The director Martin Scorsese said has no limits: “Anything this guy does is amazing”
If you haven’t seen every Robert Eggers film (and you should–but statistically speaking, you probably haven’t) you should at least know that Martin Scorsese will likely be in the front row. Eggers is given a rare license in Hollywood to make spooky historical films that always lose money. It’s very sweet that they let him do that.
Eggers’ most recent film to actually turn a profit (very unusual for him) was 2024’s Nosferatu, which is possibly still playing in a theatre near you. If not, it’s hit streaming services already and is worth some weekend viewing. The movie is (sort of) a remake of the FW Murnau film from 1922, which is functionally adapting Bram Stoker’s 1987 novel Dracula in all but name. But they couldn’t afford the name at the time. That said, it’s a classic and it’s been remade more than once. Even Herzog had a crack at it.
Murnau’s film is sort of a picturebook, with still images and silhouettes that only come to life at the gestalt points of the narrative. It can be roughly thematised as a story of carnal desire (as Dracula always is). But watching the movie itself is closer to looking through an illustrated horror novel. That was the beginning and end of filmmaking at the time.
The story, in its imagining and countless reimaginings, follows one Count Orlok, a European aristocrat of the diminishing medieval variety. He comes to England after corrupting Jonathan Harker (or Herr Knock in the original movie where they couldn’t get the rights to Bram Stoker’s characters). He spreads around a lot of coffins about London and goes further to defile Mina, the fiancé of Harker. Or whatever their names are in whichever version you’re watching.
Every Eggers movie is designed from blueprints to bolts as a means to creep you out. The Witch is an exercise in portraying the overboiling desire innate to stringent and restricting systems–and its violent consequences. The Northman is about…how you shouldn’t trust your Mom. Or something like that, it’s based on Hamlet. But Nosferatu portrays lust and monstrosity as one and the same, a conjoined body which a grisly libidinal terror befouls. A primeval thing that we’d rather forget but walks beside us always.
Scorsese himself is into it and claims to love every movie Eggers has made. He said to Indiewire “It’s amazing,” Scorsese said of the film. “Anything this guy does is amazing. That’s one film you don’t do much after seeing. You’re still in the world. You’re in Transylvania and it’s really … Man, he’s something.”
Eggers is, indeed, if nothing else–something. He has a new project in the oven called “Werwulf” and no, that isn’t a spelling mistake. That’s the name according to every reputable source, and one is to assume that it’s a werewolf story given Eggers’ predilection for monsters and horror. Why it’s spelled that way is anyone’s guess but you must hope that this one is good enough for Scorsese too.
