When Remaking a Masterpiece Is Worth the Risk

I’ve always thought that one of the most insoluble aesthetic problems going is remaking a movie masterpiece. I certainly understand the impulse to passionately re-engage such a work, but if the definition of a masterwork is something peerless at what it sought to accomplish, how do you remake it without simply reiterating it? There’s a reason no one has tried second versions of Fellini’s “8½” or Coppola’s “The Godfather” or Polanski’s “Chinatown.” In the case of Fellini’s achievement, is someone going to produce a more harrowing portrait of the self-deluding toxicity of male narcissism? In the case of Coppola’s, of the corrosive effects of power? Or in the case of Polanski’s, of the Hey-nothing-personal malevolence of late-model capitalism? (Water itself in that movie turns out to be the commodity that’s manipulated for profit.)

When it comes to those who have waded into that kind of deep water, some have tried the Let’s-really-shake-things-up solution. There’s the lamentable 1962 remake of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” for instance, which not only eliminated the central figure of Cesare the somnambulist but also featured a Caligari who instead of practicing diabolic hypnotism spent his time showing the heroine offensive pictures. Other filmmakers have chosen the even more baffling route of changing almost nothing, such as Gus Van Sant’s nearly shot-for-shot 1998 remake of “Psycho.” The number of disappointed moviegoers you risk in remaking a masterpiece from 1922 is smaller, for obvious reasons, but even so, the director Robert Eggers has made clear in any number of interviews his understanding that his new “Nosferatu” is re-engaging one of the greatest of the silent movies. (In 2016, when he was first attempting to remake the film, he told an interviewer that it felt “ugly and blasphemous and egomaniacal and disgusting” to take up that project so early into his career.)

F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror” is itself a remake — an unauthorized adaptation of “Dracula,” Bram Stoker’s compulsively readable fever dream of a novel — and Murnau and the screenwriter Henrik Galeen retained much of what was arresting about the original while slipping in their own major changes: They’re responsible, for example, for the now-set-in-stone tradition that sunlight can destroy the vampire, a notion nowhere in Stoker’s book. I likely saw “Nosferatu” at too impressionable an age. I was 6, PBS was showing such things and my babysitter was simply glad I wasn’t burning down the house. But I would have been flattened by it whenever I saw it. It was like having felt a draft from a grave. (Its effects were so long-lasting that 30-something years later I published a novel inspired by the film and its production.) The whole thing wasn’t so much petrifying as insidiously unsettling, and all of that started with the figure of Nosferatu himself. Max Schreck’s performance is, 102 years later, still the benchmark for sinister and dignified repulsiveness. Schreck’s vampire has the stillness of a figure in a bad dream or a spider on its web, and the world he inhabits is at times equally disconcerting. After our hero Hutter’s first frightening night in Nosferatu’s castle, he notices in the mirror that something has bitten his neck, and he smiles.

But the most destabilizing figure might well be Hutter’s wife, Ellen, our heroine, who’s again and again shown to be telepathically on the monster’s wavelength, even when he’s thousands of miles away, so that polarities like good and evil or desire and repulsion seem to just evaporate while we watch. That last aspect alone would seem to land this story in Robert Eggers’s wheelhouse. Part of the subversive energy of movies like “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” derives from what feels like modern takes on historical characters in thrall to dark passions so that the distantly historical is both granted its strangeness and animated by a scrutinizing modern sensibility. At its best, his version both evokes and reconceives Murnau’s most brilliant visual ideas. Murnau’s masterful use of the opacities of dark archways from which the vampire can emerge and into which he can dissolve is both echoed and made new. Murnau’s famously arresting use of shadows to visualize the vampire’s defiling reach is reimagined when those shadows in this new version extend themselves in a 360-degree pan that evokes their vertiginous inescapability. And the shadow of the vampire’s hand now extends across the entire city, repurposing the most memorable image from Murnau’s “Faust.”

“Eggers’s movies have always featured emotional intensities that can seem overdone in their in-your-face aggressiveness.”

But this new “Nosferatu” is even more clearly Ellen’s story. If in Murnau’s original, the awfulness is coming for everyone and Ellen is its temporary focus, in Eggers’s it’s coming for Ellen and everyone else is collateral damage. Both movies render the vampire as a grotesque form of desire that’s both irresistibly powerful and catastrophically dangerous. And in both, the woman can only overcome that desire by indulging it, and doing so will insure her destruction and save everyone else. If you’re a female filmgoer, at this point you’re likely muttering, “What else is new?”