This Christmas, the multiplex will be invaded by something other than Wicked‘s airborne witches and speedy hedgehogs. A vampire is coming down the chimney, and he promises to scare the pants off you. Robert Eggers’ reimagining of Nosferatu has already accumulated raves from critics and is one of the most anticipated movies of the holiday season.
If you liked the atmospheric horror film starring The Order‘s Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, and Bill Skarsgård, then you’re reading the right article. The following is a brief list of worthy movies you should watch if you’re eager to see more bloodsucking this year or the next.
Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)
If you like a remake, then it’s only natural to be curious about the original, right? When I first saw John Carpenter’s masterful take on The Thing, I immediately sought out the Howard Hawkes-produced 1951 original just to see how it compared with the version I had just watched. And while F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film is undeniably a classic, it’s also a creaky one. It’s dated, to put it mildly, and besides, I’ve always preferred Werner Herzog’s haunting 1979 remake, Nosferatu, which is creepier and better. It’s one of the few horror movies that makes you actually feel the dread of death.
The story is pretty much the same: A young man travels to Transylvania to see a reclusive client and finds himself in the thrall of Count Dracula. He escapes, Van Helsing shows up, and his wife Lucy is hunted by the vampire. Yet Herzog throws a few surprises into his narrative, including an ending that puts a downbeat spin on Stoker’s more positive conclusion, and he emphasizes atmosphere above all else. This is a movie where you can feel the decay of all the bodies onscreen. Oh, and if you’re squeamish about rats, it’s best to avoid this one altogether.
The great French actress Isabelle Adjani is Lucy, and the psychotic German actor Klaus Kinski is the Count. Both were born to play these roles and give the picture a timeless, mythic quality that’s downright lyrical. The brooding score is by Popol Vuh, and it evokes images of bare tree branches, gray skies populated by black crows, and empty tables covered in vermin. It’s glorious.
Nosferatu the Vampyre is streaming on Tubi.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Robert Eggers’ re-imagining of the classic vampire tale owes its biggest debt not to its namesake but rather to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Both movies emphasize mood over outright horror, and both have bold, ambitious directors behind the camera. Megalopolis auteur Francis Ford Coppola is the filmmaker who made this, and it has the excessiveness and boldness that powered his earlier classics like Apocalypse Now and even One From the Heart.
Gary Oldman is the Count in this one, and here, he’s presented as a tragic anti-hero who just wants a little love in his life. Well, one in particular: Mina Murray, and since she’s played by Winona Ryder, can you blame him? Coppola serves up gothic romance with all the trimmings: star-crossed lovers separated by “oceans of time”; a heroine with skin so pale you can literally see her heart beating through her chest at one point; and a love triangle so lopsided that it might as well be a circle.
The actors are all fine, but Dracula‘s real star is the production itself. The Oscar-winning costumes by Eiko Ishioka are genuinely weird and beautiful, while the set design and VFX all emphasize practicality over computer-generated nonsense. The score by Polish composer Wojciech Kilar recalls European decadence and the death of an old, dark world blighted by the light of progress and technology. By the end, there’s a sense of something passing, and it’s not just the Count getting his head chopped off.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is streaming on Tubi.
Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Who was Max Schreck? The German actor, who first embodied the titular Nosferatu in F.W. Murnau’s film, didn’t have much of a career before or after it, and he died in relative obscurity in 1936. The 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire depicts the making of Murnau’s classic horror movie and puts forth this interesting theory: What if Max really was a vampire, and the director and his cast and crew didn’t know it until midway through the production?
It’s an intriguing idea, if an absurd one, but director E. Elias Merhige milks it for all its worth in his darkly comic tale of a movie shoot that is constantly threatening to go off the rails. John Malkovich stars as a Murnau who is willing to do anything, even murder, to get the perfect shot, while Willem Dafoe gives an Oscar-nominated performance as Schreck, who brings new meaning to the term “method acting.” It’s a deeply unsettling performance, but then, what else would you expect?
Shadow of the Vampire can be rented or purchased on Amazon Prime Video.