Nosferaaarghtu: why they shouldn't remake Dracula's best film outing

For a film to be remade once looks like flattery. Any more than that and it is starting to become creepy. So the news that the classic silent film Nosferatu is in Hollywood’s sights is more than a little disquieting. Following the gruesome news that Murnau’s grave has been ransacked, now his most famous film has been exhumed – neither for the first time. Thirty-six years after Werner Herzog channeled the ghost of FW Murnau’s Dracula adaptation into his Nosferatu the Vampyre, starring Klaus Kinski, former Warner Bros executive Jeff Robinov is itching for another go.

This remake has impeccable credentials. The producers, Jay Van Hoy and Lars Knudsen, are responsible for critically acclaimed films Beginners and Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, and Robinov’s Studio 8 has made a smart decision in hiring new face Robert Eggers to direct. Eggers was named Best Director at Sundance for his first feature The Witch, which won’t be released until next year, but achieved very impressive reviews at its festival debut. In fact, he sounds like the perfect fit for Nosferatu, with one unsettling rural horror under his belt, and a background in production design.

So yes, this latest Nosferatu could be a triumph, but I am going to risk embarrassment by expressing my unease about this project before a single scene has been shot. Remakes will happen, whether we like them or not, but this one, I would argue, is a special case.

Nosferatu’s influence over cinema is so significant that something as reductive as a remake seems utterly unnecessary. The 1922 film was not the earliest exponent of German expressionism, but a crucial one. Murnau’s killer move was to take expressionist design and render it truly disturbing by extricating it from the painted sets of a film such as The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919) and applying to the exterior world. From expressionism, via the influx of European emigré directors to Hollywood, we have film noir. And from Nosferatu itself we have a library of classic horror images that crop up time and again: Max Schreck’s fin-toothed makeup as Count Orlok, the “bird of death”; his hunchbacked shadow inching up the wall as he climbs the stairs; the vampire’s uncanny rise from his coffin …

Now Nosferatu has become a shorthand for horror, its presence is felt everywhere from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to video games to Spongebob Squarepants to the name of Dreamworks’ cuddly green ogre franchise. Herzog’s “tribute film” in 1979 was no shot-for-shot remake, but lifted the look of the 1922 film almost intact. The 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire re-imagined the making of the film, but with the twist that its star was a a blood-sucker off-screen as well as on – rendering the original all the more legendary in the process. Even if Eggers were to film an original vampire story, I’ll bet he’d find it hard to resist the influence of Murnau and Schreck at some point.

But what really gives me the heebie-jeebies about this proposed remake is the implicit idea that silent films are lacking, so they need to be remade with sound to have any currency today. Deadline calls this project a “visceral adaptation of FW Murnau’s 1922 silent film masterpiece” as if the original were weedy and needed fattening up. That’s simply not true. Nosferatu is the perfect example of a film that is all the stronger for being silent – those classic images have more power, because they the story they tell insinuates itself under our skin without explanatory dialogue. In fact, it’s a beautiful, romantic film as well as a chiller, made in an era before “horror” became a genre.

Without a set of conventions to guide them, and the audience, the scary films of the 1920s are all the more disturbing. And while Nosferatu clings to its 19th-century source, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it is a product of its own time. Nosferatu’s producer-designer designer Albin Grau, brought his passion for the occult to the film, but Murnau brought his own personal experience, the violence he experienced during the first world war, the devastation caused in Germany by the 1918 flu pandemic. The 21st century can, and does, write horror stories of its own.

Mentioning Dracula does give the game away, I’m afraid. Perhaps Nosferatu was asking for trouble all along – it was an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, and the author’s widow brought and won a lawsuit aginst its makers. Rightly so: Grau asked for permission and when it was refused, pushed ahead anyway. Robinov’s studio has reportedly been trying to pin down the rights for this film for months, so this film is at least legit. And Eggers will probably pay as much notice to fans’ fears about his project as his forebears did to Mrs Stoker’s legal claims.