Saw the Nosferatu remake and it was. Bad. Like exceptionally bad. It is an hour longer than the original and yet we get less information about the characters, setting, and vampire lore. It's baffling that they achieved this. I can, however, see exactly why the script was greenlit. Studios love a cash grab like "what if we remade the original vampire movie but this time it was really a sex thing".
Points in the film's favor:
- The actors all strongly resemble the actors from the original with the exception of Count Orlok but I will get to that later and the costuming is beautiful.
- The sets and a number of whole scenes all resemble the original, as does most of the plot.
- The choice to have most of the nighttime scenes be in black and white was a nice touch.
- All of these are about how it relates to the 1922 film not because I was watching it intending to compare the two but because mimicking the aesthetics of the original aside from Count Orlock dear god is the only thing it did well.
- The film begins with a short scene of young Ellen gyrating on the ground and moaning while staring into the camera in a deeply uncomfortable way before abruptly cutting to the the start of the story. At least they were up-front about telling us that, yeah, we made the sex part literal.
- The acting is bad. The dialogue is bad. We know practically nothing about anyone at basically any point in the story. William Dafoe is the sole exception but he's just a side character.
- There is no sense of time, the pacing is atrocious, and there is no suspense at any point.
- But the suspense music does not stop. It's there to tell us that we are supposed to be Experiencing Suspense.
- This is because, in addition to bad pacing, they removed basically all the exposition and several scenes that help establish suspense and mystery like the ghouls and the vampire book.
- They did, however, add several scenes that are clearly just an excuse to see a boob. We only see a single boob at a time until the final scene, though, which I imagine they thought made it tasteful.
- One of those scenes is villagers bringing a naked girl on a horse to a grave and then stabbing the person buried in the grave, who appears to have been alive. Is there more than one vampire, then? If so, why are they only afraid of the castle? Why is she being presented like a sacrifice when they were just going to kill the guy?
- They waffle between trying to be period accurate and throwing in dialogue that does not fit the setting (like "why is Knock tied to a chair in the basement we are a modern facility" my guy it is 1838 we just talked about the humors tied to a chair is gentle)
- A significant part of the film is spent establishing that Ellen is under the sway of the vampire and has been since childhood, and that it's definitely a sex thing she kind of wants. This is not done well and she is, in fact, unconscious for the majority of the film, but it's at least clear that's what they were going for.
- Thomas meets Count Orlok and immediately becomes a terrified mess for the rest of the film. There is no buildup or even a clear reason, it just happens the second he arrives.
- When he wakes up with a feral-looking bite mark on his chest he immediately assumes it came from the count, the guy he is doing business with, and not one of the count's four enormous dogs. He has not read a book about vampires in this version. There is no basis for this.
- He finds out Orlok sleeps in a crypt because he's frantically trying to escape the castle but then spontaneously breaks a lock to go down into the basement and takes the lid off a coffin. Again, Thomas knows jack shit about vampires. There is no reason for him to do this.
- Orlok's goal from the beginning is to dissolve Ellen's marriage and live with her, I think? He makes Thomas sign some paperwork in a magic vampire language legally selling her to him? The question marks being because this is barely touched upon.
- Okay, so. Count Orlok. Where to start. Christ.
- Count Orlok is one of the most iconic horror characters of all time. It would be very easy to alter his design so it remains recognizable while also no longer antisemitic. You would expect that, in a film clearly trying to match the aesthetics of the original as closely as possible, they would do this.
- He has a thick bushy mustache.
- He is Buff and Large and not very pale and also not trying to hide the fact that he is visibly rotting.
- He speaks like someone doing a bad impression of Nandor.
- He is also dressed like Nandor.
- We do not, at any point, clearly see his fangs.
- We do, however, see his dick. Because he sleeps naked.
- He gyrates sexually while sucking blood out of people's chests.
- Did I mention they gave him a mustache.
- We see relatively little of him anyway. But most of the shots show his mustache more than the rest of his face. Or maybe I was just too distracted by it to see anything else. He has a mustache.
- William Dafoe's character (who is not in the original) is introduced when Ellen starts having magic seizures and then the plague happens and we spend a bunch of time playing Supernatural Medical Mystery Solvers. It's the only part of the film that feels somewhat cohesive and Dafoe is great which, ironically, creates a lot of dissonance between the scenes he's in and the rest of the film.
- The "plague" is not just vampire bites, though. It's also people randomly oozing and vomiting and, in one case, ripping off their own bodice so we see a boob. Why and how? Who knows. But there are lots of rats.
- Two of the four(?)(iirc) people we actually see Orlok kill are small children which is definitely A Choice given how explicit they've made it that Blood Sucking Is Sex. He's killing them to upset Ellen, by the way, who has received an ultimatum that she has three days to willingly fuck him or he'll kill the whole town.
- The climax (ha) of the film is, of course, the butt naked Count drinking Ellen's blood from her chest while they have sex. There is a lot of moaning involved. The long, slow pan-out shot from above his gross dissolving corpse body splayed over her recently-deceased but exceptionally perky breasts is at least reasonably artistic.
- Overall, significantly, devastatingly worse than if they'd just taken the general idea of the original and done something completely new with it. The 1922 film isn't great by modern standards but it has a lot of charm and historical value and the plot actually holds itself together. If you have never watched either and are interested, definitely make it the original.
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