Nosferatu (2024): My Thoughts

Date: 2024-12-26

In an effort to be journaling about and recording my thoughts about the media that I watch/play/etc in 2025(ish) I'm a bit disappointed that I feel a little silly about not having many thoughts about Nosferatu.

I tend to gauge how much a piece of art hit me by how much I want to talk about it in the car on the way home--or how many thoughts are leaping out from my brain, and while I *liked* Nosferatu, it felt like it was missing...something. So to that end, I don't have an overarching emotional response, so I'm left just kinda listing the stray thoughts I do have:

- It's table stakes as an analysis of Dracula adaptations to talk about the way that this kind of Dracula media is a fascinating look into the Victorian hysteria about womens' sexuality. Our main gal in this deigned to have sex happenings as a teenager and was damned for it. I like how Eggers has Not-Van Helsing be the first one to treat our gal with any humanity ("stop giving her ether!!!")

- I loved the way this movie looked--so spooky and gross and oppressive

- Defoe seemed to "get" what was going on the most here--chewing and chomping and delivering to the back seats in every scene. Far and away my favorite scene was him sticking the needle through the gal's wrist. Incredible stuff

- The town Hoult goes to before Dracula's castle was wild--that laughing guy was great.

- I like that no harm came to any of the cats

I'll close with saying that obviously this one is in conversation with the OG Nosferatu and also Herzog's, and there's a lot of very film scholarly things to talk about here, especially in how Eggers changed up Orlok's look in this (which I think rocks), but the god's honest truth is that I'm not a horror girlie and I'm a rube who doesn't really like German Expressionism all that much so I'm not the right person to have any real opinions on that sorta thing.