General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20266 min read

Nosferatu (2024 film)

Nosferatu is a 2024 American gothic horror film directed by Robert Eggers, a remake of F. W. Murnau's silent classic Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) and an authorized reworking of the story Murnau had adapted without permission from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula. It stars Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, and Nicholas Hoult as Thomas Hutter, and was released by Focus Features on December 25, 2024.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Robert Eggers; screenplay credited to Eggers only³^•²²
Release	December 25, 2024 (domestic and EMEA), distributed by Focus Features¹
Principal cast	Bill Skarsgård (Count Orlok), Lily-Rose Depp (Ellen Hutter), Nicholas Hoult (Thomas Hutter), Aaron Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding), Willem Dafoe (Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz), Emma Corrin (Anna Harding)³
Setting	1830s Baltic Germany, in the fictitious town of Wisborg²
Running time / rating	2 hr 12 min; rated R for bloody violent content, graphic nudity, and some sexual content¹^•⁴
Box office	$181,979,112 worldwide, including $95,608,235 domestic on a $21,652,560 opening weekend¹
Critical scores	85% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (385 reviews) and 73% from audiences; Metascore 78 from 59 critic reviews⁵^•³

Spoilers

Story and sources

This gothic story centers on a young woman haunted by a horrifying vampire fixated on her, an obsession whose aftermath unleashes incalculable terror.⁶ The setup follows the prior tellings closely: Thomas Hutter, a real-estate agent, travels to the Carpathian Mountains to take deeds to Count Orlok, a mysterious aristocrat, and has a disturbing encounter with him; back in Wisborg, Ellen suffers seizures and spells as Orlok calls to her, and the occult specialist Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, played by Willem Dafoe, is the only one audacious enough to diagnose Orlok's mystical powers.⁷^•⁴

Eggers based his script on Murnau's 1922 film, which was itself an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker's Dracula (the author's estate sued for copyright infringement), and on Stoker's novel.²^•⁴ Reviewers identified the story as a fusion of sources: the 1922 silent film, whose plot it follows closely, Stoker's novel, and, to a lesser degree, Werner Herzog's 1979 remake Nosferatu the Vampyre and Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).⁸^•⁹

The Ellen and Orlok relationship. The psychosexual connection between Ellen and Orlok is what most differentiates Eggers's take from its predecessors. Eggers grounded it in the 19th-century belief that women prone to sleepwalking were in touch with another realm, expanding a psychic connection that the 1922 film had only hinted at.¹⁰ A comparative film study determined that, whereas the 1922 and 1979 versions kept sexuality mostly a matter of suggestion, the bond between vampire and human in the 2024 film has unmistakably acquired romantic and erotic aspects.¹¹ In the film's climax, Orlok must ask Ellen her consent before biting her, and her self-sacrifice echoes Murnau's decision to make Ellen the heroine of the story rather than leaving the hunt to the men, as Stoker's novel does with Mina Harker.¹²^•¹⁰

Production and visual approach

After the Sundance success of his debut feature The Witch (2015), Eggers got his wish to remake the film, spending years on research to be as historically accurate as possible; period paintings, rather than the stark black-and-white cinematography of Murnau's picture, were the main reference for the film's look.² Director of photography Jarin Blaschke, a frequent Eggers collaborator, received his first Academy Award nomination for the film's cinematography, which blends German romanticism and horror into painterly visuals, shot largely with practical lighting.¹³

A comparative study of the 1922 and 2024 films found that where Murnau created his Expressionist aesthetic through in-camera visual effects, Eggers strengthens the gothic atmosphere through the integration of CGI and practical visual effects.¹⁴ Eggers also keeps his Count Orlok far from Stoker's debonair villain: the grunting, skeletal demon is kept in constant shadow and usually appears backlit, an obfuscation the Atlantic's critic read as an attempt to make the Count seem arcane and unsettling again after a century of filmic depictions.⁷

Reception

The film earned generally favorable reviews. The Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus calls it "a behemoth of a horror film that is equal parts repulsive and seductive," and the audience summary credits its atmosphere and Lily-Rose Depp's performance.⁵ On Metacritic, 48 of 59 critic reviews were positive, 10 mixed, and 1 negative, for a Metascore of 78.³ The Hollywood Reporter praised a "Gothic horror nightmare heaving with sumptuous visual detail," and The Independent singled out Depp's embodiment of supernatural possession.¹⁵

Not all critics agreed. Richard Brody, a film critic who has written for The New Yorker since 1999, called the adaptation dialogue-heavy and sluggish, and El País's review judged that the best of this rereading was already present in Murnau and Herzog, faulting Eggers's mix of naturalism and spectacle.¹⁶^•¹⁷

Box office. The film opened domestically at $21,652,560 on December 25, 2024, and grossed $95,608,235 domestically (52.5% of its total) and $86,370,877 internationally, for $181,979,112 worldwide.¹ Its largest international markets included the United Kingdom ($15,999,043), Germany ($6,771,332), Spain ($5,637,208), and Italy ($5,333,023).¹ A Focus Features summary described it as the studio's second highest-grossing movie ever at the domestic box office, behind Downton Abbey.¹⁸

Place in the Nosferatu lineage

The 2024 film is the third major screen version of the story, after Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and Herzog's 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre.¹⁹ A scholarly analysis of the three films argues that each reflects the social fears and values of its era: the 1922 film the traumas of post-war Germany, the 1979 film existential anxieties, and the 2024 film modern society's complex relationships with love, sexuality, and death.¹⁹ Side-by-side shot-for-shot comparisons of the versions, circulated widely after the release, show Eggers revitalizing the original silent film for a new era, whereas Herzog had adapted it to his own sensibilities.²⁰

Following the film, Eggers reteamed with several of its cast on his werewolf horror movie Werwulf, with Willem Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Lily-Rose Depp attached.²¹

References

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026