Alan J. Pakula took the paranoia at the start of the 1970s and made this film, as well as The Parallax View and All the President’s Men, movies shaped by and that shaped the zeitgeist. He didn’t stop making important films, as he’d gone on to make Sophie’s Choice, Presumed Innocent, The Pelican Brief and Dream Lover, which has some tones of Giallo.
A chemical company executive has disappeared, and the only clue is obscene letters that were due to be sent to a call girl named Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda). The company hires a detective, John Klute (Donald Sutherland), to determine where the man has gone.
There’s a john who is so disturbed that two of his past clients have either committed suicide or become addicts. Bree had seen that man but can’t remember him. That is, once she finally opens up to Klute, who has been listening to her phone calls and following her, learning that she’s an actress who does sex work to pay her bills. One of the girls she knows, Arlyn Page (Dorothy Tristan), can tell Klute that his client may be the killer.
Fonda, a feminist, didn’t want to play this role. She wanted to drop out and ask Pakula to hire Faye Dunaway. She consulted with friends and, after some soul-searching, took on the role. Despite the controversy of her Vietnam protest, it became one of the best-known roles of her career, winning a Best Actress Oscar.
I like the end of this, as Bree keeps working everyone, saying that she’ll be back to see her therapist next week and that she would go mental living in a domestic world. Yet for all we see, Bree and Klute might be destined to be happy together. That’s a big win for a movie that follows a lot of Giallo beats and is filmed as if it’s surveillance footage. Sutherland and Fonda dated for a while; he was her date to the Oscars that year.
Bree’s apartment wasn’t real but was built on a sound stage. That said, Fonda did sleep overnight in it sometimes, and it even had a working toilet. She decorated the place as if Bree was a romance novel reader and had a cat. There’s also a hidden autographed photo of JFK. Fonda had a friend in Lee Strasberg’s private class who occasionally slept with the President, and in her head, she imagined that Bree did, too.
Editor’s note: Cinematic Void will be playing this movie on January 18 at 7:30 PM ET at The Sie Film Center in Denver and will be co-hosted by Theresa Mercado of Scream Screen and Keith Garcia, Artistic Director – Sie FilmCenter. You can get tickets here. For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Knife + Heart is a true anomaly when it comes to Giallo. It’s from France, a country more given to fantastique films than Giallo, although movies like The Night Caller, Without Apparent Motive, and The Night Under the Throat exist. And its victims aren’t gorgeous women but the actors of the gay porn industry, changing the psychosexual dynamics of the form.
Instead of featuring the sounds of a band like Goblin or a score by Morricone or Orlandi, Knife + Heart has music by Anthony Gonzalez of M83, director Yann Gonzalez’s brother.
A young man is killed by a masked man whose very sex conceals his murder weapon to open the film. Then, we meet Anne (Vanessa Paradis), an adult film director recently abandoned by her girlfriend and editor, Lois. The man killed in the opening was the star of several of her films; now she must find an actor to take his place. That leads her to Nans, who agrees to be in her movie despite identifying as a straight man.
The new film — Homocidal — will be her version of the murders, which continue targeting members of her cast. The police either can’t — or won’t — help. But the movie finished, and as the group celebrates its completion with a picnic, the killer strikes again, just as Anne pretty much assaults Lois in an attempt to get her back.
The true killer is a man whose father caught him making love to another man. He killed his lover and castrated his son, who was also burned in a fire before being brought back from the dead by a blind crow — the fact that this movie isn’t called Call of the Blind Crow speaks to its non-Italian origins — and seeing one of Anne’s movies brought his memories back.
This being a giallo, there’s also a bird expert with a disfigured hand that looks like he has, quite literally, chicken fingers. Plus, the entire end of the movie is explained via voiceover. The fact that so much of this movie is given to style over substance means it lives up to the film that inspired it.
While the murders are in your face, the sex is nearly hidden from view. Anne is an intriguing protagonist — drunken and bitter instead of the normal virginal giallo and slasher ingenues that save the day. She instead brings the killer closer with each scene that she directs.
Back when they were child chess prodigies, David Willerman (Charles Bailey-Gates) and Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert) had a significant match. This match, which ended with Peter victorious and David stabbing him with a pen, had a profound impact on both their lives. It led to Peter’s father leaving and his mother committing suicide, and David’s obsession with his chess board, which he kept in the group homes and orphanages he grew up in.
When Peter grows up, he ascends to the status of a chess grandmaster and becomes a widower, left to raise his daughter, Erica (Katharine Isabelle), alone. The plot thickens when his latest lover, Debi (Kehli O’Byrne, Ginger Snaps), is discovered dead. The police, led by Police Captain Frank Sedman (Tom Skeritt), Detective Andy Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), and psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane), launch an investigation, with Peter as the prime suspect. However, the mystery deepens as David, the potential missing link, enters the picture.
Directed by Swiss-born Carl Schenkel and written by Brad Mirman (Body of Evidence), this film, a part of the Giallo genre, features all of Peter’s lovers showing up with their faces painted like clowns and drained of blood. It also takes a page out of The Cat o’ Nine Tails by having Peter’s daughter Erica being best friends with his blind coach, who is played by Ferdy Maine (the devil from Night Train to Terror).
I always wonder how the Giallo police work. In this example, Sheppard goes from psychoanalyzing Peter to being a skewered queen. See, I can make sex jokes about anything! But seriously, defund the Giallo police. Sleeping with a suspect? Well, they were married in real life at the time.
It’s not the best Giallo-adjacent movie I’ve seen, but it’s not the worst. I did like how excited Lambert was when he won at Battle Chess.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Saturday, Jan. 18 at midnight at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, MA (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Initially intended for Michelangelo Antonioni, this film had the potential to be another Blow-Up. However, Carlo Vanzina and Enrico Vanzina created it with only a limited connection to the novel that inspired the title. The book, written by fashion journalist Paolo Pietroni under the pseudonym Marco Parma, generated significant controversy upon its release for naming prominent figures in Italy’s fashion industry.
The plot of this film, unlike any other, revolves around a serial killer prowling the streets of Milan, targeting glamorous models with a deadly pair of scissors, a weapon suggested by the renowned writer Franco Ferrini, known for his collaborations with Dario Argento. The initial choice of a gun as the killer’s weapon was quickly discarded, as it didn’t quite fit the unique essence of the Giallo genre.
Meanwhile, Yellowstone Park ranger Bob Crane (played by Tom Schanley) senses that his sister Jessica (Nicola Perring) is in distress. His journey takes him across the world, where he unexpectedly finds himself mingling with the rich and famous. Can he rescue her, or will he find himself in the crosshairs of the killer? And will Donald Pleasence ever turn down a film role?
One thing is certain: Barbara (Renée Simonsen), a model and friend of Jessica’s, is interested in Bob, but there are hints that she might also be obsessed with Jessica.
I often think about the connection between Dario Argento and Brian De Palma. This movie shares similarities with its murder scenes set in Italy and its modern American methods of death, which are reminiscent of the drill in Body Double and the psychic elements in Sisters.
Unlike many Giallo films, this one made a significant impact in Italy, sparking a small wave of comeback films set in the fashion world and the sequel Too Beautiful to Die. While I prefer that sequel and certainly think it surpasses the third film, the Vanzina brothers’ The Last Fashion Show, I’ve come to appreciate this film over time.
Never forget that this has one of the most amazing moments in Italian exploitation movies: Donald Pleasence going to town on a Wendy’s salad bar.
The sixth season premiered on HBO on October 31, 1984, with “Only Skin Deep” — along with “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” and “Whirlpool” — an episode directed by William Malone (feardotcom, Scared to Death) and written by Dick Beebe, who also worked with Malone on House On Haunted Hill.
Carl (Peter Onorati) is a woman-beating loser who shows up at a party knowing an ex will be there and makes a scene, as everyone knew he would, before meeting a masked woman named Molly (Sherrie Rose, Mary Jo from American Rickshaw), who says that she is dressed as “a synthetic shield with a corpse inside.” She takes Carl home, but that’s probably not a good idea for either of them.
“Hmm, I see your raise and I call! Bleed ’em and weep! Spades beat hearts every time. Oh, hello creeps. So glad you could join me for my weekly game. My deal! Hacks and chokers are wild. Are you in? Good. So’s the man in tonight’s terror tale, except his game is relationships. It’s a ghoulish little gamble I call “Only Skin Deep.””
The night of wild passion they share takes away Carl’s anger, but it won’t last, as she wants nothing to do with him afterward. He soon learns that attacking her is the worst thing he could have done, as she has no true face. Soon, he doesn’t have one of his own.
This episode was based on “Only Skin Deep!” from Tales from the Crypt #38, written by Al Feldstein and William Gaines and drawn by Reed Crandall. The comic is very different, as Herbert and Suzanne meet yearly at Mardi Gras. One year, Herbert becomes tired of being separated from her for a whole year and asks him to marry her. Suzanne still refuses to remove her witch mask, even after she marries him and they consummate their relationship. Then, when he tries to remove the mask himself, he rips off her face and watches her slowly die. Good Lord! Choke…
In the final part of my interview with Johannes Grenzfurthner, we discuss his new film, Solvent, in more depth.
B & S About Movies: What else shaped Solvent from your own life?
Johannes Grenzfurthner: There are moments in the film that are direct quotes or anecdotes from my life. For example, the story about my grandmother is true. I went to see E.T. with her, and she was so overwhelmed.
(Editor’s note: In the film, the character Bartholdi recalls seeing E.T. with his grandmother. Flabbergasted by the movie, she tries to make sense of it, saying: “Spielberg. Hmmm. A Jew.”)
She wasn’t anti-Semitic in the way we typically think of it—she hated Hitler, often cursed him because her brother died in the war, and she never forgave him for that. But she was born in 1923 and grew up in an era saturated with Nazi propaganda. Like most kids at the time, she was part of the Nazi youth organizations—it was mandatory. While she never openly spoke badly about Jewish people or subscribed to Nazi ideology, there was still a residue of that indoctrination in her thinking. When we saw E.T. back in 1982, she was genuinely fascinated but completely baffled. It was probably the first science fiction movie she’d ever seen in a cinema. She had grown up on films from the ’40s and ’50s that aired on Austrian television—none of them were anything like E.T., she tried to make sense of it, and her explanation was, “Spielberg… he’s Jewish. Maybe that’s why it’s so strange.”
It’s such a weird anecdote, but I felt it perfectly captured the ambivalence of that generation’s thinking. Even when they weren’t openly hateful, there was still this ingrained framework of “otherness” and attempts to rationalize anything unfamiliar through those old, biased lenses.
I included it in the film because it reflects something larger: the lingering traces of ideology, the subtle ways it persists. Especially now—with Austria’s far-right gaining traction again, and looking at things like Trump’s election—it feels like history is echoing back to us. We’re literally in the 2020s, but it feels disturbingly like the 1920s all over again.
B&S: My dad was an art teacher. Kids in class would make pottery of swastikas. They didn’t know what it meant they were being rebellious. And my father would make a point to break every single one of them. He told me you can’t ever let that happen again.
He had a stroke and one of the hardest things to deal with was his memory loss, explaining where America was heading every day. He learned about January 6th and the riots months after it happened; it broke his dementia for a bit. I had to explain to him several times how we got here. And I always thought, “What was it like to be in Nazi Germany as things slowly progressed?” I worry that I know now.
With your different background and learning about it in school, what do you think? How could we be doing this all over again?
Johannes: There are so many ways to look at it, but I think, fundamentally, it always comes down to economics. People are afraid. They can’t afford things. And fear—especially economic fear—makes them vulnerable to manipulation.
I’ve heard people mocking voters, saying things like, “Oh, you’re choosing your candidate because of the price of eggs?” But for some people, the price of eggs is survival. That kind of mockery is incredibly classist. If you’re struggling to put food on the table, fascism feels like an abstract concept—it’s not what you’re thinking about when you’re hungry or when your family’s future is uncertain.
In German, we have a saying: “First you think about what you’re eating, then you think about morality.” And it rings true. For many people, politics boils down to economics. Take rural areas, or places devastated by mill closures or other industries disappearing. When people are desperate, they’ll vote for whoever promises relief, no matter the long-term consequences.
It was the same in the 1920s. The economy was in shambles, and people were suffering. They voted for the person who promised them bread, not realizing that meant voting for the person who would later send them off to war. That next step—what fascism truly entails—is something most people don’t think about when their immediate needs are so overwhelming.
That’s why, at my core, I’m such a neo-Marxist. If you don’t take the economic realities of people seriously, you’ve already lost the fight. The root of so much political instability, and even fascism, is tied to economics. Addressing that fear is the only way to truly counteract it.
B&S: As you said, I live in the Rust Belt, and we’ve barely recovered from the 1980s steel mill closures. But if somebody with power says I’m going to bring steel and coal back, you will vote for that if that’s your dream. But if you know the industry, you know that the heyday of steel and coal in Western Pennsylvania can’t come back. It’s a different world. So you set up people to vote for you because of a promise you can’t deliver, and when these disenfranchised people are energized and disenfranchised again, what happens?
Johannes: Yes! I even have a Pittsburgh story about Solvent. So, I came across this review on Letterboxd from a user called Porridge MD. It stuck with me because of how the movie resonated with him and what he decided to do afterward. He starts by describing this little dive bar where he likes to hang out—classic working-class vibe. You shoot some pool, have a drink, chat with the regulars. Among the crowd, there’s this one guy, a skinhead type with Nordic runes tattooed on his arm. And, you know, it’s clear what kind of ideology he subscribes to. Most of the time, this guy talks about football or whatever, but every so often, he starts spouting Holocaust denial nonsense—stuff like “the gas chambers never existed.” Porridge MD said he usually ignored the guy because… well, America, right? Bars like that sometimes let people like him stick around. But after watching Solvent, something changed. The next time he saw the guy, he walked right up to him and said, “The biggest traitor is the Holocaust denier. He insults the cunning of the German people.” That’s a quote by the Nazi character in my film. And apparently, the guy’s face just crumpled. Like he’d been hit by a bazooka. Porridge MD gave the film five stars, saying, “Cheers to you!” That’s the kind of thing that gives you goosebumps as a filmmaker. The idea that something you created can spark that kind of subversive reaction in someone—that’s just lovely.
B&S: Back to movies, we’re not getting the end of the world we wanted.
Johannes: A few years ago, I made a documentary called Traceroute. You can find it on Vimeo-On-Demand. It’s essentially a political nerd road trip—I traveled from the West Coast to the East Coast of the U.S., visiting locations and meeting people who influenced me as a nerd. One of the stops was the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, famous because of Dawn of the Dead.
I even did an interview with a researcher in the parking lot there until security kicked us out. That was an experience. (laughs)
In the film, I talked about this idea that people are obsessed with end-of-the-world scenarios. Zombies, nukes, alien invasions—we love these big, dramatic collapses. But the truth is, the world doesn’t really end. It just keeps getting worse, incrementally, bit by bit. We’re like the proverbial frog in the pot, with the water heating up slowly.
I think people are waiting for this defining moment, this boom, where everything collapses in one go. But that’s not how it works. Instead, we’re already living through constant, rolling apocalypses. Look at 9/11. Symbolically, for many Americans, that was the end-of-the-world moment. It doesn’t get more hardcore than that, at least in a symbolic sense.
What’s the next step? A city being nuked? Sure, that’s possible. But honestly, the way things unfold is rarely as cinematic as we’d like to imagine. It’s more subtle, more pervasive. The real apocalypse is just this endless decline—the systems we rely on slowly breaking down, society eroding, while we all hope for a clear moment of resolution that will never come.
B&S: What movies influenced your nerd life?
Johannes: After makingMasking Threshold, I was invited by Letterboxd to create a list of films that influenced me. I welcomed the challenge. I am a nerd for “lists.” But when I sat down, it was pretty overwhelming. Every movie I’ve ever watched has shaped how I view film and the world. Some films are, for various reasons, enormously present in my memory.Poltergeist, for example, because I first saw it when I was 9, alone on late-night television in our dark living room while my parents and friends had a BBQ outside. I felt I was dying of fear throughout the entire experience. OrRoboCop, because as a 12-year-old nerd in a shabby theater in my Austrian hometown, it kindled my interest in politics, technology and toxic waste that melts your face off. I didn’t include those films (and moments) in my compilation because they feel too big and too dominating. Instead, I chose films that, for whatever biochemical reason, my brain goes back to when it is wandering, digesting and scheming.
Thanks to Johannes for spending so much time discussing his films with me. I can’t wait to see what he makes next. Please take the time to experience his work; it’s quite amazing.
Directed and co-written by Sollace Mitchell (with Karyn Kay), this is the story of Anna (Patricia Charbonneau), a newspaper writer who feels a distance from her live-in author lover, Alex (Sam Freed), who is only excited about getting to writer about fast food.
One evening, she thinks she’s received a dirty phone call from him, the spice she’s looking for in her life. Instead, she’s in a dive bar waiting to meet a stranger, running away and accidentally watching two criminals, Jellybean (Stephen McHattie) and Switchblade (Steve Buscemi) too closely. They think she has their money. She has no idea who they are, much less the heavy-breathing caller who keeps dialing her almost every night.
Every man around Anna is a milquetoast that still wants to control her. So when she gets caught in the world of dead cops and someone who calls her in the middle of the night, telling her to make love to herself with an orange that gets juices all over her thighs, can you blame her when she whispers, “Push orange slices into my cunt with your tongue” and asks the caller to penetrate his own orange before realizing her lame boyfriend has been watching all along?
Anna is also pretty dumb, I must confess. Is her life so bereft of thrills that all she has are phone calls? She’s gorgeous. She doesn’t even need a boyfriend, as she has a career. Maybe she’s co-dependent, as her friend Cori (Patti D’Arbanville) calls out:
Anna: Cori, I’m not the only woman who gets obscene phone calls.
Cori: No, but you’re the only one I know who talks to them.
I wanted this to be closer to either a Giallo or a movie that let Anna finally explore her kink with someone less dull than her lame best male friend. I want her to have more. I want her to be smarter. I want her, in short, to explore her wants.
As a sad aside, co-writer Karyn Kay died way too young, at 63, killed by her 19-year-old son Henry Wachtel. After her career in Hollywood, she’d started teaching Creative Writing at LaGuardia, a New York City performing arts school. In this article on Crime Reads, the author shares her real-life experience of having Kay as a teacher. It’s worth a read.
If you’re interested, Anna gives her phone number in this movie: 212-627-2363.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Cinematic Void will be playing this on Thursday, Jan. 23 at 7:30 PM at the Little Theater in Rochester, NY (tickets here). For more information, visit Cinematic Void.
Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel, Perversion Story) has a problem. His body has been found in a park in Prague, but the American journalist is anything but dead. His heart is still beating and his mind is still able to replay the sinister events of the last few days, a story that started with the disappearance of his girlfriend Mira (Barbara Bach) and ended even more horribly than he could have imagined.
The debut movie from director Alan Lado, Short Night of Glass Dolls subverts the giallo genre to move slowly into the supernatural. The only other giallo Lado created was Who Saw Her Die?* which, much like this movie, doesn’t seem keen on following the Argento giallo formula like just about everyone else. Lado would also make the baffling Star Wars clone The Humanoid many years later.
Moore resolves to find Mira when the police can’t, so he joins forces with his co-workers Jessica (Ingrid Thulen, Salon Kitty) and Jack (Mario Adorf, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage). Never mind that he’s just had an affair with Jessica.
By the end of the film, we’re left wondering if our paralyzed narrator is really an unreliable one and whether or not he made his own girlfriend disappear. We needn’t feel that way for long. The truth is that she’s fallen into the claws of Klub 99, a black magic group made up of Prague’s social elite that uses the life force of the young and beautiful to stay powerful.
This is one dark giallo that feels like a swirling nightmare that the protagonist can’t wake from. Even when he’s moving and alive, he feels out of place, a man away from not just America, but from reality itself. The scene where he moves behind the audience and red curtain as they watch a man play piano is particularly striking as it separates him from everything else that is going on around him.
There’s only one on-screen murder and Lado really shows that he’s an artist here instead of a slavish follower of giallo convention. It reminds me of a much more downbeat All the Colors of the Dark where the cult is much more powerful. The end scene of the gallery watching the autopsy is a brutal finale.
*I guess you could also consider Last Stop on the Night Train to kind of, sort of be a giallo.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jennifer Upton is an American (non-werewolf) writer/editor in London. She currently works as a freelance ghostwriter of personal memoirs and writes for several blogs on topics as diverse as film history, punk rock, women’s issues, and international politics. For links to her work, please visit https://www.jennuptonwriter.com or send her a Tweet @Jennxldn
It’s an exceptionally difficult task for audiences to buy a ticket to a Dracula film, walk in, sit down and watch it with a completely open mind. Nosferatuis an expressionist Dracula film the same as its 1922 unauthorized namesake, based on the Bram Stoker novel that has been adapted into as many successful plays and films as anything Shakespeare ever wrote. Everyone has their favorite film version. Robert Eggers’ version will no doubt become the favorite for a lot of younger film enthusiasts the same way my favorite version is the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola film I saw at age 20. This new version ticks all the boxes in terms of the younger generations’ favorite themes including power imbalance, the need to earn, childhood trauma and gender roles.
The first half hour of the film is excellent. Every frame is a work of art. A perfect depiction of a young man willing to engage in a job he doesn’t want to do because he needs the money. Eggers’ is a master at casting actors whose faces etch across the screen like the ancient lithographs in old books about witchcraft and demonology. Nicholas Hoult does a great job as the earnest but insecure Thomas Hutter a.k.a Jonathan Harker. Yes, his accent is better than Keanu’s.
The scenes in Count Orlok’s castle are creepy, and beautifully designed, infused with a sense of dreadful inevitability. Bill Skarsgard’s Orlok is damned creepy, physically monstrous, and rips out toddlers’ throats. Box ticked.
The scenes in Orlok’s castle are very engaging. Hutter is clearly under the count’s supernatural influence, even going so far as to take communal wine and bread. He’s in an isolated place, doing a thankless job. The prey in a predator’s game on its territory. If he executes his duties successfully, he’ll have a secure financial future for himself and his new bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).
Ellen is a victim of childhood trauma. While the link between Vlad and Mina is explained clearly in Coppola’s version as a case of reincarnation, here it’s simply that Ellen was a horny teenager with dark sexual fantasies. Liking sex opened her psyche to the darkness, giving Orlok the opportunity to psychically molest her. Why he chose her, when there were no doubt countless other horny teenagers wandering around during Orlok’s thousand-year existence is never explained. Nor are his origins explained. Ellen was simply the perfect victim and now Orlok wants her as his bride. He was probably lonely since Eggers removed the other vampire brides present in almost all previous adaptations.
Ellen’s adulthood “melancholy” only disappears when her new husband is by her side. Why? Is it because Hutter is Ellen’s new sexual outlet? One sanctioned by the ring on her finger? Is it because traumatized women need protecting? The answers to all these questions are mute because…atmosphere. But hey! Did you notice that the Hutters use candles while their wealthier friends the Hardings use gas lamps? That’s the level of macro filmmaking we’re dealing with here.
Orlok begins visiting Ellen, who is now staying with the Hardings.
Orlock comes to her in her dreams bringing Ellen to fits of shaking, eye-rolling and spitting worthy of a ‘70s Italian Exorcist clone. Fortunately, Ms. Depp has the acting chops to pull it off.
Thomas escapes Orlok’s castle, finds refuge with some healing nuns, grabs a horse and starts the journey home. A six-week landlocked journey from Carpathia to Germany. Meanwhile, Orlok ships himself all the way around Europe by boat when he could have just hired some gypsies to bring his coffin in a caravan in six weeks. Why bother showing all the detail involving Thomas Hutter’s journey back and forth by land only to have the count go by boat? Because it was in Bram Stoker’s book, you say? The book that took place in Carfax Abbey in London? It made sense when the story moved from Carpathia to London. Carpathia to Germany by boat? Not so much. Granted, rail was only about a decade old in 1838 when the movie takes place, but still. It’s an oversight in the 1922 version that remains here. I did enjoy seeing a bit more of what went down on the ship and the chaos that ensued from “the plague ship” when it finally docks in northern Germany filled with cute little rats.
When the Hardings begin to grow annoyed with Ellen’s nightly fits, they call on Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) and Dr. — what was his name? — Oh, Hell. I’ll just call him Van Helsing, played by Willem Dafoe. I didn’t care for this version of these characters. Sievers seems to dismiss Ellen as a hysterical female. If he truly believes this, why even bother to seek out his mentor? Dafoe’s Van Helsing, while appropriately strange, was granted no real authority in the proceedings. He doesn’t know how to defeat the vampire. He can only guess. Why is he even there if he can’t help? I mean, come on! When Peter Cushing showed up, we knew we were in good hands. When Anthony Hopkins gave an order to give Lucy a transfusion, the other men listened and obeyed.
Dafoe’s character’s sole purpose in the film seems to be to tell Ellen that she, simply by virtue of being a normal female with normal sexual desires, can save everyone by allowing her attacker to attack her again. Because the whole thing was her fault to begin with. It was at this point where I seriously began to consider why Robert Eggers chose to retain the outdated sexist themes of the 1922 version. Does he hate women? It was the exact opposite of the way I felt when Mina decapitated Prince Vlad in the ’92 version. My suspicion was vindicated when the lights came up and the woman sat behind me declared to her companion, “This movie is a warning to never marry any woman. Ever.”
Nosferatu is a film that tells you that Ellen is the hero, while showing you quite the opposite. In fact, Eggers often ignores the golden rule of “show, don’t tell” on every major plot point in this film. In the 1992 version, we didn’t need to be told that Mina was the hero. We could see it with our own eyes through her actions. It improved on the original, more traditional Universal and Hammer versions. Here, there’s a lot of dialogue about Ellen being the hero but, in the end, she dies along with her assailant, sacrificing herself for the greater good, as in the original 1922 film. Even though it was her husband’s fault for selling the count a piece of real estate. She warned him not to go, but Thomas did it anyway and the only self-reflective scene in the movie is when Ellen tells him off for doing it.
For all my complaints, I am a Drac enthusiast. Nosferatu is worthy of a second viewing, if only for the wonderful visuals, sound design, set design and overall atmosphere. Sometimes good atmosphere is all an audience needs to carry them through, although I have a feeling it won’t play as well at home as it did on a giant IMAX screen. It’s a technical triumph with a cold, hollow script. Like a decent cover version of an old favorite song. A song with a melody that’s so good, it’s nearly impossible to screw it up.
(Editor’s note: Jenn sent me this note later: “I forgot to mention in my Nosferatu review the really long vampire schlong in IMAX.”)
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