Nosferatu [4K UHD]

Studio: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment

Apr 06, 2025 Web Exclusive By Zachary Lee

For director Robert Eggers, his adaptation of Nosferatu, which haunted its way to theaters last Christmas, represents the culmination of all of his artistic sensibilities. He’s perhaps best known for films like The Witch and The Lighthouse, which nuzzled its protagonists’ tortured anxieties against a backdrop of dreary yet gorgeously realized period aesthetics. (His follow-up to The Lighthouse, the underrated The Northman,isn’t a horror film but follows a similar suit.) With a project like Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (which was inspired itself by Bram Stoker’s original novel 1897 novel Dracula), Eggers explores the ways desire, temptation and curses all clash on a more expansive gothic canvas. In Nosferatu, to love is to be consumed, and it laces its lived-in and remarkably rendered period aesthetics with a seductive and palpable menace. It’s hard not to describe the feeling of being put into a trance when watching the film, and, while there’s no greater spell than that of seeing a film like this in theaters, this new physical edition release offers opportunities to be entranced in more ways than one, thanks to the inclusion not only of an extended cut but also commentaries and deleted scenes that flesh out Eggers’ eerie nightmare.

Nosferatu opens with a young woman, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), crying out into the darkness, first to God, then to “anything” to meet her amid her anguished loneliness. The titular vampire, Count Orlok (a haggardly Bill Skarsgård) is all too eager to answer the call and attacks her before Ellen’s appeal has left her lips. Willing to kill and convert anyone who stands in his way, the rest of the film focuses on Orlok’s attempts to make his way back to Ellen, while the likes of her husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), friends Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Anna (Emma Corrin) and philosopher Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) attempt to stop the vampire before his dark influence corrupts their hometown of Wisburg.

While Eggers seeps Nosferatu in all the dread and gloom you would expect, what’s striking is the director’s deployment of humor. Apart from Ellen, Thomas is the first to meet Orlok and his interaction with the vampire in his Transylvanian castle is a comedy of errors with sardonic bite. Skarsgård draws out Orlok’s sentences in a lugubrious fashion, which clashes well with Hoult’s own panicked and squeamish delivery. This contrast between Orlok and Thomas underscores deeper commentary about the ways people of the era thought of evil as a foreign force outside of themselves that they could not possibly relate to. Yet, the closer Orlok gets to Ellen and as his sinister and blood-soaked entrance into Wisburg underscores, it is to Thomas and the company’s own detriment that they’re immune to evil’s influence and seduction.

As far as bonus features go on the film’s release, there was a rumored cut of Nosferatu that ran for three hours, so it is disappointing that viewers only get four new minutes of footage here; although, Eggers does a lot with a little in terms of what gets added to the film. The sequence in which Thomas encounters Orlok is extended; this time, Orlok talks at length about some of the gypsy traditions he witnessed the night before entering Orlok’s castle. Dafoe gets to let his freak flag fly for a bit longer, as he’s gifted two dialogue scenes which flesh out his character’s backstory and belief in the occult and vampire mythology. Also included are three deleted scenes, some of which are alternate cuts of scenes that made it into the film (perhaps most interesting is a different take on the sequence we saw at the beginning, where Ellen’s face gradually gets more obscured by Orlok’s hand as he invades her quarters).

The unexpected bonus of the set is a full feature-length audio director commentary track with Eggers. His comments offer a brand new way to watch the film, particularly when it comes to his efforts in recreating some of the period accuracy. Some of what’s revealed was shared in interviews leading up to release, such as the fact that all of Lily Rose-Depp’s performance and body movements were not enhanced through any CGI or camera work, but there are many other bits of information that help reframe one’s understanding of what occurs in the film. For example, viewers might have noticed that Orlok doesn’t bite his victims’ throats the way one might typically think of vampires. This is because, in Transylvanian folklore, the vampires usually drink blood from the heart of their victims. It’s moments like these that help viewers get more immersed into the world Eggers has built and what makes the release a worthy pick-up not just for vampire’s heads, but for those looking to be spooked in an all-enveloping way.

(www.uphe.com/movies/nosferatu)

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