HHere is Robert Eggers’ declared passion project as writer and director: a luxury arthouse remake on a grand scale, an homage to FW Murnau’s classic 1922 silent film, the German expressionist nightmare of Count Orlok or Nosferatu, the “evil one”. a pale vampire who lives in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains. Eggers’ film can’t quite bear to say the comedic word “Transylvania” out loud, even though we can see it on a map. It’s an interesting new Nosferatu for our age of pandemic anxiety, with some beautiful imagery and striking moments, particularly in the eerie moonlight hallucination sequence at the beginning, which makes the rest of the story seem somewhat literal and self-conscious.

German stage actor Max Schreck was the vampire in the 1922 version and Klaus Kinski appeared in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. Now it’s Bill Skarsgård (best known for playing Stephen King’s creepy clown Pennywise) who remains in the penumbra for much of the film. He is undead but intimidatingly athletic, like an animated corpse, torn in every way. He’s not hairless in the traditional Orlok style, has a bushy mustache, and speaks in a booming native language with borderline ridiculous subtitles. It’s the early 19th century, and the Count, with the help of a sycophantic secret acolyte, plans to buy property in the fictional German port town of Wisborg to bring his ancient evil to the heart of enlightened Europe. Orlok tricks an innocent, healthy young real estate agent into making the perilous journey to his castle to personally oversee the signing of the document, but he plans to seal his imperial expansion with the ecstatically obscene blood conquest of the man’s demure young bride whom he has received a telepathic passion; she sees him in her dreams.

The Murnau film was famously adapted without permission from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, with the names changed to avoid lawsuits. But most of the plot points remained intact, including the vampire’s sea voyage, which made sense as Dracula traveled to Yorkshire but is more puzzling as Orlok travels from Romania to Germany. Eggers keeps it here, with plague rats. Nicholas Hoult plays fresh real estate agent Thomas Hutter. Lily-Rose Depp is his wife Ellen, haunted by her sleepwalking and nameless sexual longings. Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play the couple’s friends, the Hardings. Ralph Ineson is the local doctor Dr. Sievers. And Simon McBurney is Thomas’ creepy employer, Mr. Knock.

Most importantly, Willem Dafoe plays occult expert and vampire hunter Professor Von Franz, a heterodox outsider and free thinker who is the only one they can rely on; He is the equivalent of Stoker’s Van Helsing and the great ancestor of Father Merrin in Friedkin’s The Exorcist. (Dafoe actually played Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire, E Elias Merhige’s 2000 film about the making of Nosferatu.)

Any adaptation of Nosferatu must decide on what can only be called the Mel Brooks question: How far should one indulge in black comic horror and absurdity? Herzog did it in passing, and Eggers certainly does it too, giving Dafoe’s professor a bizarrely long pipe to smoke (perhaps the equivalent of Klaus Kinski’s disturbingly tall wine glass in Herzog’s Nosferatu). And Dafoe’s occasional way of suddenly appearing at the edge of the frame is a little reminiscent of Marty Feldman, although Brooks never wrote anything like the line that Eggers gives to the local innkeeper, screaming at the unruly locals: “May the Spirit of God be.” Fuck off!” The macabre comedy mimics an uncomfortable giggle of fear, avoiding possible ridicule or skepticism and keeping the dust of horror dry. More serious is the assumption that Professor von Franz’s settings are more complicated than we thought.

The film is well produced and filmed, with good performances, although for me Skarsgård’s vampire is opaque and off-puttingly cruel without necessarily being as scary as one might expect. Murnau’s creation took the vampire into a more fairytale realm of a demon or monster and away from the novelistic tradition of being a sympathetic, patrician, believable human person. Stoker’s Count Dracula was a distant cousin of literary figures such as Mr. Rochester and Maxim de Winter. Orlok is more abstract and brutal, and needs to be from the start, but I feel that Eggers’ vampire is more stylized and rehearsed, but less insidiously frightening than he needs to be, and that you feel his weakness – his passion – less for Depp’s Ellen – becomes dangerous to him. Whatever psychological intricacies there are are carried over to the Freudian ordeal of Ellen, who is attracted to and disgusted by the vampire, but recognizes how these competing instincts must be reconciled. This is an extensive, detailed love letter to the original, intelligent, respectful and faithful.