The first reviews for Robert Eggers' Nosferatu dropped last night and we now have a Rotten Tomatoes score for the filmmaker's long-awaited return to horror.
As we write this, it sits at 93% based on 57 reviews. Whether the movie will find a mainstream audience over the holidays is hard to say, though some horror purists will likely be upset by the supposed changes made to Count Orlok's appearance.
Eggers has always fared pretty well on Rotten Tomatoes with The Witch (93%), The Lighthouse (90%), and The Northman (90%) all "Certified Fresh."
Orlok has deliberately been kept under wraps in the marketing campaign for this new take on Nosferatu (the studio is keen for it not be to referred to as a "remake"), and Eggers recently addressed his approach to the iconic vampire in an interview with Deadline.
"Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I’ve been thinking about and looking at for a long time," the filmmaker explained. "I had read Montague Summers [the clergyman scholar who wrote about the occult] as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes."
"And so, you’re infusing things you’re reading with cinematic tropes that aren’t there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you’re like, ‘They’re not even drinking blood, they’re just strangling people, or suffocating people, or f*cking them to death.’ And that was really interesting."
"What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like?" Eggers continued. "That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schreck’s makeup design."
A new take on F. W. Murnau's 1922 version and Werner Herzog's take in 1979, Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in its wake.
Written for the screen and directed by Robert Eggers, Nosferatu stars Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney and Willem Dafoe.
The movie arrives in theaters on Christmas Day. Check out the initial Tomatometer reveal in the X post below.