While all horror movies are supposed to be scary, I’m one of those mutants who enjoys it when a really scary movie is also unabashedly sexy. I’m not talking about things like ‘80s slashers loaded with gratuitous nudity (though those are always fun), but movies that are clearly made by a director just as lustful as he is downright weird. It’s tough to find a more honest freak than Robert Eggers, and if you like your movies full of supernatural sex appeal, you can now stream his Nosferatu on Prime Video.
Nosferatu tells a tale quite familiar to anyone who loves vampire movies: a creepy count wants to move out of his creepier mansion into new digs, and a young family man is sent out to help seal the deal, securing a sweet commission to help provide for his lovely newlywed. But the real estate agent’s new client is actually a vampire who has established a psychic link with the blushing bride, and he’s looking to break up their family and make her his own. And unless someone can stop this supernatural predator before it’s too late, he will begin a reign of bloody chaos that will make the Black Plague look like the common cold.
The reason most of that sounds familiar is, of course, that it broadly adapts Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. That’s the same thing the original 1922 German film Nosferatu did, and the Stoker estate successfully sued it; the result was that nearly all copies of the movie were burned, but like Dracula himself, the movie couldn’t stay dead, and it is now readily considered one of the earliest horror movies. That movie got its own stylish remake by Werner Herzog in 1979, making Robert Eggers’ take on this story the third Nosferatu film released in just over a century.
It’s also arguably the best, thanks in large part to Bill Skarsgard doing such a creepy cool job in the title role of Nosferatu. He oozes malevolent menace whenever he’s onscreen, but he’s also weirdly captivating; a monster you can’t stand the sight of but also can’t look away from. And in a movie filled with insanely talented performers giving it their all, Skarsgard still manages to (much like Nosferatu himself) cast a long shadow that nobody, onscreen or off, can truly escape.
Some other notable performers include Nicholas Hoult (now best known for playing Lex Luthor in James Gunn’s Superman) as the hapless real estate agent whose life is about to be ruined by Nosferatu. Lily-Rose Depp (best known outside of this film for movies like The King and A Faithful Man) plays the agent’s wife and the subject of Nosferatu’s freakshow fascination. And Willem Dafoe plays a Van Helsing-esque professor whose knowledge of the occult may hold the key to stopping this vampire from draining the entire world of life.
As a lifelong horror fiend, I found Robert Eggers’ film to be the ultimate version of Nosferatu: it has the kind of iconic monster design that made the 1922 film so compelling and the fantastical romance that made the 1979 remake so engaging. At the same time, Eggers adds his own trademark brand of stylish weirdness that made previous movies like The Lighthouse and The Witch so much more than the sum of their perverse parts. The overall result is a movie both sexy and scary, leaving you with some very weird (and maybe very awakened) feelings long after the credits roll.
Nosferatu certainly left critics with some very generous feelings, which is why it scored 84 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In general, critics praised the movie’s epic scope and how Robert Eggers created arguably the most ambitious horror film of the modern age. And like this humble reviewer, they agreed that the movie is weirdly seductive and seductively weird, the cinematic equivalent of watching a classy porno in a graveyard at midnight.
Will you agree that Nosferatu is a sexy/scary movie that could make the deadest audience members rise from their graves, or would you rather drive a stake into this film? You won’t know until you stream this Oscar-nominated film in all its fangtastic glory on Prime Video. Afterward, you might feel like shunning the sunlight, but don’t worry: this is a bloody good film best enjoyed long into the deepest depths of the night.
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