Nosferatu (2024)

Director: Robert Eggers

Cast: Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson

Have I Seen it Before: Nope. Brand new movie. First episode of a new season of Beyond the Cabin in the Woods. Interesting enough, a day before actually sitting down to watch the movie, I was volunteering at the theater and had to help somebody kick out some pathologically disruptive kids from a screening. So, I can cross that one off my bucket list?

Did I Like It: There’s probably not a whole lot new one can do with an adaptation of Dracula. The tentacles of that story seep into so much that if you’re alive in any way, you could probably guess where the story is going. There’s not even that much new anyone can do as a riff to Nosferatu (1922). Nothing will ever be quite as unnerving as the sight of Max Shreck as Count Orlock, especially when it was abundantly clear that there was no special effects as we understand them to convert a man into some kind of unspeakable creature of the night.

That all being said, Eggers immediately makes the case for his version of the story to need to exist. It is filled with atmosphere and the kind of concerted visual filmmaking that made up the best of the silent films, and is almost uniformly not on the menu for newly made movies.

Much has been made of the film’s disinterest in offering a riff on the original Orlock. Some say that the character as he appears in this film has little to do with what we have traditionally come to imagine when presented with vampires, but honest to God those people aren’t thinking things through very much. This Orlock is the first—with the possible exception of some early scenes with Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)—that looks like he might have once lived as Vlad the Impaler. That would be enough to consider the film something of a fascinating experience, but I also can’t get over Skarsgård’s performance in this film. There is no trace of Pennywise or any of his other performances here, so much so that I honestly didn’t realize it was Skarsgård until the end credits. Even Karloff and Lugosi ended up playing mild variations of a static screen persona in their varied careers. We may have found a new master of horror, who can disappear so completely into a role. What can’t he play?

IT - Chapter One (2017)

Director: Andy Muschietti

Cast: Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgård, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophie Lillis

Have I Seen it Before: I can’t believe I look back on seeing this in the theater as a simpler time, but I do… It’s hard to forget how terrifying in an unhinged sort of way that the “slideshow” scene was. I wasn’t even 100% sure what had happened in that scene, and it was only about 2:00 AM that following morning before I realized I had neglected to fall asleep in favor of trying to decode on a cinematic level what happened in just that scene.

Did I Like It: It’s unfortunate that IT - Chapter Two (2019) was such a befuddling disappointment, because this film ends up getting the short shrift in that deal. Whereas the conclusion so thoroughly misses the mark in every possible way (while at the same time not winding up completely embarrassing), this film capitalizes on every potential pitfall and turns it into an opportunity to make a better film.

Skarsgård has the tallest task on spec, as Tim Curry is the only consistently good thing about the first, made-for-TV adaptation It (1990). Literally no other performer in either parts of this new adaptation has been compared to their predecessor (or later on, the adults, although I did have some thoughts on Bill Hader vs. Harry Anderson). The new Pennywise acquits himself well and becomes just as iconic as his predecessor, which was no small accomplishment. His Pennywise harnesses some of the stranger elements from the source material and makes the entity less merely a murderous clown and more the ancient evil from within cosmos that he always could have been. His is the only thing that survives two movies essentially unscathed.

But the movie’s true secret weapon lies with the kids. Casting a batch of Losers could have been a big swing and a miss, but not only does each of the kids indelibly occupy their role (although Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) gets far less development than the character deserves), but they have such a seemingly genuine chemistry amongst one another that I can almost understand Muschietti’s impulse to keep the kids in the second part, even though their stories are effectively concluded here. Now, if only they had managed to pull that off the second time around… If it helps, I think the story of the children might just be more interesting than the adults, and Chapter Two never really had a chance.