Robert Eggers’ remake of F. W. Murnau’s silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922, German original Nosferatu—Eine Symphonie des Grauens) was one of the most anticipated horror films of the twenty-first century thus far, partly because of the reputation for smart horror that Eggers have already established with films such as The Witch (2015) and The Lighthouse (2019), as well as The Northman (2022) which infuses a violent fantasy adventure film with horror elements. But Eggers’ Nosferatu, released on Christmas Eve in 2024,was awaited with special eagerness because of the lofty place in horror film history occupied by Murnau’s original film, one of the crucial founding works of the horror film genre and one of the films that helped to establish the German Expressionist style that has powerfully influence the look of horror films ever since. Nosferatu, of course, is a version of the Dracula story, which also places it within one of the most important phenomena in all of horror film. And Eggers’ film, by and large, did not disappoint, updating the original Nosferatu via the adept use of state-of-the-art twenty-first-century filmmaking technologies, almost a century after Murnau’s original.
Murnau’s central vampire figure, Count Orlok, was directly based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but the name was changed for legal reasons after the filmmakers were unable to secure the rights to Stoker’s novel. Orlok is a gaunt and abject figure, though, far less suave and charming than Stoker’s aristocratic original. Moreover, he was played so effectively by actor Max Schreck that many suspected Schreck himself of actually being a vampire. These suspicions provide the premise for the 2000 film Shadow of the Vampire (a fictionalized account of the making of the original Nosferatu), while Nosferatu has exercised a strong influence on other films as well, including the direct sound film remake by Werner Herzog, Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), a highly respected vampire film that is notable for being made in both English and German versions, with character names from the original novel (including that of Dracula) restored (though with some modifications), due to the fact that Stoker’s book was by thenout of copyright. And, of course, the most immediate impact of Nosferatu on other horror films was on Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), the first vampire film (and, indeed, the first American horror film) to be produced in the sound era.
In addition to the changes in character names, Murnau moved the central site of his vampire’s assault on modern civilization from England to Germany, which made his film a direct reflection of conditions there at the time. In particular, the low-key Expressionist lighting and effective use of shadows in the original Nosferatu create a mood of gloom and dread, a sense of darkness that well captured the pessimistic mood of Weimar Germany, a society that was falling apart and unraveling into what would become Nazi Germany. Similar effects were achieved in the near-contemporaneous German Expressionist horror film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), and these effects provided both visual and thematic inspiration, not only for numerous later horror films, but also for other films, especially American film noir.
Dracula films now have an extensive legacy, of course, and have continued to appear on a regular basis through the first quarter of the twenty-first century and into the era of “smart” horror. A number of recent films have attempted either to invigorate the original story through fresh retellings or to produce different perspectives on that story. Among particularly remarkable recent Dracula “films” is a British-produced three-episode mini-series (simply entitled Dracula), released on Netflix in 2020, with Danish actor Claes Bang as a dashing-but-sinister Dracula and Dolly Wells as his antagonist, Sister Agatha Van Helsing, bringing in a new spin on gender in the narrative. In films proper, Chris McKay’s Renfield (2023) features Nicholas Hoult as the vampire’s zany assistant and none other than Nicolas Cage as Dracula. This film introduces some comic elements but is a relatively straightforward vampire narrative except for the unusual use of Renfield as the point-of-view character. Also of particular interest is André Øvredal’s The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023), which focuses only on Dracula’s voyage to England, a voyage that we already know will be a tragic one for the ship and its crew but that fills in many details not present in the segment of Stoker’s original novel devoted to this voyage. Last Voyage is perhaps most notable for its extreme visual darkness, which is clearly meant to evoke an atmosphere of horror, but which renders many scenes virtually invisible. Not well received by critics, this film nevertheless does introduce some new elements, including the fact that it is more reminiscent of the 1979 science fiction horror film Alien than of most Dracula films, featuring a Dracula who, like the titular xenomorph of the 1979 film, is barely seen, thus remaining mysterious and potentially frightening. We do see enough of a heavily made-up Javier Botet as Dracula to discern that he is an ugly, other-worldly Dracula in the mode of the original Nosferatu. And, in Eggers’ much-anticipated remake, Nosferatu himself (played by Bill Skarsgård) returned, uglier than ever, now with a weird voice and now moving through a world of softly muted (but rather Romantic) color and with sound.
Nosferatu the Vampyre is itself an important vampire film. Herzog adds a few plot elements of his own that are not in either Dracula or Nosferatu, but the most notable differences that set Nosferatu the Vampyre apart from its predecessors have to do more with characterization than with specific events. The most important differences, though, have to do with tone, style, and pacing, elements that make Nosferatu the Vampyre a unique film in its own right—and one of the greatest vampire films of all time. As S. S. Prawer puts it in an extremely useful book-length study of the film, Herzog’s use of Murnau is a clear demonstration of the former’s “ability to assimilate such influences while still producing films that unmistakably bear his signature” (28). And, of course, Herzog also demonstrated that there was still plenty of room to do new things with the Nosferatu story, in that sense opening the way for Eggers.
In terms of characterization, Herzog’s Count Dracula (Klaus Kinski) is modeled closely on the Count Orlok of Nosferatu, especially visually, where Kinski is able to replicate Max Schreck’s repellent look almost exactly. In some ways, Kinski’s Dracula is even more unappealing than was Schreck’s Orlok, especially in the way that he is so strongly associated with death, disease, and corruption. When he comes to nineteenth-century Wismar (a real port city in Northern Germany, renamed “Wisburg” in Murnau’s original), where the second half of the film is set, he brings with him coffins full of rats, which quickly overrun the city, spreading a contagion that wipes out almost the entire population. This motif of infestation by rat-carried disease—which clearly echoes the popular memory of the Black Death that swept Europe in the fourteenth century, killing roughly half the total population of the continent—helps to characterize Dracula as a sort of loathsome vermin in his own right. This disease motif acts as a sort of multiplier that magnifies the disease metaphor that is already inherent in the vampire motif. This multiplier is not present in Stoker, though it is present in Murnau’s Nosferatu. However, Herzog’s Dracula, I would argue, is much more extensively associated with disease and contagion than is Murnau’s (or Eggers’) Orlok.
The basic plot of Eggers’ Nosferatu remains intact from Murnau (and Herzog). The vampire Count Orlok finds himself drawn to Wisburg by some sort of mysterious connection with Ellen Hutter, the wife of aspiring real-estate broker Thomas Hutter, who is sent to Transylvania to close a deal to lease a castle in Wisburg to Orlok, who then travels there, bringing with him death and disease. All efforts to protect Ellen (and others) from Orlok’s mystic powers seem to fail, but Ellen herself is able to lure the vampire to his death, even though she herself also dies in the process. But this rather simple plot leaves open an opportunity for a great deal of cinematic embellishment, which Eggers supplies in abundance, both through the performances of his actors and with lavish visuals that make effective use of just enough color to create a sensuous richness, even while remaining muted enough to the recall the black-and-white visuals of the German original.
Of course, Herzog had also enriched the original in many of the same ways, though his film is particularly dominated by the performance of Kinski, whose Dracula is vile and monstrous yet also a much more sympathetic figure than Schreck’s inhuman monster, who seems driven by a thirst for blood and domination, while the Dracula of Nosferatu the Vampyre seems genuinely sad, almost pathetic, driven mostly by loneliness and a desire to be loved. Part of the odd sympathy that we feel for this Dracula no doubt comes from the humanity with which he is invested by Kinski’s performance. Eggers, meanwhile, opts to retain the modified character names from Murnau’s Nosferatu, while also returning to the monstrous Orlok of Murnau, rather than the more sympathetic Dracula of Herzog’s film, something he achieves largely through visual affects that give his Orlok a particularly monstrous appearance, while casting, in Skarsgård, an actor who is best known for portraying the monstrous clown Pennywise in the two It films (2017 and 2019).
One could argue, though, that Skarsgård’s Orlok, with his grossly inhuman appearance and his bizarre voice and accent is almost a bit too much. The extreme nature of this portrayal, though, does help to set him up as the Other to Nicholas Hoult’s Thomas Hutter, who serves in the film as bastion of middle-class normalcy, which is a bit odd, given that Hoult himself has often played over-the-top characters (as in the Renfield film). But Hoult’s Hutter is extreme only in the extent to which he is extremely ordinary—almost to the point of being rather boring. Indeed, that is essentially his role in this film, which (probably more than the other Nosferatu films) emphasizes Hutter’s utter blandness, as opposed to the supernatural sexual energies of Nosferatu, who uses vampire magic to deliver sensual satisfaction to Hutter’s wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) beyond the capabilities of any ordinary human male—and certainly beyond those of a mild-mannered clerk-type such as Hutter. As Ellen, clearly in thrall to the vampire, herself blatantly tells her husband, “You could never please me as he could.”
However, the sexual dynamic between Orlok and Ellen (emphasized in this film more than the earlier Nosferatu films) works in both directions, and it is clear that Orlok also finds Ellen irresistible. When Orlok finally confronts Ellen in her chamber in Wisburg, he tells her, “I lay within the darkest pit till you did wake me, Enchantress, and stirred me from my grave. You are my affliction!” Indeed, it is Ellen (in the film’s prologue) who unknowingly summons Orlok to Germany, and it is also Ellen who uses her power over him to cause him to remain with her in her chamber until after sunrise, whereupon he meets his final and permanent death as the sunlight strikes him. Ellen is the focus of the sexual energies in this film, of course, and (while she was portrayed in Murnau’s version by the little-known Greta Schröder) it is not by accident that Herzog’s “Lucy Harker” (his version of the character) is played by French actress Isabelle Adjani, widely regarded as one of Europe’s most beautiful, sensuous, and most talented actresses. Wendy Ide, reviewing Eggers’ film in The Guardian, calls it “an unsettlingly atmospheric and richly realised work.” She then goes on to note that “there’s something about the macabre sensuality and mossy, crepuscular gloom of this retelling of the vampire legend that leaves a mark on the audience. It’s not so much a viewing experience as a kind of haunting.” But Ide is particularly impressed by the performance of Depp, noting that it is in this “phenomenal, physically committed” performance that the film “finds its dark and tortured heart.”
No doubt even Eggers would find it difficult to say just how many developments in the hundred years of cinema history between Murnau’s film and his own might have influenced his take on the story. One might note, for example, that one of the most important influences of Murnau’s Nosferatu (and of German Expressionist cinema in general) on American film was in the look and atmosphere that pervaded the original cycle of dark, black-and-white, crime-oriented films that came to be known as film noir, running roughly from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958). (See my book American Noir Film for a historical overview of this important film genre and its later reincarnations up to the present day). These films often feature a murderous man who is lured to his doom through the seductive wiles of a particular kind of woman character who came to be known as the femme fatale (deadly woman). And, clearly, one could argue that Eggers reinterpretation of Nosferatu is filtered through (among other things) film noir, with Depp’s particular version of Ellen Hutter having more than a little in common with the film noir femme fatale.
One could, again, argue that Depp’s performance—with all the drooling and panting and tongue wagging—is a bit extreme, but extreme, somewhat exaggerated acting seems to be a hallmark of this film, perhaps as a nod to the sort of acting that was necessary to convey emotions in silent film, with its lack of dialogue. In addition to Orlok and the Hutters, the other two most memorable characters in the film are also a bit over-the-top. For example, the distinguished and versatile American actor Willem Dafoe (who had also starred in Eggers’ The Lighthouse in 2019) plays the scientist figure Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, who stands in for Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing (Professor Bulwer in the original Nosferatu). Dafoe’s performance is actually rather restrained in comparison with some of his own more spectacular performances, including his turn as Schreck in Shadow of the Vampire. However, von Franz does cut a rather odd figure that seems slightly out of sync with the other characters, giving him a vaguely comic air. While there is an extensive tradition of comic vampire films (see the collection edited by Bacon), the comic potential of the Dracula/Nosferatu story is often overlooked, even though it is clear that this narrative, however fundamentally dark, is extreme enough always to be on the verge of self-parody. Reviewing Eggers’ Nosferatu in The Guardian, Bradshaw notes that “any adaptation of Nosferatu has to decide on what can only be called the Mel Brooks question: how far to lean in to the black comic horror and absurdity. Herzog did it marginally, and so does Eggers—surely—by giving Dafoe’s professor a bizarrely long pipe to smoke (the equivalent, perhaps, of Klaus Kinski’s unsettlingly tall wineglass in Herzog’s Nosferatu).”
The final major character in Nosferatu is Herr Knock, the real estate broker (based on Stoker’s Renfield) who initially sends Hutter to Transylvania. As played here by Simon McBurney, Knock is quite clearly in thrall to Orlok from the very beginning, a fact that has driven him quite mad—though his desire is not so much to be bitten by Orlok as to be Orlok. McBurney’s Knock is largely a figure of pathos, and he does not quite reach the level of zany weirdness that has made the figure of Renfield/Knock such a juicy role for scenery-chewing actors through the years, often taking this character to the edge of comedy and beyond. (See Booker and Daraiseh for an overview of the history of this character.) Alexander Granach (a Jewish German actor who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and ended up appearing in a number of Hollywood films) played the original Knock, though the character got a boost in manic zaniness with the performance of Dwight Frye as Renfield in the original 1931 Dracula. Meanwhile, before his role as Dracula in Nosferatu the Vampyre, Klaus Kinski played a particularly whacked-out Renfield in Jesús Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). And one of the most fun things about Nosferatu the Vampyre itself is the performance by French writer/artist Roland Topor as perhaps the craziest and most extreme Renfield of all. By the time Dracula arrives in Germany in this film, Renfield has gone completely over the edge, turning into a cackling lunatic dancing merrily through the streets of Wismar as the citizens die off in droves from the plague brought by the vampire and his rats.
Eggers vs. Murnau: The Two Nosferatus
To comprehend Eggers’ Nosferatu properly, it is crucial to understand the exact nature of the relationship between this film and Murnau’s. In an early review, Peter Bradshaw described Eggers’ Nosferatu as a “respectful homage” to Murnau’s original, which seems about right, as does Bradhsaw’s description of Eggers’ film as featuring a vampire that is “more stylised, more studied, but less insidiously frightening than he needs to be, and there is less sense of his weakness—his passion for Depp’s Ellen—becoming dangerous to him.” All in all, Bradshaw concludes, Eggers’ film is “an elaborate, detailed love letter to the original, intelligently respectful and faithful.”
It is certainly the case that, in some ways, Eggers’ remake is so faithful to the original that it is reminiscent of Gus Van Sant’s notorious 1998 shot-for-shot replication of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), mostly using Hitchcock’s original script, camera placements, and camera movements. Van Sant’s film was almost universally reviled, perhaps most strongly because Vince Vaughn’s performance as Norman Bates was considered to be so much weaker than Anthony Perkins’ legendary performance in the same role in Hitchcock’s film. Some critics also felt that Van Sant’s film lack imagination, though one could argue that making such an exact remake was itself rather imaginative, or at least risky. Eggers’ film, though, differs enough from Murnau’s that most of these criticisms do not apply, partly because performances in a sound film cannot be compared directly with performances in a silent film, but also because the visual pleasures of Eggers’ lavishly constructed film far exceed anything that Murnau could have achieved with the technology available in 1922.
In this sense, Eggers visual enhancement of Murnau’s film goes far beyond anything in Van Sant’s remake of Hitchcock, which does add color but in a rather unimaginative way that actually makes Van Sant’s film less visually interesting than Hitchcock’s. In addition to a very creative use of color and sound, Eggers avoids Van Sant’s biggest mistake by being careful not to replicate exactly the most striking and memorable visual aspects of Murnau’s film—as when he gives his Orlok his own distinctive look, rather than attempting to mimic Schreck’s striking original.
Perhaps the most obvious visual difference between the 1922 Nosferatu and the 2024 Nosferatu is the different appearances of Nosferatu himself. One of the keys to the success of Murnau’s Nosferatu is distinctive look of Max Schreck’s Count Orlok, which differs so sharply from the somewhat charming version of Dracula as European aristocrat that we have seen in so many other Dracula films. But Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok in Eggers’ film pushes the envelope even further in this direction, to the point of making Orlok so repulsive that one might wonder why anyone might be seduced by him. But that, of course, is the point: Orlok is able to seduce, not because of his personal magnetism but because he is able to use supernatural powers to enthrall his victims.
Perhaps more important than the changed look of Orlok is the way Eggers references most of the key moments in Murnau’s film but does not attempt to replicate them visually, giving them a distinctive look of their own. This aspect of Eggers’ film can perhaps be best understood through a comparison of two of the two most memorable moments in Murnau’s film, which also appear in Eggers’ film but with distinctive differences. In Murnau’s original, for example, Nosferatu simply disappears as the sunlight strikes him at the climactic end of the film. Eggers’ Nosferatu, on the other hand, goes through an abject (and visually spectacular) sequence of physical destruction, eventually collapsing atop Ellen as a skeletal remain.
Orlok disintegrates as sunlight strikes him.
The destroyed Orlok lies atop the dead Ellen.
Meanwhile, probably the most important visual moment in Murnau’s film—and perhaps the best remembered visual in all of German Expressionist cinema—occurs in the scene in which Count Orlok mounts the stairs toward his assignation with Ellen, casting his shadow ominously on the wall. This moment has been replicated in number of vampire films—and also in other sorts of horror films. In Ti West’s The House of the Devil (2009), for example, an endangered babysitter (played by Jocelin Donahue) creeps up a stairway in what is essentially a haunted house, with her shadow cast ominously against a wall. The famous shot even appears in the Netflix neo-noir series Ripley (2024), though in a different way: here, the murderer Ripley drags a body down stairs, casting a shadow on the wall that at one point resembles a cat—while a very judgmental cat looks on (see Booker, “Steven Zaillian’s Ripley”).
The shadow of Orlok as he creeps up the stairs in Murnau’s Nosferatu.
Eggers, though, chooses to replicate this moment in a highly stylized fashion that re-creates the chilling atmospheric impact of this visual more than the visual itself. Thus, instead of emphasizing the shadow of Orlok’s entire body as he ascends the stairs, Eggers instead chooses to focus on the shadow of Orlok’s clawed hand, which seems even more threatening, suggesting the grasping nature of his desire for Ellen and the physically danger that he poses to her as he approaches her chamber.
The shadow of Orlok’s claws as he creeps up the stairs in Eggers’ Nosferatu.
To understand the relationship between Eggers’ film and Murnau’s original, one might appeal to Linda Hutcheon’s distinction between “parody” and “pastiche” as modes of replicating the style and content of earlier texts. In particular, Hutcheon argues that parody seeks “differentiation in its relationship to its model,” typically as a way of engaging critically with its model. Pastiche, on the other hand, pastiche “operates more by similarity and correspondence,” and thus does not seek to establish a distance from its model or to critique its model in any way (38).
Based on this distinction, it seems clear that Eggers does not intend his film as a parodic engagement with Murnau’s original but rather as a rather admiring and nostalgic reminiscence of it, suggesting that the best way to understand the relationship between the two films might be provided by Fredric Jameson’s crucial theorization of postmodernism as the dominant mode of cultural production in our contemporary era of “late capitalism.” For Jameson, pastiche is perhaps the most characteristic technique for the construction of postmodern artworks of all kinds, due to a cultural exhaustion and loss of historical sense that makes it impossible for contemporary artists to establish distinctive and original individual styles of their own. As a result, contemporary artists tend to look back longingly and nostalgically on the art works of the past and to use them as models. But, for Jameson, postmodern artists seek to mimic past works in rather straightforward ways that do not engage those works in any sort of critical dialogue. He thus refers to postmodern pastiche as a form of “blank parody” that leaves it free of any real critical power, evoking the past through borrowed images and styles “without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of any laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists” (Postmodernism 17).
Of course, a Gothic work such as Murnau’s Nosferatu is a perfect source for pastiche, partly because its highly stylized conventions are so extreme and so easily recognizable. In this sense, it is relevant that Jameson’s brief discussion of the Gothic in his indispensable 1991 postmodernism book dismisses the Gothic as a “boring and exhausted paradigm” that is hopelessly nostalgic and politically retrograde (289–91). Indeed, Alex Link has argued that Jameson’s dismissal of the Gothic is very much a part of his overall theorization of the particularly bland workings of nostalgia within postmodernism. For Jameson, perhaps the central example of postmodern pastiche is what he calls the “nostalgia film” a terminology he applies to films that stylistically evoke a specific period in the past in a blank, affectless mode that is bereft of the kind of genuine longing for something that has been lost that we typically associate with the emotion of nostalgia. This emotion, for Jameson, is unavailable to postmodern films because of their inability to grasp the historicity of the past (or of the present as the future of the past).
In the case of film, the styles to which Jameson refers are primarily visual, and he argues that the nostalgia film demonstrates “its historicist deficiency by losing itself in mesmerized fascination in lavish images of specific generational pasts” (296). Some of his favorite examples of the nostalgia film are neo-noir films—such as Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) and Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981)—noting the “stylish recuperation” of the American 1930s in the former (19), but arguing that the latter is particularly distinctive because it is set in the present but stylistically evokes the past, producing a “glossy” and “mesmerizing” demonstration, not of our ongoing ability to connect to our past, but precisely the opposite. For Jameson, such nostalgia films speak to the fact that we had (in the 1980s, when neo-noir film hit a particular peak) become so estranged from our present, demonstrating the “enormity of a situation in which we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience” (21).
Within the context of the contemporary culture of the 2020s, it is particularly interesting to note that Jameson’s theorization of postmodernism was developed through the 1980s and applies primarily to the culture of the 1970s and 1980s, which he sees as longing for the past because the present was so impoverished. Today, of course, the 1980s themselves have become the object of a great deal of cultural nostalgia, suggesting that our own present time might be even more imaginatively impoverished. And it is certainly true that, while it might be a technically impressive example of filmmaking craft, Eggers’ Nosferatu seems filled with nostalgia for Murnau’s film and does very little to enhance or update any message that might be contained in the original, except to the extent that Depp’s Ellen might have somewhat more agency than her predecessor (and certainly more than Stoker’s original Mina Harker), suggesting a more contemporary representation of her gender (especially in comparison with her rather ineffectual husband).
To this extent, Nosferatu serves as a verification of Jameson’s view of postmodern culture, suggesting that his original characterization of the culture of the 1980s might have been accurate and that it has become even more accurate over the years. At the same time, one might also argue that Eggers was particularly constrained by the fact that the Dracula/Nosferatu narrative is so well established (rivaled only by Frankenstein narratives in prominence) in horror film tradition that any significant deviations would be difficult to justify unless the whole scenario were changed, perhaps placing the story in a contemporary setting, as opposed to the late-nineteenth-century setting of Stoker’s novel and Murnau’s film. Eggers’ goal, though, was clearly to present the original story intact for the consumption of contemporary horror film audiences, many of whom might not find the original silent Nosferatu to their taste and thus might find Eggers’ film more to their liking, bringing the Nosferatu narrative to a new generation of viewers.a
In addition, while Eggers’s decision to remain faithful to the original Nosferatu might make his film a quintessential example of postmodern pastiche as described by Jameson, it is also the case that the last decade or so of “smart” horror films has been a particularly rich (and particularly innovative) cultural phenomenon that suggests at least the beginnings of a movement beyond the exhausted postmodern culture described by Jameson. There is, of course, room both to pay homage to the horror films of the past and to seek completely new directions in horror film, and Jameson’s point is surely not that contemporary cultural products that draw upon works of the past must always be critical of the those works or at least deviate from them in significant ways. His point is that, in the 1980s, we seemed to have reached an impasse in which it was impossible to mount an effective critique of past works or to do anything genuinely new. Smart horror films of the past decade suggest that, several decades after the culture that was discussed by Jameson, we are finally beginning to get beyond that impasse.
Works Cited
Bacon, Simon, ed. Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy. McFarland, 2022.
Booker, M. Keith. American Noir Film: From The Maltese Falcon to Gone Girl. Rowman and Littlefield, 2024.
Booker, M. Keith. “Steven Zaillian’s Ripley: Neo-Noir or Revisionary Noir?” Film International, 15 October 2024, https://filmint.nu/steven-zaillian-ripley-neo-noir-or-revisionary-noir-m-keith-booker/.
Booker, M. Keith, and Isra Daraiseh. “Renfield: The Vampire’s Undying Assistant.” The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire. Edited by Simon Bacon. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. 1569–1584. Published on-line, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82301-6_111-1.
Bradshaw, Peter. “Nosferatu Review—Robert Eggers’s Respectful Homage to a Vampire Horror Classic.” The Guardian, 2 December 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/02/nosferatu-review-robert-eggers-lily-rose-depp-bill-skarsgard. Accessed 9 April 2025.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms. Methuen, 1985.
Ide, Wendy. “Nosferatu Review—Lily-Rose Depp is the Dark Heart of Robert Eggers’s Extraordinary Vampire Tale.” The Guardian, 29 December 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/dec/29/nosferatu-review-lily-rose-depp-robert-eggers-willem-dafoe. Accessed 10 April 2025.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke University Press, 1991.
Link, Alex. “The Mysteries of Postmodernism, or, Fredric Jameson’s Gothic Plots.” Gothic Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, May 2009, pp. 70-85.
Prawer, S. S. Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht. 2nd ed. London: British Film Institute, 2013.