Giddy reactions to a movie that ‘goes harder than any other horror film’ this year promise one of 2025’s best new releases for the UK.
With performances dubbed ‘out of this world’ and a film described as ‘one of the most seductively macabre films ever made’, Nosferatu has also been called ‘a perfect remake’.
Robert Eggers’ anticipated take on the Dracula-inspired tale has also roundly been praised as not only the best horror film of the year, but one of the best overall.
Critics who have been able to see the first screenings for Nosferatu in the US, where it’s scheduled to come out on Christmas Day, promise terrifying things for British fans come January 1, the UK release date.
Starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emm Corrin and Willem Dafoe, Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, according to the official synopsis, which causes untold horror in its wake.
‘Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu goes HARDER than any other horror film this year. Holy f**k,’ wrote film critic Courtney Howard in awe, also calling it ‘a gorgeous grotesquerie of dread-infused terrors and a divine dark delight’.
‘Bill Skarsgård’s Count Orlok is pure sinister nightmare fuel. Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult’s best work to date.’
Next Best Picture’s Editor-in-Chief Matt Neglia also had praise for the acting as he noted ‘Lily-Rose Depp gives every ounce of her body and soul to this eye-popping performance of tormented possession’, while Skarsgård as vampire Count Orlok was ‘so utterly compelling every moment he’s on screen that his presence lingers even when he’s not’.
He also warned that the ‘breathtaking final shot sent chills through my body as I left the theatre’.
Meanwhile Griffin Schiller described Nosferatu as ‘a deeply chilling nightmare that lingers’.
‘If you love the horny fever dream of Coppola’s Dracula you’ll adore this,’ he added, while anointing it ‘easily one of the year’s best’.
‘Best horror film of the year’ proclaimed film critic Zayyan Farooqi in agreement, while @dancindanonfilm said that the movie ‘took my breath away’.
‘Nosferatu is a frightening fever dream. Robert Eggers’s camera movements are masterful as he pulls you into a relentlessly disturbing horror film,’ shared movie and TV critic Jonathan Sim, who also claimed that the period horror ‘improves upon the original’ with a performance by Skarsgård, ‘who manages to be even scarier and more unrecognisable than he was as Pennywise’.
It’s been reported that Depp will be submitted for Oscar consideration in the best actress category, while Skarsgård, Hoult and Dafoe will be classified as supporting actor.
The movie was initially set to star Anya Taylor-Joy and Harry Styles as Ellen and Thomas Hutter, the woman who becomes the obsession of a vampire and her husband who unwittingly signs away her soul.
Nosferatu was first made over a century ago in 1922 as a silent German Expressionist Dracula knock-off directed by FW Murnau and starring Max Schreck.
Schreck’s bald head, bat ears, peg-like teeth and clawed nails as vampire Count Orlok have become an iconic image in cinematic history, but Skarsgård’s transformation has so far been kept secret – much like the tease of Nicolas Cage’s appearance as the titular villain in Longlegs this sumer.
We have seen just shadows and a sinister, long-nailed hand in the trailer.
Director Eggers has made a name for himself in the horror/thriller-history space over the last decade with his feature films The Witch, The Lighthouse and Viking tale The Northman.
Nosferatu was remade previously by Werner Herzog as Nosferatu the Vampyre in 1979, starring Klaus Kinski, while E. Elias Merhige made Shadow of the Vampire in 2000, a fictionalised behind-the-scenes look at the making of Nosferatu with John Malkovich as filmmaker Murnau and Dafoe as Schreck.
Nosferatu will hit UK cinemas on January 1, 2025.
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