Halfway through Act I of Waiting For Godot, Estragon complains “Nothing happens; nobody comes; nobody goes; it’s awful”. There is a probably apocryphal story that, on the first night, the audience ironically applauded.
Two thirds of the way through Nosferatu one of the indistinguishable Victorian Men in Top Hats (we have long since given up pretending they are German), standing outside a burning tomb where a lady’s corpse has just been violated, groans “I cannot bear any more”. I know exactly how he felt.
The director is Robert Eggers, who did that Norseman thing a year or two back. That was another film I honestly wanted to like and which excited me during the first few minutes but which I entirely disengaged with after the first hour. Both films are exercises in atmosphere, visuals, imagery, and pervading strangeness which never quite cohere into a story.
I saw the original Nosferatu for the centenary. In an arthouse cinema, with an avant-garde cello accompanist. I rather liked it: the imagery was good and it was less laborious than a lot of silent movies. Any faults were excused by the fact of it being, did I mention, a hundred years old.
There is not much excuse for this remake. It is possible, I suppose, for a director to love an old movie so much that he wants to film it himself, like an artist making an exact copy of an old master. Didn’t someone do a shot for shot remake of Psycho? Which was presumably more fun for the director than it was for the audience. Peter Jackson’s King Kong has always struck me as being one of the most redundant films ever made. (My abiding memory is the ice-skating gorilla, which left me screaming “make it stop” at the screen.) But the impulse to take cutting-edge 1933 stop-motion and see what can be done with cutting-edge 2005 CGI is perfectly intelligible. Is the hope that the remake will send audiences back to the original? Or is there some thought that the Platonic Essence of Kong or Orlok is mediated to audiences who can’t be doing with inter-titles?
Jackson’s Kong is a perfectly entertaining action movie: if a gorilla fighting a tyrannosaur is fun, then a gorilla fighting three tyrannosaurs is three times as much fun. Nosferatu, not so much.
In a world of palliative care, hospices, and no-fuss cremations do we still even need Gothic? Gothic is about life and death and mystery and outsiders and very, very, repressed sexuality. But mostly it's about death. Any Steven King novel could be said to be, in that sense, Gothic. So, in fact, could Fifty Shades of Grey. (I have never read Fifty Shades of Grey.) But proper Gothic, genre Gothic, needs its tropes and symbols, its bats and rats and clanking chains. Gothic is ridiculous: it always was. Jane Austen is spoofing it while it is still a going concern, although she regards Anne Radcliff as one of the good novelists. Frankenstein was parodied almost as soon as it existed.
Graves and dead bodies are taboo: not actually frightening, necessarily, but either physically repulsive or else associated with the most traumatic moments in our lives. But the paraphernalia of the Gothic shields us from that trauma. Did you ever make a connection between the spooky grave yards in Scooby Doo and your terrible memories of when Grandma died? James Whale’s Frankenstein is a knowingly silly film. It begins with a convict’s body being removed from a gallows. The last public hanging in the United States took place in 1936.
So is the endless parade of Gothic signifiers — castles, graveyards, coffins, Bavarian gypsies, lunatic asylums, rats, etcetera — intended to evoke fear? Or are they merely part of the furniture of a film that is meant to be in some way frightening on its own terms? Or are they just there because we're meant to enjoy the aesthetic in a Tim Burton kind of way?
There is no doubt it’s very pretty: every scene is a perfect example of a scene of that kind. Hutter (nee Harker) (Nicholas Hault) Rides through vast Transylvanian landscapes and stays in dark silent inns where the locals perform strange rituals and sing old Pentangle numbers. (I made that up.) Castle Orlok (Dracula) is sports stadium huge; Orlok himself (Bill Skarsgard) is permanently shrouded in shadow, with a silly cossack hat, a Bela Lugosi accent and a voice that won't stop booming. Every third shot is a face looking into camera framed by architecture or scenery, like a series of illustrations. It’s pointedly not widescreen. The final image of the pretty lady in the embrace of death has an oil painting beauty to it, like something Peter Greenaway would have done in split screen. But I am not sure that I have reached a point in my life where I need to look at a portfolio of gothic oil paintings for two hours solid.
There is probably a case for a new Dracula movie: the original novel stands up pretty well, and even if it didn’t, Dracula is an indelible part of popular culture. I think the story is about the interpenetration of a medieval folk demon into the present day. So a remake would need to dispense with the specifically Victorian and set it in modern London; iPhones and Teslas replacing wax cylinders and steam trains. I think we could feel the strangeness of dead bodies coming to life in a suburban hight street undertakers; of corpses being violated in municipal chapels of rest more than in foggy Victorian streets. The Vampire myth is about ordinary people driven to edge by unimaginable horror. Most of the cast of Nosferatu seem barking mad before anything has happened.
I seem to recall that in the novel, Van Helsing persuades Lucy’s fiancee to exhume her remains, surgically remove her head and fill her mouth with garlic in order to prevent her rising as a vampire and therefore free her soul. This is represented as a terrible thing for someone to have to do to their deceased loved-one. In the silly 1992 version, Anthony Hopkins played Van Helsing as a comic turn, har har har I vood like to chop your vife’s head orf. I have always preferred the 1977 BBC version, where Frank Finley’s Helsing is a religious man, with a permission slip from the Pope, performing exorcisms on the forces of darkness. Tonights Van Helsing stand in, Von Franz, is obviously and inevitably played by William Dafoe, an occultist and a scientist as barking mad as everyone else. When Harding (nee Holmwood) (Aaron-Taylor-Johnson) is driven mad by grief and goes of his own accord to the vault where Anna (nee Lucy) (Emma Corrin) is buried in order to make love to the body, Franz pours oil over the whole thing and sets it on fire.
Is this a horror movie, or a commentary on horror movies, or merely a spoof? The scene in which Franz burns down Orlok’s mansion, yelling “In vain! In vain!” has a theatrical absurdity to it: Doctor Who fans may find it hard not to think of Dr Zaroff yelling “Nuzzink in zee vurrld can ztop me nowwww!” Perhaps this conscious silliness is enjoyable to some people; I think that Gothic is quite silly enough without consciously taking it over the top. When women are being endlessly violated by immaterial evil forces; somewhere between rape and epilepsy it is impossible not to notice that the audience is tittering and occasionally guffawing. I think a horror film which makes the audience laugh is a failed horror film; but I think we are more familiar with Dracula as a comedic trope than as a horrific one.
The ending is Murnau’s rather than Stoker’s; more Flying Dutchman than Hammer Horror. Ellen (nee Mina) (Lilly Rose-Depp) having inadvertently summonsed Orlok to begin with, willingly submits to him. The terms of the curse say that when someone willingly submits to Orlok he will cease to he a vampire and crumble into a photogenic corpse. Which feels a bit of an anti-climax, frankly. In the silent movie, the point is rather more that Orlok is distracted and destroyed by the light of the rising sun.
The film has been pretty well reviewed, and I suspect that the parade of greatest goth hits and cinematic archetypes resonated with some people. If you are the right kind of film buff, then the vampiric shadow on the wall probably triggers all sorts of Proustian emotions. Hell, I’ve myself have admitted to enjoying bad films with dragons in them far more than they deserve.
There is an old question about whether you can tell a story about boredom without being boring; about whether you can make a movie about sex without being pornographic. And there is a theory that great literature forces the reader to subjectively reenact the emotions of the characters in the text. Waiting For Godot makes the audience anticipate an arrival which never happens and welcome the distractions and games which fill the space; the reader of Paradise Lost finds himself annoyed and resentful toward God and forcibly attracted to Satan. At which level, if at no other, this film succeeds admirably. By the time it finished, I was longing for the sweet release of death.
5 comments:
"There is probably a case for a new Dracula movie [...] I think the story is about the interpenetration of a medieval folk demon into the present day. So a remake would need to dispense with the specifically Victorian and set it in modern London; iPhones and Teslas replacing wax cylinders and steam trains."
I am far from convinced of this. The story was about the interpenetration of a medieval folk demon into the then present day, i.e. the Victorian era. But now it's also about the Victorian era. That's an irreducible part of the atmosphere.
This is one of the things that the recentist pretty-good Steven Moffat Dracula did well: two episodes in the Victorian era, then the third and last one in the modern day. We really get to feel not two but three atmospheres fighting each other: folk-horror, Victoriana and modernity.
For me, this definition of the Gothic is a little too literal, a little too surface. It arose when the new modern, rational world seemed to finally have arrived, and it arose to scoff at all that. The vampire who won’t stay dead isn’t *just* the past that won’t go away like its supposed to, but he is partly that. You ned the remote Transylvanian villagers with their strange superstitious customs to react against, then find yourself doing the same thing. Where will they come from if you flew there by EasyJet?
But at the same time, though seemingly in contradiction, the Gothic has had something of a resurgence. So many seemingly Science Fiction films are actually Gothic, just given some SF trappings, it seems to me. I’d suspect recent political developments have led to this. You can probably guess which ones I mean.
I honestly don’t have an opinion to give whether this film is just a masterclass in style without much in the way of substance, I am still mulling it over. (I did think that about ‘The Northman’, I didn’t about ‘The Lighthouse’, go figure.) One thing I will say, I like the way the film just owned its theatrical absurdity, without trying to justify it or leaven it with humour. I suspect films are more loath to do that these days, where any point can be lifted and stuck on-line without context, and this becomes a form of self-restriction.
I've not seen this yet, but plan to go on Monday night. I'm intrigued by this in a way that I've not been for any film in a long time.
"One thing I will say, I like the way the film just owned its theatrical absurdity, without trying to justify it or leaven it with humour."
I think this is critical. Simple conviction is so compelling, and so hard to do well, and also so untrendy. Every film seems to want to be clever about challenging its own premise, undermining itself. Just the promise of a film that is entirely itself, without a meta-level wittily (i.e. tiresomely) commenting on itself — that's deeply appealing.
Have you seen The Lighthouse? I saw it in a cinema and thought it was excellent. It's a visual extravaganza, with Dafoe providing the ham, but Pattinson providing the actual bones of a story. Ironically, The Northman only made me appreciate how the Bard of Avon took an old text and made the character a lot more interesting by making him conflicted. The Northman has none of that nuance, whereas I reckon Coppola's Dracula does: by having him in constant mourning for his lost love, Coppola makes Dracula more dimensional - a monster torn between wanting to be reunited with his reincarnated wife and his desire to keep her free from the same curse that defines him.
In terms of 'modern day'* versions Ultraviolet is a great example of reinventing vampires.
* it must be nearly thirty years old).
For the record: I saw it tonight and found it rather a lot better than Andrew did, but not as good as Jordan M. Poss did in his review at https://www.jordanmposs.com/blog/2025/1/3/2024-in-movies that motivated me to want to see it in the first place. I was hoping for more of a tightly wound sense of oppressive futility.
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