Friday, January 17, 2025

Love is inferior to you


NOSFERATU

2024
Written and directed by Robert Eggers (based on the novel Dracula by Bram Stoker)

Spoilers: moderate, but it's also Nosferatu, which is also Dracula, so... you know


An acquaintance of mine described Robert Eggers recently (not, I believe, for the first time) as the most exciting American-born filmmaker now working, and I don't think that's too marginal an opinion; I'm resistant to the sentiment myself, for reasons that may not go deeper than contrarianism (I think my reasons rest more on a reluctance to anoint anybody "the most exciting" when by my lights they still haven't made a full-marks masterpiece yet), but I don't know whom I'd substitute in his place.*  And so Nosferatu is a tiny bit confusing to me: I'm fairly convinced it's the best time I've had watching any of Eggers's movies, which I suppose necessarily means I think it's the best of a quartet of films that includes The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, while also finding it to be the least challenging"most normal," even "most generic"and the least intellectually stimulating (though hardly intellectually unstimulating**), while also, for reasons announced aloud by the title, the least original.  But if that's a disappointment, it's by a measure that isn't my priority for evaluating movies anyway; the reason it is his best, after all, is that it's by some margin the most emotionally immediate and accessible film he's ever done.  (That it is, the public domain aside, an "IP" filma remake, a reboot, a reimaginationis, I'm afraid, probably the reason it's also been Eggers's best-performing film, too; even so, all that emotional immediacy and accessibility, and the consequent mixture of delight and disgust that audiences have demonstrated towards it, I'm sure has not hurt.)

"Disappointment" might be the wrong the word, in fact, for what it does overcome, happily, is my prejudice against it, since my feelings upon hearing about it over a year ago, up through buying my ticket and arriving at the theater yesterday, were that Eggers was wasting his time on a movie that would almost have to be superfluousanother vampire film, another adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula specifically, one that I assumed (an assumption confirmed before I saw it) would raise into text the vampire's half-rape, half-seduction sexuality, and that I assumed further would lean heavily upon old-fashioned, let's-call-it-neo-silent imagery and style, and hence in two separate ways redundant with Francis Ford Coppola's own splendid Bram Stoker's Dracula specifically, in addition to potentially being redundant with F.W. Murnau's 1922 unlicensed Dracula adaptation, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horroraltogether a project that would give Eggers permission to "do his thing" with horror-inflected period pieces that confronted you with the alien ethos of worlds not our own, but more lazily than his previous projects had allowed.  As a pleasant shock, I was about 98% wrong about this, and the only thing I was totally right about is that it really is a more well-worn kind of period piece, and, at least on an Eggers scale (if not on any other), a less fascinating one: it's more concerned with using its indulgence in curlicued Victorian language as a joke (a good joke!) than a device for resituating you in time, and while the "Nosferatu" elementit is, technically, based more on the 1922 film than Stoker's novel (it credits both)means that it's going to be set in the 1830s, the movie continues to feel like it's Stoker's Dracula, set in the 1890s.  As I was neither alive during those times, nor am I a scholar of either, I feel insecure making such a claim, but the effect is a little bit more of a secular, scientific society under secret assault by the subversive powers of the old centuries, rather than an Age of Reason only now reaching full ascendance against the irrational (for one big thing, Nosferatu '22 doesn't have a Van Helsing but Nosferatu '24 sure does).  Meanwhile, either offers something much closer to our present than The Witch or The Northman.

A miniscule and possibly imaginary problem, you'll agree (my others are slightly more substantial, but we'll get to them in due course); beyond that, it's remarkable how little it feels redundant with Bram Stoker's Dracula, or any other Dracula, doing one thing that I do think is genuinely new with the material, despite the fact that it does steal BSD's one huge, story-reorienting innovation (to give it a name, gross horny paranormal romance).  Meanwhile, many of my favorite scenes are Eggers almost explicitly zigging where Coppola zagged, not so much doing the opposite but the converse.  The most efficient way of describing it would be to say that Eggers is coming up with answers to the question of how to make his vampire horror just as otherworldly and terrifying as Coppola did back in 1992, but in the idiom Eggers has been honing over his last three pictures, exchanging Coppola's surrealism generated by supreme artifice for his own tangible physicality backed by natural light (and natural dark).  And then, to make sure he wasn't being outdone, Eggers added a little bit of artifice back in, to punch that horror up one more notch.

And before that, there's also a surprisingly robust dance number.

Eggers even provides a perfect scene-to-scene comparison: you will obligingly recall, since it's probably the thing BSD remains most famous for, its vampiric count casting impossible shadows as he invites Jonathan Harker to partake of his hospitality; and this film's vampiric count will, indeed, cast different impossible shadows, elsewhere, but in the one-to-one corresponding scenewhich begins with the count churlishly snarling "you're late," so on that point, it is "the opposite"instead of "impossible shadows," Eggers does not ever let the vampire come into focus, even as he delivers significant amounts of dialogue to our Harker-like figure, and the effect, besides pinning us to our pseudo-Harker's quaking terror, is almost that the vampire is actually, himself, refusing to take on a firm shape, his cosmic malevolence too archetypal to exist in a real world, a manifestation of the darkness that dominates these images because the only illumination is the giant raging fireplace that's like gateway to hell, and the filthy, sooty smoke issuing forth from it that glows dimly with the fire's infernal light.  So we reach the same goala deeply-unsettling presence unbound by God's or nature's lawthrough the same overarching strategyin-camera effectsbut still entirely different means, in pursuit of different textures and a powerfully distinctive aesthetic.  And then Eggers makes it a little bit weirder and more uncanny still, with a heavy layer of digital distortion on the vampire's voicea creature that is now and shall remain as much a work of sound design than literally any of the other things you'd expect from "a movie monster," with the actor growling but the spiritually urgent horror of his words coming from how the vampire is constantly issuing forth in a wheezing rasp, like his "voice" isn't "a voice," but the wind blowing through a hollowed-out corpse in a way that happens to produce speechand, in this case, what we have is "the converse" of Coppola's vampire's pale white butt of a hairstyle, which had been his method of impressing upon you the ethereal foreignness of his creation.  (The other "converse" is that Eggers's horny vampire either lacks the capacity, or the desire, to make himself over into something a normal person might want to fuck, though he expects you to genuinely want to fuck him anyway.)

Now, I apologize for my impulse to use Bram Stoker's Dracula as the standard by which to judge this movie called Nosferatu, but Coppola's film is my favorite Dracula and my favorite vampire movie, and, anyway, you can do your own compare-and-contrast with Murnau's film (or Herzog's film, I guess) at your leisureI'll give this one to you, BSD's touchstone was Méliès as much as Murnaubut anyway, the idea that Eggers isn't using it as his own comparator, and possibly his prime comparator, above and beyond the 1922 film, is sort of hard to deny, as any summary of the plot that starts with the film's first scene I think more-or-less demonstrates, when Eggers's Nosferatu describes its own, even darker and bleaker vampiric "lost love."  So: many years ago, we get an intimation of how Wilhelmina Murray, I mean Ellen Hutter (Eggers naturally deploys the names and rearranged relationships of the 1922 film's dramatis personae; Lily-Rose Depp) first made contact with a certain malevolent force (Bill Skarsgard), in an adolescent desire for freedom and pleasure, though the visual token of this is a fit that has only a vague and frightening resonance with orgasm.  Years hence, she has broken things off with the force, and replaced him in her heart with her husband, Thomas (Christopher Hoult) of "Wisborg, Germany," whatever the hell that means (it's either a North Sea port or Baltic one).  Thomas is a young lawyer lately charged by his employer, Knock (Simon McBurney), to handle a real estate purchase by their foreign client, Count Orlok, sending him out to the Carpathians to escort the elderly nobleman to his new home in Wisborg.  Leaving Ellen in the company of family friends Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), Thomas has his dreadful adventure, accidentally selling his bride to Orlokas was the count's plan all alongbut while Thomas has himself likewise been made a victim of Orlok's ravishment, he does escape, arriving back home barely in time to bolster, and complicate, his wife's mystic dance with the vampire.


That last sentence indicates the actual novelty I mentioned earlier, though it's well to make note of the "Nosferatu" improvements to Stoker's Dracula, namely the streamlining that removes all the ancillary charactersthough this one does bring in its own Van Helsing, now named Von Franz (Willem Dafoe, basically playing Anthony Hopkins in a Dafoevian vein)but which, especially, also removes the requirement to go back to Southeasten Europe for the finale (a pacing thing which is BSD's one serious problem, frankly, and if that means I'm saying "Nosferatu has a better ending than BSD," I might be, although one of my medium-sized substantial complaints is that maybe it's too streamlined where it really counts, as the climactic shot feels truncatedthis might be my 80s kid assumption that any modern vampire movie should invoke extremely pronounced gore effects for its vampire's demise, and this one doesn't linger the way I'd prefer).

Well, since I've dug into the negative criticism with thatI should let you know that it's pretty mild, all the waymight as well go through the rest of that list: as an Eggers film, we do still have his general aesthetic approach to making period pieces, of pretending that he's a denizen of the period actually making a movie in that period, thanks to being gifted by some time travelers with the miracles of a camera, filmstock, and a processing lab, but not lighting equipment or a generator.  As I've already described in perilous detail, this works flawlessly in the "pure horror" sequences, and in fact works flawlessly in any nighttime sequence (which is close to a perfectly overlapping pair of sets, though there's at least the one shot, in a smoky Balkan innwhich is only threatening, rather than out-and-out horrificthat stands out in my memory).  It also means some stark, brittle, frankly unpleasant daytimes that peak with "good prop and/or digital snow," but mostly just hit "handsome period piece" unspecial blandness, such as, sometimes, could've been offered up by any 21st century filmmaker; as one of the so-obvious-I-feel-foolish-saying-it key distinctions from Nosferatu '22 is color (second only, I suppose, to sound), I'm not wholly convinced it should have been in color, because, since the blatant purpose of that color is to meditate on the difference between orange firelight and the palest blue moonlight in the nighttime sequences (and a deep, annihilating black that sucks all light into its maw), I'm not sure it was an entirely profitable trade-off.  But, certainly, be advised this is one of the best-looking movies of 2024, and Jarin Blaschke has, probably, delivered its best cinematography, possibly the most glorious exception to the 2020s' overbearing fad of "not being able to see anything equals scary" photography you'll ever behold in that, somehow, amidst its natural lighting and edgelighting and shadows, it's never underlitin the same way that its forays into obscuring shallow focus are the exception to that trend, too.)

The other thing, and a bigger problem, is that you could be an hour deep into Nosferatu (running a not-disagreeable, but probably somewhat-excessive, 132 minutes), and still be wondering what the fuck I could have been talking about when I called it "emotionally immediate and accessible," with Ellen and Depp's performance thereof taking at least that long to resolve.  Once she gets there, Depp's outright greatunless it's VFX-cranked, which I didn't perceive but I wouldn't call you a liar if you told me it was, I'd call her "pretty damned good" solely on the basis of her apparent ability to go into some really upsetting-looking shaking fits on command, and once the end phase arrves, she's handling the character like she's always been here, required to bounce from discontinuous extreme to discontinuous extreme and contradictory desire to contradictory desire with masterful deftness, somehow without ever sacrificing Ellen's core identitythough until then, that character kind of is just a collection of fits, and the careful groundwork Depp's laying down isn't noticeable yet.  Fortunately, during our returns to Wisborg, she's supplemented by Taylor-Johnson and Corrin, the former being especially good and, until Dafoe shows up, the prime means by which Eggers is executing "comedy" vis-a-vis a Victorian overarticulation of speech.  (Taylor-Johnson is further gifted with an awfully moving scene late in the filma really goth one, and Gothic, toothat's nicely prefatory to the climax and how we should feel about it.)


But the lede I've been burying is that this has got to be the all-time best Harker, or, if you insist, Hutter; Hoult (who's just getting better and better at rotating through all the Dracula characters***) would be well-cast for the part under any circumstances, as it requires a certain whitebread, middle-class gormlessness that Hoult (no offense) exudes in his sleep, and his Thomas has that in spades.  (One of my favorite shots in the film isn't horror at all but our first visit to his Ebenezer Scrooge law firm and all the old bald men looking down at him in vague contempt.)  But it's very generous to Thomas, and one of the neater things Eggers is doing is "correcting" Harker, not something that I can think of any Dracula adapter (or Stoker himself) seeming to give much of a shit about till now, making his initial semi-idiocy comprehensible as an outgrowth of his inexperience and ignorance, without making him stupid, and Houltthough also absolutely terrific at essaying a quivering mortal fear, as the essential other component of all his tete-a-tetes with Orlokbrings a hidden steel to Thomas, all the better in that it's seemingly against Hoult's nature.  It gets Thomas to a place where he can, much more quickly-than-usual, bring battle, albeit a losing battle, to the ghoul who's imprisoned him.  (While if it seems as if I have barely mentioned the actor playing the vampire, in this vampire movie, that's no mistake: Skarsgard is great but by way of understanding the needs of this vampire movie, which dialogue even spells out for him"an appetite, no more"and therefore more of a prop to anchor that act of sound design that Eggers is perfectly comfortable with you finding amusingly over-the-top and disconcerting in equal measure, and a template upon which a mustache can be glued and the makeup designers can symbolize sexualized putrescence.)

Fundamentally, it's a Harker, or Hutter, worthy of love, and as that's essentially the point of a movie that's psychosexual drama and full-blooded romance without differentiating very much between those two modes, it's pretty altogether crucial; at its most reductively-phrased, sounds-stupid-put-this-way bottom, it's a movie about an ex you completely despise for every good reason in the world, have left behind for a vastly superior new partner, and still kind of want to fuck, because that's all they were good for, and the last hour of Nosferatu swirls around this by way of horror fabulism, in ways that feel ineffably emotionally true even though they're intentionally beyond analysis, activated by magic and involving a rapist corpse and swinging from hot Victorian shame to open-hearted devotion to full-on cuckold reclamation fetishism to an outright equation of sex and death.  (It's a superb follow-up to The Witchit was, originally, supposed to be Eggers's second filmsince while that one makes you work for it harder and this one is readier to explain itself, it's also being more rewardingly messy, more like an impressionistic evocation of psychosexual drama, which in turn works for the horror because it feels like Orlok's coming has triggered a psychological disintegration for our lovers as much as the vermin-borne, metaphorically-apocalyptic plague that accompanies him.)  It's why Depp's performance is, obviously, equally essential, having to somehow make these rapid shifts work on our way to a conclusion that's tragic and triumphal all at once, striking with the most overwhelming notes of Robin Carolan's score; and while I shall hold to a conservative judgment for now, I am questioning whether I still agree with myself when I say Eggers hasn't made a masterpiece yet.

Score: 9/10

*With the implied caveat, "American-born filmmaker whose career is entirely contained within the 21st century," Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert do come to mind, as does Joel Crawford.  However, their track records are shorter.  There is the further matter of Damien Chazelle, but he's in the same "extraordinarily high average but no masterpieces yet" boat.
**Give or take a Lighthouse, actually, which I'm cooler on than some, and which I recall as a grab-bag of fragments of intellectually stimulating things, rather than a more intellectually cohesive experience like The Witch and The Northman.
***It occurs to me that Dafoe played a vampire dude playing another vampire dude once, too.

15 comments:

  1. I'm still reading through this, but...

    Given the parameters (21st century films only) and, let's say, at least 3 feature films, I'd have Chazelle, then Eggers, then a gap before anyone else. Every movie Peele makes is interesting, although I'm not quite so high on him as the consensus (and I recall that you are not as well).

    Move the bar down to two films, and Daniels probably jumps up to #2 behind Chazelle for me, and I have a couple of indie dramedy filmmakers (Eisenberg, Cooper Raiff) who I'd be very excited to see what comes next but more because they make the exact kind of films I'm a sucker for. Joel Crawford is a good curveball pick, though I remain at least a skeptical that the director is the main throughline of quality on major studio animated pictures most of the time.

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    1. In most cases, that's probably true, although Crawford's particular personality, I think, shines through clearer than usual in his run of Trolls Holiday>Croods: A New Age>Puss In Boots: The Last Wish. Meanwhile, if it weren't limited by "American" (and as long as we're not counting a three minute homemade short as part of his "career"), my "most exciting director" would be Makoto Shinkai by miles and miles and miles.

      Looked back at my index, and I guess I really, really don't know who it'd be besides Chazelle or Eggers. Lisa Joy only has the one feature (I've never seen Westworld, it's TV, and modern serial storytelling TV is, like, almost intrinsically bad), James Wan has too much junk in his filmography (plus he may only be really great at doing Aquamans), RKSS is too underground and also serious no track record (plus only two films period, in eight years now).

      At this point, like Shyamalan before him, Peele needs to prove to me he's not actively bad.

      The 21st century limiter I added is, needless to say, mainly there to nix Wes Anderson.

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    2. At one point (after TRON: Legacy and Oblivion) I'd have been very excited about Joseph Kosinski.

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    3. Yeah, if the festival review headlines were "____ has just released a major film," I'd probably still be as much or more excited for Anderson, Linklater, and even Spielberg than any of the youngins. Although I'm so curious what Chazelle is going to do after Babylon, and how it might use a Hurwitz score, that I still might gravitate to that first.

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  2. I’ve seen NOSFERATU (2024) described as ‘Vampire Romance’/‘Paranormal Romance’ in one other review (On Reactor.com), which also goes on to compare it (Albeit unfavourably) to the Coppola DRACULA of AD 1992: put simply, I feel that calling the pursuit of Mrs Ellen Hutter by Graf Orlock* any kind of romance is profoundly misguided, so to place that notion of their relationship at the core of your article is to build your analysis on a fundamentally-flawed thesis.


    *He is called ‘Count Orlock’ in the film under review, I know, but ‘Graf Orlock’ just sounds more impressive.


    Put simply, I feel that NOSFERATU (2024) is, at heart, a Tragedy: in general a Tragedy generated by the abuse of power - a consistent theme, given the betrayal of Mr Hutter by his employer Herr Knock; the physical abuse of the former by Graf Orlock (Not to mention further abuse of trust in the matter of the ‘contract’), Herr Knock’s own mistreatment by an Orlock utterly contemptuous of a man who is nothing if not consistent & enthusiastic in his service, even (to some degree) in Mr Harding’s conduct towards Mrs Hutter (Though in this case the manifestation sinks from the inhuman to the level of mere human fallibility).

    Most of all and more specifically it is manifest in the ‘relationship’ of Mrs Hutter and Graf Orlock: the latter, an immensely powerful individual, encounters the former as a lonely innocent reaching out for a friend and immediately proceeds to violate her - years later, having made some no easy recovery from this assault, Ellen meets and marries a good man, who makes her feel happy and more secure, with every expectation of building a new life.

    Graf Orlock, apparently regarding this as a mortal insult, decides to reassert his ‘property rights’ over the new Mrs Hutter and the film presents a truly chilling number of incidents whereby this immensely powerful man proceeds to bulldoze through Mrs Hutter’s persistent & consistent efforts to refuse him, with society either completely unprepared or completely unable to support the lady, partly through it’s own systematic failings (Lack of respect for her gender and her history of mental health issues - issues almost certainly stemming from a history of abuse - foremost amongst them).

    Left almost wholly isolated, Our Heroine is left with only one way to break the cycle - by bringing down the villain at the cost of her own life, saving her beloved husband at the cost of breaking his heart.

    As I said, NOSFERATU (2024) is a Tragedy - and don’t even get me STARTED on how that (and other things) makes it a very different animal from DRACULA or we’ll be getting into weeds of novel vs film vs adaptation vs adaptation all week.

    Suffice it to say that I feel comparisons between DRACULA ‘92 and NOSFERATU ‘24 are inevitable, but somewhat misleading (One thing I will say is that Mr Eggars improves on Mr Coppola by actually choosing a specific take on his story, rather than spend an entire film refusing to decide between uncommonly-faithful literary adaptation, complete inversion of DRACULA as we understand it, full-on horror movie and vampire romance, all of which renders this one of the most inveterately frustrating DRACULA films*).


    *It’s definitely not my favourite adaptation, because it always leaves me with a painful case of whiplash as it gyrates between high fidelity and complete adulteration of the original, but there’s so much of worth in the production that I can never leave the film be as we go our separate ways - the old school special effects, the costumes, the melodrama, a significant part of the cast and THE MUSIC.

    The fact that my favourite DRACULA score is attached to a film that insists that Mina/Dracula is a pure and true love despite Count Dracula being an on-screen rapist of Madam Mina’s best friend just GALLS me: don’t even get me started on the Anthony Hopkins Van Helsing (Mr Dafoe’s Professor Franz I’m has a far better bedside manner, if nothing else - and there’s quite a bit else).

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    1. I was being somewhat unclear that the core romance here would be Ellen and Thomas, though that works out, since I think the movie is okay with being unclear on that front sometimes. And of course even to the extent there is any "romantic" dimension to Orlok's predation, I'm thinking of all of the three as vessels for emotions and ideas, rather than biographical sketches. Just so we're not talking past each other. In that vein, I think it also gets at the ideas you mention, which is one way I think you can tell that Eggers's Nosferatu is a good movie, it can hold contradictions. But it's definitely dealing with feminine sexual desire and mental illness in a Victorian frame; in fact, considering how purposeful it is about that and how it sort of adopts that Victorian frame, while simulanteously turning it on its head, Witch-style, maybe I should've gone more into it, but self-imposed word limits and all, and like I said, I do think the whirlwind of it is meant to make it difficult to analyze anything in isolation and intended to make it irrational and addling and emotionally overpowering. (Even while it definitely wants to plant a flag in "Victorian patriarchy was lame.")

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    2. Fair counter-points: I definitely agree that the actual romance in this film is Ellen/Thomas (Though the Hardings seem to be genuinely affectionate couple too, despite Mr Harding being vaguely suspicious that Mrs Harding may have a Thing for Mrs Hutter - whether fairly or unfairly).

      I admit to being a tad twitchy when it comes to allegations of Vampire Romance, since it’s one of my least favourite sub-genres: my first encounter with DRACULA in any form was reading a summary of the characters, getting to Van Helsing and thinking “Yep, I want to play the cool Vampire Hunter medicine man”, which explains quite a lot).

      By the way, thank you for your patience with a deeply opinionated Fan: it’s never easy to process Fierce Enthusiasm when faces and body language are not involved.

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  3. Anyway, core objection aside I actually agree with quite a bit of your review - Mr Skarsgard isn’t really required to do very much, but he definitely puts himself over as the most intimidating vampire to leave the Carpathians since Mr Jack Palance (Who ranks up there with Sir Christopher Lee on the list of Draculas one would not want to mess with); I too am eager to see where the Nicholas Hoult Classic Vampire Universe goes next (I’m hoping Doctor Polidori’s THE VAMPYRE will finally make his Big Screen debut, but I’d guess that showing up as a Peter Cushing Van Helsing type is more likely); Personally I tend to place Wisborg, Germany on the North Sea coast as a tribute to Whitby (It’s original inspiration); and, in all honesty, I simply cannot imagine Ms. Anya Taylor-Joy (Initially linked with the production that later became this film) doing a better job than Ms. Lily-Rose Depp, which is no small praise (Think about it: watching Ms. Taylor-Joy as Ellen we’d all be chanting “Is Anya a vampire yet? VAMPIRE TAYLOR-JOY FOR THE WIN!”, so she’d probably better suited to the role of CARMILLA than that of Ellen Hutter).

    Anyway, the more I think about NOSFERATU (2024) the more I want to see it again: what more can I say?

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    1. Just want to say I appreciate the prompt that it's Wisborg with a W, not Visborg with a V (in Gotland), I fixed that.

      I was kinda curious if Taylor-Joy was pursued and it just didn't work out scheduling-wise, or what (it just seems obvious that she would've been considered for something, given her level of fame and presumably strong relationship with Eggers), but I obviously have no complaints viz. Depp.

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    2. As I understand it, the pre-production took so long she was committed to another film by the time production was underway: I believe it was the FURIOSA movie that demanded her complete attention.


      Also, you might be amused to learn that the name ‘Wisborg’ is apparently an homage to Wismar - the shooting location for the original NOSFERATU - as well as to Whitby.

      Interestingly, Wismar is on the Baltic, which might answer your question as to whether its fictionalised counterpart is a North Sea or Baltic port.

      It’s Hanseatic either way!

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    3. Oh yeah, her commitments to Furiosa makes that make sense.

      It's just so strange that it's even closer to the name of an actual place and that place isn't German. But I can see some wisdom in setting it in an off-reality place. (I didn't really like the line of dialogue describing Orlok's locale as "east of Bohemia," which seems extremely unspecific, and there would be many places of some note between it, I mean, like, just for starters, Moravia.)

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    4. Presumably they wanted to leave the exact location of Schloss Orlock unspecified - partly to avoid branding some poor corner of Eastern & Central Europe with The Mark of the Beast, the way Mr Stoker branded poor Transylvania but mostly, I suspect, to suggest that Orlock is a creature of this Earth, but not of this world (As though his point of origin were the place nightmares come from, rather than any country known to man).

      Also, it bears pointing out that the name ‘Wisborg’ comes from the original NOSFERATU (Which presumably wanted to avoid ticking off Wismar and Lubeck by associating either name with a plague of rats).

      As somebody who loves, loves, loves coming up with fictional locations in multiple variations on the real world, I suppose they chose the name ‘Wisborg’ precisely because it was a Teutonic variation on a non-German place name, since it’s always easier to make a fictional place feel more realistic when you apply some variation of a real name.

      Just ask Gotham City.

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  4. Incidentally, it amuses me to imagine Professor Von Franz being required to attend some remedial classes in Vampire Hunting if he wants to retain his somewhat shaky credentials as a Van Helsing (“When destroying a vampire we do not NOT feed his victims to him” “Man didn’t even kill a single vampire!” “Well he was facing a rather sharp deadline” “The man couldn’t even remember to bring terriers to the rat pit!”* and so on).


    *As I understand it, when you want lots of rats dead in a hurry you send in the dogs, not any kind of cat - just ask Bram Stoker! - though in all fairness Professor Albin IS a cat man, so his native prejudices may have conquered common sense.

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    1. You know, I hadn't even thought of the cat that way. Just thought of it as "a cat, such as people have." That's neat.

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    2. In all fairness, I suspect that the cats in question (I believe that in addition to Mrs Hutter’s Greta, Doctor Franz has two of his own) are merely meant to suggest the characters is question as particularly hostile to all things rodentine (Like our villain, though in this case Graf Orlock’s traditional Plague Rat symbolism is complicated by his employment of wolves as guard dogs, which I believe is unique to this variation on the character*).

      Though I would certainly love to think that the absence of rat-killing terriers was a subtle way to hint at Our Heroes being willing to confront Graf Orlock, but not so well-prepared as other vampire hunters.


      *It’s interesting to note that, despite being this Graf Orlock being one of the cruellest vampires committed to the silver screen, he’s actually more kind to his wolves than the literary Count Dracula, who actually kidnaps a wolf from London Zoo and mind controls the poor animal into battering through the last defences surrounding Miss Lucy Westenra (Which also helps provoke the heart attack or stroke that kills her mother).

      Part of the reason I love the original novel more than any of it’s adaptations is that Mr Bram Stoker then goes on to produce a short chapter allowing us to see that poor Bersicker (SIC) is, in fact, a perfectly normal zoo animal who merits our pity for being mind-controlled by a supervillain, not any sort of hellhound.

      It’s a rather silly chapter and I wouldn’t trade it for all of FRANKENSTEIN.

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