Review: 'Nosferatu' is your holiday ticket to fear and trembling

Looking for some horror holiday counter-programming? Then listen up: "Nosferatu," now haunting theaters, is your ticket to fear and trembling. This wild thing of beauty and terror, indelibly written and directed by Robert Eggers, is a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film milestone that was itself an unauthorized take on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, "Dracula."

You get it, right? That’s why the vampire, Nosferatu, played to creepy- crawly-gory perfection by Bill Skarsgård—the scream-inducing clown Pennywise from the "It" franchise—is called Count Orlok instead of Count Dracula. Otherwise, who are we kidding?

Eggers has terrorized us before with the spooky likes of "The Witch," "The Lighthouse," and "The Northman," but he’s pulling out all the chiller-diller stops on "Nosferatu" since living up to a horror landmark is hard, especially with purists gunning for you.

No need to worry. "Nosferatu" grabs you from the first fearsome scene to the last. It’s also the passion project Eggers has been spoiling to make for years. And he’s assembled a creative team, in front of and behind the camera, that is (pardon my language) to die for.

Set in 1838 in Germany, "Nosferatu" was shot in Prague by noted cinematographer Jarin Blaschke’s who slowly drains color from his images like Orlok does to his victims.

A prologue introduces us to a shrewdly cast and quite wonderful Lily-Rose Depp—her dad Johnny knows the undead territory from "Dark Shadows" and "Sleepy Hollow"—as Ellen, a teenager with visions of a dark silhouette she mistakes for a guardian angel.

Ellen couldn’t be more wrong. But the visions persist even after she marries Thomas Hutter (a nicely naïve Nicholas Hoult), who worries when his boss Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) sends him to a castle in Transylvania’s Carpathian Mountains. His job is to seal the sale of a moldy mansion for—you guessed it–Orlok, which will make the Count cozy neighbors with the Hutters.

Dumb idea since Ellen is already tormented with scary dreams about Orlok who beckons her to his side. She shelters with local friends, Anna (Emma Corrin) and her shipyard owner husband Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but the Count is not to be denied.

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His storm-tossed sea voyage results in a plague of rats on arrival. Yuck! With Thomas sidelined Ellen seeks help from Professor von France, played by a superb Willem Dafoe—a bloodsucker himself in "Shadow of the Vampire"— who brings much needed humor to the hell everyone else is living. He’s a hoot.

Still, it’s Ellen’s meet-up with Orlok that sends "Nosferatu" into occult orbit. Skarsgård sets the screen ablaze. Made up as a rotting corpse, but somehow still seductive (just wait, you’ll see), he dropped significant weight, spent hours a day in prosthetic makeup, and studied with an Icelandic opera singer to lower his vocal range as he spoke in a dead Balkan language.

It’s a hell of a performance, demonically devised to haunt your darkest dreams. Skarsgård admitted to Esquire recently that "it took a while for me to shake off the demon that had been conjured inside of me."

Audiences may never shake it off. Eggers has created a new classic in the art of dread. Warning: You may wake up from his cinematic nightmare, but you’ll wake up screaming.