Your Daily Dracula – Doug Jones as Count Orlok, Nosferatu A Symphony of Horrors (2023)

Your Daily Dracula – Doug Jones as Count Orlok, Nosferatu A Symphony of Horrors (2023)

There’s a tendency to view Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (20024) as the second remake – after Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) – of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu Eine Symphonie das Grauens (1922) but there are a surprising number of other redos, remakes, rejigs and remixes of the foundational text of Dracula cinema.  Long in the making, David Lee Fisher’s Nosferatu A Symphony of Horrors has crept out in the shadow of Eggers’ high profile picture – which gives an undoubtedly serious enterprise something of the feel of an Asylum mockbuster.

In 2005, Fisher made The Cabinet of Dr Caligari – in which new actors were CGId into actual footage from Robert Weine’s 1919 film and new music and dialogue was added.  He announced that his Nosferatu, a vehicle for tall thin monster specialist Doug Jones (Abe Sapien in Guillermo del Toro’s Hellboy films), would use the same technique but in the event has gone with new-build CG backgrounds.  It’s not often noted that Caligari and Nosferatu, hugely influential early horror films, take diametrically opposed approaches – the Weine is entirely studiobound on deliberately artificial sets while Murnau gets out on real locations and uses camera magic and makeup to add the magic.  Herzog followed Murnau – which is why the real bats and mummies feature – but Fisher and Eggers have transferred their Orloks into the now-dominant fantasy cinema mode of pixellated Caligarism, making human puppet theatres with greyscale backdrops.

Unlike Eggers, Fisher puts Jones in a version of the Max Schreck Orlok make-up – though without the beaky nose some have seen as an antisemitic caricature – and the vampire’s body language is the selling point of this take on now-familiar material.  The Murnau/Henrik Galeen plot – itself filleted from Bram Stoker – is stuck to closely, albeit with a couple of new-ish character wrinkles.  Thomas Hutter (Emrhys Cooper) is here obsessed with money and status and sets off for Transylvania and a big real estate deal in the hope of becoming wealthy and prominent enough not to have to live opposite the derelict structure his crazed boss Knock (Eddie Allen) has instructed him to sell to the Count.  Hutter makes a few conventional noises about his love for wife Ellen (Sarah Carter) but he also sleeps with a barmaid at the inn on the road to Castle Orlok – later, after some sufferings, he kind of changes his mind about being a git, which at least gives him something to do in the second half of the story (always a Jonathan Harker issue) but doesn’t make him any less unpleasant.  The cast adopt a kind of declamatory style which feels like community theatre, though it’s so uniform that I presume it’s a Fisher decision as a way of reproducing the stylised mime of even the human-looking cast of Murnau’s film.

Orlok is seen in recreations of all the famous images from the Murnau film, and has a few added bits – some shadowy wings – but this isn’t one of Jones’ more indelible monster performances, and you get a sense – as with Javier Botet, who has a similar CV, in Last Voyage of the Demeter – that the actor has taken this role just to tick an obvious box.  Sometimes, Fisher and Jones take pains to recreate exactly Schreck’s poses and movements, but they also dress up the vampire a little, with a monklike robe to cover the inhuman head in the early stretches and a few new moments with the long-taloned hands.  It’s mostly in black and white, with the odd splotch of red (a blob of blood in the letter Orlok sends to Knock).  Like Dr Caligari, it has a good score by Eban Schletter.