A tale of three Nosferatu

I took the occasion of Robert Eggers' new film to watch three versions of Nosferatu in three days. I love the Murnau (I agree with Gilberto Perez that Dreyer's Vampyr "alone bears comparison" with it [The Material Ghost, p. 124], athough I am of the possibly heretical opinion that Vampyr is the greater of the two), but I'd managed somehow never to see Herzog's version before now.

Aside from the surprisingness of the fact that Murnau's film contains nothing at all about creating new vampires (something that Eggers, unlike Herzog, is faithful to; this seems to me one of the weaker aspects of the Herzog), one of the other very striking things about the Murnau is the suggestion that Orlok is somehow natural. The film is so much more interested in death than sex (more on this below), and death is the most natural thing in the world. This is what I take to be the import of the Van Helsing figure's lecture about venus flytraps and hydras: horror lies at the heart of nature rather than intruding from without. (Others have of course already noted this, including Simon Bacon.) Which makes it all the more surprising that Herzog did not explore this theme given his notorious fondness for it.

The thing that most struck me about the Herzog version (aside from the fact that it may have the best joke in all three versions, when the vampire apologises to Lucy for coming in uninvited) is the sense of the inexorability of Nosferatu's arrival that it generates, possibly even stronger than in Murnau's. Although the approach of the ship is more frightening in the earlier film, it is the very lack tension that gives the corresponding sequences their power in Herzog's version. What is a day or two, let alone an hour or two, to fate? Death is coming either way. (Nosferatu's pathos lies precisely in the parallel horror that for him, this is not true. To be a vampire with a death wish is a terrible thing. Let the Right One In and Only Lovers Left Alive are two of the most engaging explorations of the curse of vampiric immortality, but they don't emphasize abject pain in the way that Herzog does.) Thus I find Perez to be a little unfair to Herzog when he writes of the plague ship's arrival in the town that "[t]he brisk rhythm of Murnau's cutting builds up to the shot as an arresting point of confluence, whereas in Herzog the shot is preceded by a leisurely helicopter shot circling the ship at sea that generates little impetus or anticipation" (p. 429, n. 6). This seems to me precisely the point, and it is a distinct achievement of Herzog's film that it finds something else to express with this sequence and thus avoids a futile head-on confrontation with Murnau. (One other lovely detail from the Herzog, just after this moment, which is both funny and terrifying, is the little girl standing on the quay next to plague ship who sneezes.)

In Herzog's film science itself is a dusty superstition, personified in Walter Ladengast's Van Helsing. Eggers, on the other hand, throws in all the mundane occult nonsense that neither Murnau nor Herzog wanted anything to do with. The film is not without its pleasures - Willem Dafoe comes through unscathed through an impeccably judged level of conviction, and both Simon McBurney and Orlok's voice are entertainingly schlocky - but I remain puzzled as to the intended contribution of this film as another Nosferatu, rather than just another vampire movie. The routine jump scares and sometimes very unfortunate imagery (the naked woman on a horse is pure Dungeons and Dragons) don't indicate a film that has very much to say, and invoking another Murnau film (the shadow of Orlok's hand stretching over the town summoning the ghost of his Faust) didn't clarify anything for me. Given that the relative lack of interest in eroticism is such a large part of what distinguishes the two previous Nosferatus from what we think we all know about movie vampires, I couldn't see that reintroducing it achieved anything very much. (The obsessive retention of the names from Murnau's version just underlined how little the films have to do with each other.) It seems that female sexuality is excessive and uncontrolled, a source of fear - like a sex-negative Poor Things. Turning Nosferatu at points into The Exorcist, as Eggers does, might be calculated to appeal to Mark Kermode but left me cold.