A few days ago, I was watching the 2024 Robert Eggers directed remake of the
classic 1922 silent film Nosferatu. While I have heard mixed opinions on this movie, I believe it to be excellent, and an exciting start to films in 2025. It presented a more classic style of vampire but with a modern coat of paint; trading in the sexy, young and “morally grey” vampires of Twilight and True Blood in favour of something older, satanic and pure evil. It made me curious to check out the original 1922 short film, which follows the same plot line as this newer movie.
Yet, whilst the same story, the 1922 Nosferatu leaves a lot to be desired to a modern audience. Most obviously, it is silent, with dialogue appearing in separate title cards between shots. Aside from these technical limitations, the film can feel quite… silly. Undoubtedly horrific for its time, loaded with occult references and the surreal and jarring imagery of the German Expressionist period, it is a film that is also packed with the exaggerated, goofy expressions of its main actors (common in films of the silent era) and a main villain who looks more like a Halloween costume than a real vampire. It could be that most of the story’s horror was spoiled for me, considering that my first encounter with the Nosferatu of the 1920’s was through a classic episode of Spongebob.
This got me thinking: outside of film school classrooms, does the Nosferatu have any value to a general audience? With the remake out, why return to this slower, arguably less scary, more obtuse original that, outside its score, doesn’t even have sound? A friend of mine who saw a screening of it quite recently described it as being a film that is “good for its time”; something that needed to be made to push the medium, but nowadays doesn’t offer much to the average moviegoer.
I would argue, however, that no film can truly replace another. Has 1920’s Nosferatu lost some of its impact? Yes. But in place of this impact, it carries this… charm that I just can’t put into words. You can see the cracks in the illusion, but you can also feel the sheer effort. It’s in the way the film utilises such basic techniques to create its effects; like how primitive stop motion is used for Count Orlock sealing his coffin with telepathy. Or how the film’s “werewolf” is really a striped hyena the film makers have captured footage of strolling in the hills. Perhaps this is the feeling that a modern big budget movie can’t really recreate. You can feel the limitations put on the film makers that give the whole production a kind of “community theatre” vibe, one I think a casual viewer could appreciate with the right perspective. In this case, therefore, a film worth retelling but also worth preserving.