Nosferatu

This weekend I came across the horror movie "Nosferatu" that was recommended to me before the Spring Festival. I didn't expect it to be an award-winning movie in Hollywood this year.

The movie tells the story of Alan who summoned a ghost as a child and ended up being possessed by it. When he grew up, he married a young real estate agent, Thomas. In order to make a living, Thomas was arranged by the company to go to an abandoned castle to do business with Count Nosferatu. He met the mysterious and terrifying Count Vampire and fled the castle in a hurry. Unexpectedly, the Count Vampire had arrived and caused a plague in the town. He and his wife, together with the professor they invited, began to try to eliminate the Count Vampire.

The story framework setting basically replicates the horror narrative of the return of the vampire Count causing the spread of plague in the old movie "Nosferatu" in 1922, and is mixed with the Count's obsession with his new wife in "Bram Stoker's Dracula" in 1992, and then innovatively adds the desire-driven nature of today's trendy female subjectivity. In the end, the movie ends with the Count's terrifying desire gaze at the heroine Ellen, and Ellen, as the subject of desire, is hesitant to speak but easily kills the Count in the end, resulting in a split in the viewing experience.

This movie wants to maintain the same Gothic style as the previous one - dim environment background, plain clothes, and towering gloomy castle. Although the atmosphere is well set, the unique aesthetic details of Gothic are not refined enough. The gloomy castle is only left with light and dark silhouettes, making the movie look like a horror shell.

As for Depp's daughter Lily, who plays Allen, I personally feel that she is not suitable for this role. Her body shape is not suitable for playing the peerless beauty praised by the real estate boss; and her temperament is rather wooden. She does not have the fragility and confusion of Winona Ryder in "Bram Stoker's Dracula", nor does she embody the tension of female subject desire, only the hysteria when she is possessed by ghosts.

The female characters lack flavor, and the male characters are not portrayed accurately. Nicholas Hoult, who plays the newlywed husband Thomas, is middle-aged but not mature enough, so he is suitable as a husband without sex appeal in the movie, but his appearance lacks the Gothic style. And Count Nosferatu in the movie has become a hairy monster, which is also not Gothic.

Of course, these are minor flaws. The most serious problem of the film is that the expression of desire is too direct and fragmented. At the beginning, the heroine Ellen summoned the vampire lord because of desire, and then she was in a panic. During this period, the film directly expressed the desire through the wanton flirting between her husband's friend and his wife. Then the newlywed wife directly asked her husband for sex to express her true love for her husband and rejected the vampire lord's sexual request. So the desire either did not appear or was so obvious that it blinded the eyes. Only the detail of the naked girl riding a horse towards the depths of the fog in the middle of the movie was meaningful.

At the same time, the movie constantly emphasizes that the Count is powerful. He can control the real estate owner to become his accomplice, and can spread the plague through his coffin. But in the end, Allen kills the Count directly by having sex with him. It can be said that dying under the peony flower is unjust as a ghost! It can be seen that the powerful ability of traditional vampires in the movie is ultimately no match for the powerful consciousness of modern women, and the adaptations that are not beautiful outside the movie have won consecutive photography awards. It turns out that Hollywood movies are gradually regressing!

The idea of ​​remaking the film was influenced by the following works: FW Murnau's silent film "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" and Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula". Robert Eggers used his usual exquisite costumes and cold visual images on this basis. The large amount of natural light and the only light source have made great achievements in creating a gloomy and terrifying atmosphere. The photography shows a high level of aesthetic skills by using the physical boundaries of door frames, castles and city gates to compose the picture.

Robert Eggers has added many modern issues while retaining the original story background. For example, the bond between Ellen Hutter and Nosferatu comes from childhood trauma. Troubled by loneliness, emptiness and helplessness, she signed a contract with the devil. As she matures and finds her beloved Thomas Hutter, the struggle with Nosferatu can also be seen as a projection of her innermost desires. For Ellen Hutter, Nosferatu came from her and she was shackled by her inner demons. If she wants to get rid of them, she can only face and defeat them bravely.

Nosferatu originated in the border villages of Germany in the early 19th century. At that time, Europe was experiencing the baptism of the Industrial Revolution, and the elite class was enjoying the glory brought by science and technology. However, the border areas were influenced by religious witchcraft, and regarded Nosferatu as a demon and an ominous sign, and wanted to eliminate it. As a result, Nosferatu turned from one person's "Ellen Hutter's broken promise" to indiscriminate revenge in the whole society, bringing the fear of plague and death.

The new version produced by director Robert Eggers on the 100th anniversary of FW Murnau's classic silent film "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror" uses the mode of popular drama to tell the story in detail and completely. In some sections, FW Murnau's classic expressionism is retained, such as the shadow of the vampire Nosferatu on the wall in the dark, casting his raised claws. The way of creating the sense of fear in the interaction between Thomas Hutter and Nosferatu in the castle returns to tradition, and the audio-visual arrangement of light, shadow and sound presents a good sense of horror. In the home of Thomas Hutter's wealthy friend Friedrich Harding, the presentation of some horror scenes is inevitably influenced by the current horror film thinking, and is a startling and direct style.

The new version of Nosferatu is very complete in terms of the unity of form, style and content, and is worth a look.

A24 has cultivated a large number of auteur directors, who have obtained dominant production funding outside the production system of Hollywood studios. This is really a great merit. Especially in the field of horror and thriller genres, the creativity and quality of its released works have always been leading the way. Robert Eggers is one of the capable ones. I have watched three works of Eggers recently and was very impressed. The most amazing one is the 2015 debut "The Witch", starring the lovely girl Anya Taylor-joy. With first-class image texture, it uses a simple and profound story to explore the fear and redemption under the Puritan ethic. The text, form and conception of this film are perfectly self-consistent, and the philosophical metaphors are extremely brilliantly integrated into the story, and it also presents a very personal aesthetic style. As a Virgo, I can give it a full score. This is a representative psychological thriller in the United States, and it is the "X-Men" of the United States (although the two films are very different). After the debut work was a hit, Eggers was able to get good resources. The 2019 film "The Lighthouse" brought together Pattinson and William Dafoe, and entered the Cannes and Oscar competition circle with its difficult black-and-white photography, dense Shakespeare-style lines, closed space narrative, and the weirdness of Greek pagan legends. But my impression is that it is not as good as Virgo because it is too deliberate. When the pagan cult, Cthulhu imagery and philosophical thinking can only be inserted into the cake like a piece of fondant letter card as decoration, instead of being organically integrated into the cake (story and characters), then this kind of superficial symbolic expression can only show the creator's laziness or incompetence. The 24-year Gothic vampire film "Nosferatu" is a remake of an old German film. This film has no novelty in terms of image style and theme expression, even in terms of investment and cast, it has reached the top scale of B-level films. It is not uncommon for independent author-type directors to be unable to control top-level productions. Probably only Villeneuve and Nolan have really passed this level. It's also good to quietly be the Tarkovsky of the horror film industry, and stay away from big productions, I want to say to Eggers.

It can be said that this is the worst movie in Dan's career. I was looking forward to it, but I didn't expect it to be so boring. The reason is not that the director's style was not successfully integrated, but that there is not much Dan's style in it. It has completely become a stylized Hollywood visual blockbuster account. Dan's narrative technique has been replaced by a straightforward account. Dan's lens language full of symbolic metaphors has been replaced by useless digital special effects with low information content. What's even funnier is that his way of shooting characters has also changed completely. All male characters have become tools to tell the plot and none of them can stand up. The heroine is not very good either. Depp's daughter's plump and healthy appearance can be said to be not suitable for Gothic movies at all. Every time it comes to her part, it feels out of play. It feels like she sneaked into Tim Burton's studio. This movie is just a commercial film that fools around and makes money. The director has no idea, theme, or core. He just follows the process and shoots it. The lens uses the simplest TV lens without any design, and the actors are just reciting the words. No wonder there is no big-eyed girl in this movie. If there is a big-eyed girl, the director should have created it seriously. It would be just right without her. The funniest thing is the vampire. In the first shot, the male protagonist seemed to be shrunk in his coat. Later, a very featureless white-skinned monster stood up from the coffin and was not scary at all. When he saw the female protagonist, he looked like a Tsarist Cossack officer with a big beard. The whole design is very flat, and there is no feature, no memorable point, no mystery, and nothing. A three-no monster. Oh, it’s not that there is no memorable point at all. In the plot, it can be said that the male protagonist cheated on him. In a vampire movie, it is also a reversal of the sky that humans cheat on vampires. By the way, he is still very weak, a century-old demon, who didn’t check the time and didn’t go back before dawn and was sunburned to death. It’s really the worst vampire in history. That’s about it. It is recommended to change the title of the film to "Disney Princess Single-handedly Kills the Vampire Amnesiac Old Man from Goose Country"

Douban's ratings of the three versions of Nosferatu are reasonable. The earliest 1922 version is a masterpiece in all aspects. The 1979 version has an overall art style like a classical oil painting, which is also a masterpiece, not to mention that the heroine is the stunningly beautiful Adjani. The latest 2024 version ruined this reputation. This time, director Robert Eggers failed to combine his personal style with the story and commercial genre films. What's more disappointing is that if the atmosphere in the first half of the film is still the director's normal performance, then the second half is an irreparable collapse. The atmosphere that was hard to foreshadow in the front is gone, the plot rhythm is loose, the photography, lines and performances are all vulgar and no different from those ordinary Hollywood exorcism movies, and the key ending of the elimination of Nosferatu is also hastily and sloppily, as if the funds have run out and have to be quickly finished. This kind of horror movie villain monster should be the core character that needs to be paid special attention to, but after the director showed all of Nosferatu (look, motivation, magic power, etc.) too early in the middle of the movie, he was completely instrumentalized in the second half of the movie, and his lines were too many and too chatty, but his ability was not outstanding enough, and his style was actually lowered. What I couldn't stand in this version was the sound forced into my ears and the exaggerated performance of the actors, which had the opposite effect of overdoing the atmosphere that was most important in horror movies. Let's talk about the sound first. I can hear a lot of clear details when I wear headphones, but it feels too "noisy". There is almost no time when there is no background sound or music in the movie. The high-level atmosphere of a horror movie should be silent, but this movie did not do it. The jumpscare combined with the picture is actually a low-level approach for horror movies. And the noisy sucking sound when sucking blood also destroyed the original mysterious elegance of the vampire and fell into a dehumanized monster. Excessive sensory stimulation is not suitable for vampire themes. The actors' dramatic performances also made it difficult for me to immerse myself in the story. They cried and screamed at the top of their lungs, their faces twisted and twitched, especially the heroine who was always reciting lines with full energy. How could she look like the lack of energy that her character should have? The overly rich facial expressions of the characters, including the male protagonist, when they performed horror were for fear that the audience would not understand that they were afraid. But the problem is that the film did not make the audience feel the same in terms of atmosphere creation, so these characters can only appear ridiculous. The emotions of all human characters are sudden and incoherent. There is a sense of weirdness, but there is no sense of immersion. The director's performance of eroticism has deviated from the metaphor of traditional vampire themes and is almost straightforward. It sucks and fucks at the same time. Coupled with the crazy performance of the actors, this version can be said to be the most aesthetically ugly vampire movie. I finally understood the theme of this film when I saw the second half. Just as the 1922 version was a metaphor for the First World War, this latest version is a metaphor for the Russo-Ukrainian War in keeping with the times. The 1979 film is neither about the Gothic story of good guys defeating vampires nor the awakening of modern women (that was the theme of the 1979 version). It is about advocacy for supporting Ukraine to continue its endless confrontation with Russia, and it would be best if both sides died together so that the West would benefit. Some people may think that this version is also about female awakening, but if I may be frank, it would be too ugly to say that Nosferatu, a symbol of death and destruction, is the embodiment of female desire. Isn't this stigmatizing women? Only this version emphasizes that it was the heroine who took the initiative to invite Nosferatu, rather than the latter coveting her and finding her. As for the Western society of that era that generally criminalized women's pursuit of desire, and slandered women's normal emotional ups and downs as hysteria, as well as tights and restraints, this film only touched on it briefly and did not explore it in depth. In fact, the heroine's strong desire led to the witch's physique that was easy to provoke evil spirits, and the zero-frame performance of crazy performances confirmed the stigma that women are indeed prone to hysteria. In terms of casting, the fourth sister played a monster villain with special effects makeup that even her own mother couldn't recognize, and Nicholas Hoult played a vampire movie after "Renfield" and played the role of a vampire victim, and even the personality was not much different. It can be seen that the director's safe casting decision was indeed based on commercial considerations, but he was reluctant to give up his own visual style. The combination of the two resulted in a very fragmented viewing experience of the film, with personal style not fully displayed, and commercialization not being thorough and lacking in entertainment.