache, a departure from his original, clean-shaven look. Skarsgård says the hairstyle and facial hair were inspired by “actual paintings from that era.”
The original “Nosferatu” was essentially a “Dracula” adaptation, but since it wasn’t officially authorized, the characters’ names were changed. There were, and still are, a number of differences, namely the idea of the female protagonist defeating the count by sacrificing herself. Unlike Dracula, Orlok doesn’t turn people into vampires, and unlike Orlok, Dracula isn’t killed by sunlight.
Still, the plots of the two movies are remarkably similar. So it makes sense that Eggers’ “Nosferatu” draws on “Dracula,” such as with Orlok’s appearance. Like Skarsgård’s count, Dracula has a mustache in Stoker’s text.
While Dafoe’s character isn’t in 1922’s “Nosferatu,” he’s clearly a take on vampire hunter Van Helsing from “Dracula.” Both are recruited by a former student to help an ailing woman, relay key information about the vampire, and join a mission to kill him.
Additionally, Anna’s friendship with Ellen is reminiscent of the relationship between Mina − a woman whose fiancé goes on a trip to sell property to a vampire − and her friend Lucy in “Dracula,” and in both instances, this friend ultimately dies. In “Dracula,” though, she first becomes a vampire.
The scene in the remake where Knock bites off a bird’s head comes from the book, in which Dracula’s servant Renfield eats birds, and Orlok killing the Hardings’ children calls to mind the vampire version of Lucy attacking kids in the book. Finally, the new film’s finale centering on a mission to kill the count is a lot like the climax of “Dracula,” except in the book, that led up to the count being successfully murdered.
Like many great adaptations, then, Eggers’ version is a mishmash of inspirations coming together to create a bloody great concoction.
Contributing: Brian Truitt
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