Andrew Toth/WireImage/Getty ImagesThis week at CinemaCon in Las Vegas, an audience of theater owners and journalists was presented with a teaser for Robert Eggers’ latest, Werewulf. “In 13th-century England, a mysterious creature stalks a foggy countryside as local folklore becomes a terrifying reality for the villagers,” states the film’s logline, and while the teaser has yet to be released online, Variety was there and described the footage:“The trailer echoed Eggers’ past movies, with plenty of black-and-white shots of mauled corpses, desecrated graves and frightened townsfolk terrorized by an unseen beast.

A nude Taylor-Johnson convulses and transforms into the werewolf, with spit filling his fanged mouth, but his full monstrous look wasn’t shown.”Werewulf isn’t set for release until Christmas, which leaves many long months suffering under black parasols in the summer heat until goths and the goth at heart can indulge in another of Eggers’ meticulously crafted historical nightmares. But hark! What cold gust of wind comes whistling down the moors?

It’s Eggers’ 2024 reimagining of Nosferatu, here to wrap morbid cinephiles in its chilly embrace. In terms of Gothic romance, Eggers’ Nosferatu is one of the darkest films to come out of Hollywood in recent memory, explicitly linking death and desire for what’s essentially a $50 million feature-length dramatization of the French phrase la petite mort. Of course, it also draws from F.W.

Murnau’s 1922 silent masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which itself was inspired by Bram Stoker’s iconic 1897 vampire novel Dracula. (Although Stoker’s widow, who sued Murnau for copyright infringement and won, argued that it was a little more than that.) Eggers’ version of these stories takes inspiration from all of them, setting Nosferatu in Germany circa 1838 and embellishing it with painstakingly crafted miniatures and looming shadows straight out of an expressionistic silent film. The basic structure of the film, about newlyweds Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) and Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) and the monster who comes between them after Thomas is sent to Transylvania on a business trip, is borrowed from Stoker’s novel, but the ultimate arc of this tale of dark devotion is wholly original.

Nosferatu’s tale of dark devotion put a delicious new spin on the story. | Focus FeaturesAs always with Eggers’ films, the production design, costumes, and cinematography are all slavishly faithful to the era, with Eggers using special lenses to capture the film’s dark, brooding figures and sickly maidens by firelight and candlelight. The scene where Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlock first enters the picture is absolutely breathtaking, full of menace and tension; Orlock himself is a terrifying figure, a wheezing, dusty walking corpse whose deep voice and fur robes conceal a startlingly skeletal frame.And yet, Skarsgård’s Orlock still inspired his share of thirst traps and fan edits, and not just because internet fandom inspires people to become their most unhinged selves.

Although he’s much less suave, Count Orlock is much like his more famous counterpart, Count Dracula, in that he represents inevitable, all-consuming passion, the kind of love that transcends death itself. That’s one interpretation, anyway. Nosferatu can also be read as a metaphor for depression and mental illness in general; cheerless companions who follow us from childhood all the way to the grave.

And there’s something strangely comforting about seeing that kind of darkness represented in a film, even one as morbid as this one. At least in the shadows, we’re not alone. Nosferatu is now streaming on Peacock.