House of Frankenstein – Blood and Porridge

March 19, 2025March 19, 2025

Eggers’ banquet

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector. This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses. The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title. A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great. At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector. When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws. But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen. And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula. That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old. 13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life. Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu. More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese. That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema. I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t. Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula. However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu. There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen. Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template. Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok. Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host. He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination. These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there. Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him. Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals. Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg. Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple. Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated, escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city. Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well. Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene. As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16). Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task. You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19^th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss. But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula. And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter. His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock. The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore. (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.) If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do. More on that in a minute.

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing. When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught. Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz. Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok… I can see why it’s been controversial. Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair. Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok. During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness. But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970). But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time. Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché. As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss. (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent. At least it’s different… And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing. But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys. (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged. The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives. Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces. Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte. If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought. In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok. But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy. It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much. This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

September 17, 2024September 17, 2024

Cultural Alasdair-isation

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Finally, I’ve managed to catch up with the movie Poor Things (2023). This is Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s adaptation of the novel of the same name, which was written, designed and illustrated by the Scottish polymath Alasdair Gray and published in 1992. Early this year, it got a brief release in Singapore, courtesy of the city-state’s arthouse cinema The Projector. But when I tried to buy tickets for it on a day I wasn’t working, I found it was already sold out. So, I had to wait until it turned up on a streaming service I had access to.

Anyway, nine months later, here are my thoughts on the film and how it compares to Alasdair Gray’s novel. A warning before I proceed – there will be spoilers about both, including about their endings.

I’m a huge fan of Gray, who passed away in 2019, and I consider Poor Things one of the key Scottish novels of the 1990s. It’s a retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) set in Victorian Glasgow. The bulk of the book has a narrator, Archibald McCandless, relating how his scientist colleague Godwin Baxter creates a young woman, Bella, out of dead flesh just as Frankenstein did with his creature. What Baxter does is reanimate the body of a drowned woman and replace her brain with that of the baby she’d been pregnant with when she died. Thus, Bella, despite appearing to be an adult, has a lot of learning to do. McCandless falls in love with her despite her initial infantilism (and later childishness and adolescent-ness) and there ensues a highly entertaining mishmash of sci-fi story, horror story, adventure, romance and comedy

I’m less of a fan of Lanthimos, having mixed feelings about his previous films. I thought The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Favourite (2018) were all right, but I found his earlier The Lobster (2015) witless and annoying. So, I wasn’t overjoyed to hear that a favourite book of mine was being filmed by someone I was, at best, conflicted about.

The good news is that, for the most part, Lanthimos’s cinematic version is very entertaining too. For me, it’s his most engaging work so far. However, because it’s stuffed to its bulwarks with scenes of sexual shenanigans, those of a prudish disposition would be advised to stay away from it.

© Film4 / Element Pictures / Fruit Tree / Searchlight Pictures

Firstly, it has many good performances. Willem Dafoe does a decent job of playing Godwin Baxter – ‘God’ as Bella refers to him with unconscious irony – although he wasn’t the actor I imagined when I read the book 30 years ago. I’d envisioned the late Robbie Coltrane as Baxter, whom Gray depicted as hulking and huge-headed, though with a high-pitched voice and small, dainty – practically Trump-like – hands. Visually, Lanthimos and scriptwriter Tony McNamara rework the character. They give him an unsettling habit of burping out bubbles and make his face malformed and stitched-together, so that he resembles a cross between Frankenstein’s creature and the 1930s-40s character actor Rondo Hatton, who in real life suffered from the disfiguring disease acromegaly. But, helped by Dafoe’s understated, softy-spoken portrayal, Baxter retains the endearing blend of kindness and stubbornness he had in the novel.

Ramy Youssef is likeable as Max McCandles – the film’s renamed Archibald McCandless – though, as we’ll see, the excisions and simplifications the film imposes on the book make him a less complex character than the one Gray imagined. Meanwhile, the most memorable male performance comes from Mark Ruffalo as Duncan Wedderburn, the lawyer who encounters Bella while doing legal business with Baxter and McCandles, falls in lust and elopes with her. Or more accurately, since at this point Bella’s mind hasn’t developed much beyond that of a child, abducts her. While Wedderburn takes her on a debauched ‘grand tour’ that extends from Portugal to Egypt and then to France – with the rapidly-evolving Bella gradually turning the tables on him – Ruffalo gloriously channels every cad, rotter and bounder who’s existed in British culture, from Harry Flashman to Terry-Thomas.

Even Ruffalo’s performance, though, is something of a sideshow compared to the one delivered by Emma Stone as Bella. Mentally growing from a floor-pissing infant to a gawky child, from a rebellious (if naïve) teenager to a verbose and sophisticated adult, all the while wreaking havoc with the social, patriarchal and sexual mores of the society around her because she doesn’t have a filter and is fearless in challenging what doesn’t seem fair or sensible to her, Stone never puts a foot wrong with her portrayal. She fully deserved her Best Actress win for this at the 96^th Academy Awards, though I was a little surprised she did win – films as provocative and hard to categorise as Poor Things don’t normally float the boat of the conservative-minded, play-it-safe Academy.

Poor Things also netted an Oscar for its production design by James Price and Shona Heath and set decoration by Zsuzsa Mihalek, which are the film’s other great strength. Price, Heath and Mihalek place Bella and her associates in a world that draws on our popular images and stereotypes of the Victorian era, puts them through a mincing machine and reassembles them as somewhere both familiar and trippily different, one where everything is that much bigger, stranger and more baroque. One where the traditional Hansom cabs mingle on the streets with chugging, steam-powered ones that have ornamental horses’ heads on their fronts, where Lisbon’s tram system has been replaced by an airborne network of cables and capsules, where the Mediterranean is ploughed by absurdly top-heavy and castle-like steamships churning out yellow smoke under psychedelically tumultuous skies. I don’t think I’ve seen a live-action film that comes closer to capturing the vibe of the sci-fi subgenre of steampunk.

I think the design team went too far with one detail, though. Populating Baxter’s house and grounds are bizarre hybrid animals – a half-dog, half-goose creature, for instance, and a half-pig, half-chicken one – which are presumably the results of past experiments. Doomed to wander around as house-decorations, with their anatomies horribly messed up, those hybrids can’t have much of an existence. They suggest an uncharacteristic cruelty in Baxter’s nature. Yet as we see from his fatherly concern for Bella, he isn’t Dr Moreau.

A bigger flaw in a generally excellent film is that, at 142 minutes, Poor Things is too long. And its final stretch is a bit dissatisfying because it has a tagged-on feeling, involving a new character, Alfie Blessington (Christopher Abbott), who is Bella’s husband. At least, he’s the husband of the woman whose corpse Godwin salvaged, revived and turned into Bella. He takes her back to his house, proves to be a brute and imprisons her until, once again, she turns the tables on this latest antagonist. Blessington appears near the end of the book too but Gray takes less time to deal with him – a few pages, if I remember correctly.

Unfortunately, as a last-minute villain, Abbott’s Blessington can’t quite match Ruffalo’s splendidly scenery-chewing Wedderburn who preceded him. Also, the film ends with a weak punchline that, again, implies some out-of-character cruelty on Baxter’s part. (Actually, it made me think of the 1944 Universal Studios potboiler House of Frankenstein, wherein Boris Karloff’s villainous Dr Gustav Niemann tried to transplant a man’s brain into the body of a dog).

Its length and final act aside, Lanthimos’s Poor Things gets a definite thumbs-up from me… as a self-contained film. As an adaptation of Alasdair Gray’s novel, I’m less enamoured with it. One issue is that it makes no attempt to replicate what happens at the book’s end. This is when Gray turns everything on its head because he lets Bella take over as storyteller. She denounces Archie McCandless’s version of events and makes him out to be devious and delusional. She claims to be not a Frankenstein-type creation but an ordinary 19th-century woman – though one ahead of her time because she passionately believes in and campaigns for gender equality and social justice. What we’ve read to this point is an insecure man’s gothic fabrication. Thus, the book’s last part serves as a rebuke of male attitudes towards women that combine possessiveness with mad romanticism.

This is both more disorientating and more satisfying than in the film. There, yes, Bella becomes an emancipated woman, fiercely intelligent and independent. But she remains a male fantasy creation, something that was made on a man’s laboratory table, reared and tutored in the ways of the world by men and used as a sexual plaything by dastardly men like Wedderburn – Bella, with her brain still trying to make sense of her experiences and her vocabulary still limited, describes those carnal encounters as ‘furious jumping’. However, Gray pulls the rug from under us, making us question men’s treatment of women and their whole interpretation of women, in a way the film doesn’t.

The other thing the book has but the film doesn’t have is Scotland. Gray’s Glasgow setting has disappeared, supplanted by a sprawling, steampunk-styled, Victorian London one. And what was generally a very Scottish book has been turned into a film where the only hints that Scotland exists are Dafoe’s low-key Scottish accent and a few Scottish-sounding character names. This de-Scottification of the story strips from it a layer of symbolism that was obviously important to Gray, an enthusiastic supporter of Scottish independence.

You can read Poor Things-the-book as an analogy for the relationship between Scotland and England. When Archie – falsely – portrays Bella as a creature of gothic fantasy, this parallels how the common image of Scotland was fashioned by 19^th-century English monarchs like King George IV and Queen Victoria (with, admittedly, help from locals like Sir Walter Scott) into a fanciful, ethereal never-never-land of castles, mountains, lochs, heather, tartan, kilts, bagpipes and so on. When Bella finds her voice, refutes Archie’s fantasizing and finds her true identity as a campaigner for feminist and socialist causes, it can be seen as Gray’s wish for Scotland to cut loose from fusty old history-obsessed England / Britain and become a new, egalitarian and forward-looking nation. Mind you, the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s independence referendum, which ended in failure for Gray’s side in 2014, is just a day or two away – so such a thing probably won’t happen for a while yet.

I don’t think Gray – a man so idealistic that in 2019, rather than have a funeral, he left his body to science – would have been too annoyed had he lived to see the cinematic Poor Things. I don’t think he’d have indulged in literal ‘furious jumping’. Rather, he’d have understood why Lanthimos, a Greek, probably didn’t feel comfortable with the Scottish aspects of the story and elected to leave them out. (It also wouldn’t have surprised me if Gray had donated his royalties from the film to his nearest foodbank.)

I suspect, though, he’d have been depressed that no Scottish filmmaker had tried to make a celluloid version of Poor Things that was closer to his original, Glasgow-set vision. Or that there seems to be zero funding and infrastructure in Scotland’s modern-day arts world to support a local filmmaker wanting to adapt the book to the screen.

And I don’t agree with certain Scottish commentators – invariably of a ‘Unionist’ hue – who’ve argued that it doesn’t matter that Scotland has been omitted from the movie. Journalist Kenny Farquharson, for instance, has claimed that “Poor Things is a triumph for Scotland,” which makes no sense at all. How can it be a triumph for Scotland if Scotland isn’t in it? It’s like saying The Godfather (1972) is a triumph for Indonesia. Or Blade Runner (1982) is a triumph for Birmingham.

Incidentally, there is one magical moment where Poor Things-the-film achieves an alchemy with Poor Things-the-book. That’s the scene at the end where Bella and Archie snuggle up beside the dying Godwin Baxter – a visual reference to the image Gray created for the novel’s cover.