Horror movies

In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, the dark shadow of a long-fingered hand looms over the fictional German port town of Wisborg. It is a chilling, striking shot: an aerial view of twinkling, snow-dusted houses, the ugly threat of a monster’s grasping hand gliding overhead.

Conjuring atmosphere is something that Eggers, the American horror director behind The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman, is especially good at. His reimagining of the 1922 German silent film by FW Murnau, itself a barely disguised (and distinctly unauthorised) reimagining of Bram Stoker’s 19th century gothic novel Dracula, isn’t scary exactly: even its moments of gore and grossness are studied and artful. But it is spooky.

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Yet for all its sexual tension, the film ends up feeling oddly cold. The baroque displays of passion and extravagant flowing blood usually associated with vampire movies are deployed sparingly. Unlike in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Dracula (which is, for better or worse, the one imprinted on this critic’s mind), both necrophilia and the devouring of children are tastefully implied. In that film, the love story at its heart felt real and moving, in spite of its gleefully over-the-top trappings. In Nosferatu, Eggers leans away from, rather than into, anything that might be considered playful, but the deadly serious tone can have the opposite effect.