TALES OF LOHR: ROBERT EGGERS' "NOSFERATU"

A new-ish take on a horror masterpiece

The initial announcement of a remake of the 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu, as imagined by contemporary genre auteur Robert Eggers, was one that filled me with a range of profoundly mixed emotions. In the last decade, Eggers has emerged as one of our most compelling filmmakers, melding a near-Kubrickian technical command with a passion for historical settings and subject matter that hews, in ways both challenging and exciting, to much of the dramatic and ideological thinking of the eras in which his films take place. His 2016-released feature directorial debut, The Witch: A New-England Folktale, is one of the few films of the last ten years about which I would not hesitate to use the word “masterpiece.” (The film won Eggers the Best Director prize at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival.) His monochromatic salt-spattered shaggy-dog nightmare The Lighthouse was my favorite film of 2019, and while I was less passionate about his third feature, 2022’s rough-edged Scandinavian bloodbath The Northman, I still was swept along by the film’s physical production and bracingly antique perceptions of heroism. So, when it was announced that Eggers would be turning his talents to one of the most famous of all supernatural horror films, I should have been among those most tantalized by the prospect.