Nosferatu

Anytime we get a new Dracula movie, all people want to know is whether it’s scary. That’s always seemed like the wrong question. These films have never scared me, at least, not in a conventional horror-movie-suspense sort of way. A truer test for one of these things is a matter of carnal morality. How hideous can the filmmakers make their vampire — how cadaverous, satanic, ratty, rasping, raisiny, rinded — until he’s just too unsightly, too unwieldy not simply to behold but to be held?

Can an actor so transform the effects, prosthetics and rococo that we give up and give in to the gnarled, murderous pestilence towering over everybody? That’s one barely concealed conundrum in this new, Robert Eggers Dracula film, “Nosferatu”: What do you do when evil kisses better than your husband?

Nothing, I’m afraid. You just whirlpool around the feeling, like the movie’s at-risk Victorian-era heroine, until you’re sunk, crying out for a scratch of the dark lord’s claws. That terror feels like the movie’s achievement. Eggers, along with his craft technicians and the actor Bill Skarsgard, has created the grossest-looking, ooziest, most cooked, most rotted, most mustached, least-living Dracula I can recall.

And yet what this Dracula radiates — the scariest thing about him — is greater than any of that totalizing power. Alas, after more than two hours of chomping, impaling, infanticide and telepathy, I was so queasy with sympathy for all the sexual manipulation, so susceptible to it, that I’m ashamed to confess that I wanted my turn. Do me, baby.

Here’s a shrewd approach to Bram Stoker’s 127-year-old novel: a vampire movie that feels configured to our renewed attraction to the strong man. The character and location names have been changed to match “Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror,” the silent chiller F.W. Murnau and Henrik Galeen made of the same material in 1922. But the story proceeds more or less intact. This remains the tale of a spooky real estate transaction in 1838. A young, newlywed, inexperienced solicitor named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels from his made-up German city of Wisborg to Transylvania. One Count Orlok (Skarsgard) has his eye on a property in the region but demands the closing paperwork be signed via house call.

The count gets a look at Ellen (Lily Rose Depp), the lady in Thomas’s locket, and schemes to make her soul a separate residence, his love shack. Even before her beloved Thomas departs, Ella fears what’s on its way, because Orlok has already invaded her mind and flooded her dreams. Spellbound, she wants her tin roof, rusted.

Setting aside some gratuitous jump scares, Eggers has now made a Dracula movie that’s more than an exercise, more than an assertion of talent. There’s a vision at work. His “Nosferatu” is differently sepulchral when compared to other notable Dracula movies while also paraphrasing some of them.

This “Nosferatu” dares you to feel seduced and sick over the seduction. Those other Dracula figures are somehow recognizable, physically, as men. You can’t find the actor inside Orlok. Skarsgard is acting the man very much at home in the monster. I don’t know how many demons and boogie men he’s played at this point, but he might become the doomscroller’s Lon Chaney.