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NOSFERATU (2024)
Now that Father Time has allowed one more year to pass, and Santa has been banished to his ice prison until next solstice, it's time to visit our favorite memory from this holiday season: Nosferatu, AKK Robert Eggers Presents "This Ain't Dracula: A XXX Symphony of Horror." Stalk the stone paths of turn-of-the-century Germany alongside The BOP Suitors as Lilly Rose-Depp's star-making performance ties together an all-star cast, including Bill Skarsgaard at his most uncanny, Willem Dafoe at his most grave, Nicolas Hoult at his most dandy, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson at his most obsessed with his wife. Along their stroll they'll discuss the appeal of the Nosferatu iteration of familiar vampire lore and how Eggers plays with those expectations, rank the stars of Dracula Cinema by their fashion and sex appeal, and scour forgotten lore to determine how exactly Orlok traveled by boat to a landlocked country.
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Transcript
So I just typed in Germany to Transylvania and then they give you, like, the little breakdown of it.
n Germany and Transylvania is: Jamie:I'm a boat woman. I don't understand these kilometers.
Mike:Well, I mean, there's some small bodies of water between. I see a lake. It is 18 hours and 40 minutes by car.
Cody:Let's see, this is the AI overview. So it's probably bullshit, but they do say Avalon Waterways offers Danube river cruises from Germany to Romania. That includes stops in Transylvania.
Jamie:Ooh, fancy Romanian cruise lines we hear so much about.
Cody:Book. Oh, they actually have a website. Transylvanian cruise Vacation. Yes, book me. Give me the full Orlok, baby.
It's an 18 day river cruise from Wilshofen to Bucharest.
Jamie:That doesn't sound harrowing at all.
Cody:No.
Jamie:Isn't that what they were doing in Fitzcarraldo?
Cody:They get two nights in mysterious Transylvania.
Mike:Okay, I typed in river along the route and I think I broke a map trying to like, bullshit together some way to make this work.
Cody:Google's currently doing the opening to.
Mike:Okay, okay, here is a river.
Cody:Shuffling the piece of paper and putting the pencil through it. It's trying to show you how wormholes are formed.
Mike:Okay. From what I can tell there. Okay, what does this go to? Transylvania?
Well, I mean, it doesn't go to Transylvania, so he has to drive a ways to get there. Well, wait, that's. I mean, there's. That's. I'm not sure. I don't know if a boat can fit on that one. There is water you can take that can go between.
It doesn't seem economical.
Jamie:Mike, does this route form a pentagram?
Cody:I'm looking at a map right now for the river cruise. And yeah, it doesn't actually go directly to Transylvania. It goes much further south in Bulgaria.
And I guess they probably just put you on a coach or something and take you to Transylvania at the end when you're done with your boat ride.
Jamie:Lake cruise line, where the only class is stowaway.
Cody:But if you were to go an entire country down from like, Romania into like Serbia or Bulgaria, you could connect to the Danube river and follow that all the way northwest through the heart of Germany. So if. If you took a very large detour at the start of your trip, you could go by river all the way to Germany.
It wouldn't make sense for what the movie's doing, but no.
Mike:Okay.
Jamie:It seems like you could have a nice trip.
Mike:It sounds like he could have gotten in Huggies. If he got on a boat there and took the old river. He could. Then I'm getting the fucking bottom of this. Goddamn scientist.
He then could have joined up with the Voila river and that could have kept it. This seems pointless on Orlok's part, but, you know, he's okay. At which point that would cross over with another. The Saen river, which.
Okay, okay, we're. We're connecting. You're connecting water. Sure. You know, this is. And that. That we're moving.
Cody:We're grooving.
Mike:Yeah. And eventually you would still be able to connect to some waterway. They're not the best waterways, but they're waterways nonetheless.
Like, you can probably get. We don't know. Maybe he took a raft at some point. We never saw that part.
So if you stay on that river for a while and that ends up going into the Pyru Rosbach. Now this all sounds made up. If you keep going on that, eventually you will. You're getting closer.
I mean, if you stay on that, it turns into the Pyro Rascuri. Okay. He's admittedly going a little bit out of his way, but. Oh, you know, that comes to a dead end. Okay, I've.
Cody:There's a mountain. So I typed into Google Robert Eggers Nosferatu boat. What the fuck?
The first result was a Reddit thread on the Robert Eggers subreddit titled how did Orlok take a boat from Transylvania? Which seems very pertinent. One week ago, Chris color Suto responded, and he's got 300 upvotes. So this is the big times here.
Black Sea, presumably, by the way of the Varna, threw the Dardan Dar. Dardanelles. Dardanelles.
Jamie:Darnells.
Cody:The Darnell savages. Cross the Mediterranean. That's a football joke for anyone who's paying attention.
Cross the Mediterranean, round the Rock of Gibraltar, up the channel, over Jutland and to the German coast. It's a long boat trip, but necessary. Hauling that sarcophagus overland would be a nightmare.
That's why Hutter is able to head him off and arrive at a similar time.
Jamie:Again, they're just describing Fitzcrol. You have to get the boat, carry it over the mountain, kill the villagers.
Cody:Course might be slower, but the route is far more direct.
Mike:I guess I buy that. I mean, that's a heavy box.
Cody:Yeah, it makes more sense than anything else. If you were to walk it, according to Google Maps, it would be a 14 day and 6 hour walk.
So, you know, maybe, maybe some of this ocean stuff makes a little bit of sense. It's also surprising that a human being could walk all the way from Germany into the heart of Transylvania in just over two weeks.
Although I suppose it's not counting for like the need to sleep or eat.
Mike:Or poop and poop.
Cody:Yeah, so it's a big part. Yeah. Nobody wants to be caught pooping in the middle of Austria in the winter.
Mike:No, that'll get you killed. That'll say you're a Nosferatu.
Jamie:International incident.
Mike:I have to say, I'm learning a lot about the topography of the toboggan Transylvania.
Jamie:A coffee table book.
Cody:There's the bells of Notre Dame, the toboggans of Transylvania.
Mike:You know, they have a lot of rivers though. So I mean, still saying maybe anyways. Which also. Which honestly makes. Doesn't that make Orlok seem a little bit fucking stupid though?
He's like, I gotta take this. I'm gonna have to like go such the long way because I have to bring the biggest box I possibly could to get to fucking Germany.
Cody:Family seal.
Jamie:Just all that dirt weighing it down too.
Mike:Like, did you have to bring the sarcophagus with you?
Cody:I mean, it doesn't nowhere do they specify. It's gotta be your coffin. He really could have just brought a little Ziploc of dirt and just called it good.
Mike:It's true.
I mean, at that point isn't like a Ship of Theseus thing where it's like, well, if he just brought a little bit of dirt and then sprinkled it on the other dirt.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Isn't that just his dirt? Now?
Cody:This is exactly how my mom made cleaning supplies run so long. Like, oh, well, we're almost out of Windex. Let's just pour a gallon of water in there. And there's still a little cleaning agent left behind.
It's still got that magic.
Mike:The hand soap still works.
Cody:Yeah.
Jamie:I've always wanted to see a vampire story where the vampire exploits a loophole and that where he just has like a little vial of dirt he keeps in his breast pocket that he sleeps with. Every night.
Cody:I sleep face forward on the dirt in my pocket. Gotcha.
Mike:You want to start the podcast now?
Cody:We have started the podcast. Thanks for joining us, folks.
I hope you learned something about the geography of Transylvania and the fact that we don't know how to pronounce any European country's name or city or river. Unz, this is Box Office Pulp, your one stop shop for movies, madness and moxie. I'm your host, Cody.
applies to that one as well.:Joining me tonight are my co hosts, Mike. Say hello, Mike.
Mike:So question. If Orlok were to shave his mustache.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Would he not be able to grow it back?
Cody:Umm, you know, I would say probably not because it's a, it's an old wives tale, right? That like when you die, your nails and your hair keeps growing. And I think they're trying to portray him just as a living corpse.
So he doesn't really regenerate, does he?
Mike:I mean he had a lot of sores and stuff on him, so I don't know if he would be able to grow more hair. I mean if you look, he still had like the Romanian nobleman haircut. Obviously he has not grown more since then, so it has to just stop. Right.
Which also means there's no grooming, which is impressive. And that's pretty cool. I mean that's, that's useful.
Cody:He had that very long strand of hair on the top of his head, but I'm assuming that wasn't his hairstyle when he was alive. Jamie, tap in on noble hair transitions here. Tell us what we're missing.
Jamie:I like to think that it's like the, the phenomenon where corpses appear to grow hair and fingernails when they die, but it's just them shriveling up. I like to think the residual hairs would eventually be apparent just by his corpse like shivering. So eventually like the body just pushes that out.
Cody:It is true that that definitely lines up with my thinking on Nosferatu's hair situation, which all sounds bad, but just imagine it this way. This guy never has to bother getting a new razor. He doesn't have to bother shaving his pants.
He shaves once and he's like ready to swim for the rest of his life. He's going to be like an arrow.
Jamie:Now this is just a little preview of our new box office Pulp spin off. Monster Fashion.
Mike:Oh, oh, that has to be an.
Cody:Episode followed by Monster Law, Monster Crimes of Fashion.
Mike:I'm picturing the logo right now. Nice, nice.
Cody:Nobody steal that at Home. We're working on this. That's gonna be ours.
Mike:Which Dracula serves more cut boy.
Cody:Off of the top of my head.
Mike:Hard one to answer.
Cody:So a lot of people forget because, you know, it's Bela Lugosi and they kind of remember him as later heroine days when he was a young man. Like his stage play Days of Dracula. Smoking hot.
Mike:Yeah, yeah.
Cody: . But let's Think of Dracula,:It goes down to basically his navel. It's about the sluttiest way Dracula could dress.
Mike:Yeah, that is an extremely 70s Dracula too. Like, he's got that whole rock star that just invited you backstage for drinks kind of vibe to him the whole movie. Definitely attitude wise.
Sexiest Dracula. He's a walking throbbing hard on.
Cody:Which is weird because it seems like this Orlok probably gets more action than most Dracula.
Mike:Yeah.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Even more than Oldman's Dracula.
Cody:I'm amazed, actually. We didn't even mention Oldman's Dracula in terms of like, oh, that guy's serving fashion wise.
Mike:Most serving Dracul. I think armor.
Cody:Look at the little glasses, the little. The little blue glasses.
Mike:Fashion specs. Yeah. I think Oldman's Dracula. Here's the problem. I think he cries during sex.
Cody:He strikes me as more of a romantic than a fucker.
Mike:Yeah. Like, he doesn't. He doesn't have sex with you. He just writes you a poem that is about the art of lovemaking and then reads it to you. Oldman's Dracula has sex. Like, I imagine, like sex with Jared Leto would. Would be like his own band's music is playing the whole time.
Cody:I'm imagining Oldman's Dracula fucking just like the movie portrays him when he's like, in that candlelit room for no apparent reason, just wind blow and he's just waving his arms around, but he's not really doing anything.
Mike:Does he come?
Cody:Blood. The blood is the life mic.
Mike:Now, we can all agree the best in bed is Butler.
Cody:I just. I'm trying to think of some award I can give to more Dracula. Loving it. I'm trying to. I'm trying to think of some, like, best Zaddy award.
Leslie Nielsen, but it's. It's not coming together. He's. He's too funny.
Mike:Oh, well, if we're going for Silver Foxes, I mean, George Hamilton.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Oh, yeah. Oh, where's Udo Kirgo?
Cody:Oh, you put that Dracula back where he came from, or so help me.
Mike:Can the logo for this episode just be one of those, like, YouTube tier lists?
Cody:We need to do an episode ranking all the Draculas on their collective sexiness, because we also have to. You gotta compare their Renfields as their sexy backups.
Mike:True.
Cody:You know, you gotta look at the supporting cast.
Mike:Well, what is Dracula and Renfield if not a power couple?
Cody:Mm. It's true.
Mike:Oh, especially Mark Gaddis Renfield.
Oh, my God, I hate to say it, but Adam McKay's Renfield probably takes the cake there. If we're going. Going for sexiest collective Dracula Renfield pairing with Nick Nicholas Holt and Nick Cage. Especially Cage in that outfit.
This is a Nosferatu episode.
Cody:Yeah, we're getting to that, folks. Shut up.
Mike:Do the Dracula iceberg.
Cody:We haven't even gotten to the Dracula from Scooby Doo and the Reluctant Werewolf. I'm gonna say this whole thing has been difficult for me because I was trying to look up different Draculas, and I landed on Dracula 3D.
So I've just had Rutger Heuer pulling a funny face, holding two twigs together, just bearing full teeth, snarling at me as we're trying to discuss sexy Draculas, and it is not doing the trick. It's not.
Mike:There's an hour. He was a Dracula.
Cody:Thomas Kretschman's here, like, pulling funny faces as Dracula. None of this works.
Mike:The long list of people who are legally Dracula, and that's it.
Cody:Yeah, Jeff Goldblum, Adam Sandler. You know, the list goes on.
Mike:That guy from the NBC show Dracula New York.
Cody:That's a sitcom I'd watch. Like, Young Sheldon. Nah. Dracula in New York.
Mike:That existed. It was on Fox.
Cody:Yeah, it really did. Yeah.
Mike:Mike blew my mind with that a couple of years ago.
Cody:Dracula in New York.
Mike:It's as stupid as you think it is too. Like, it's totally Dracula in the big.
Cody:City, the first thing that comes up is love at first bite, which is definitely not it. And then it's Vampire in Brooklyn, which get closer, but also not right.
Mike:I like how it's trying to, like, distract you from looking at anything but Dracula New York.
Cody:It was a TV show, right?
Mike:Yeah. I'm adding TV pilot is on YouTube. I think, like, maybe the whole series is. It definitely exists.
Cody:I'm getting from the team behind Drunk Shakespeare comes drunk Dracula. I'm actually assuming that's what it is. It taps out at drunk. No, it is drunk Dracula. Two months ago, this is a thing New York's apparently getting.
They're getting Drunk Dracula. All right, we've lost the plot.
Mike:Let's.
Cody:Let's get back. Let's circle the wagon.
Mike:Rewind a little bit.
Cody:Nosferatu. Spoilers for everyone here. In case you haven't watched the movie yet, which is a little weird, it's been two weeks. You've had time.
ie, Nosferatu the Vampyr from:Nosferatu the now version, and Shadow of the Vampire. Shadow of the Vampire. Literally any adaptation of Dracula. Just be prepared. You're in for spoilers. We're going to give it all away.
Mike:There's one person listening to this. Go. I know nothing of Dracula. I don't know what these people are talking about.
Cody:They're sitting at home. Nosferatu's a vampire. God damn it.
Mike:I thought it was some kind of. Clown, but that's who's dating my mom.
Cody:Luckily, we had that spongebob episode as kids that introduced us all to Nosferatu. So I think pretty much every millennial and younger is kind of hip to Nosferatu just because of spongebob.
Mike:I love that that iconic TV moment was something they had to argue for so hard. It went to the top of Paramount. That's how important that joke was.
Cody:Someone asked Robert Eggers about that on the red carpet, and he kind of laughed. He's like, oh, yeah, definitely. Like, it's important that new generations find out about some of these things through other media.
So I'm glad he's on board. I know a lot of people kind of accuse him of being a little stuffy and maybe humorless, but I don't quite get that.
I think his movies are very serious.
Mike:He seems very like us.
Cody:Yeah, the dude himself seems cool. I'm staunchly an Eggers supporter.
I feel I have to start with that because I've seen so many comments online saying insane things about him that I just feel like I'm going nuts myself.
Mike:The man added a fart track to one of his movies to combat rumors of stuffiness. The man is okay.
Cody:So to start at the beginning here, I'm gonna say we all enjoyed the movie. I'm pretty sure none of us came out of this thing thinking it was awful. Not the vibes I got from the group chat.
Mike:I wish I was watching it right now.
Cody:Me too.
Mike:I'm going to an anniversary screening of Paprika tomorrow at 7. And it was all I could do not to order a second ticket to go see Nosferatu a second time.
Cody:No one's stopping you. I think it's a good idea.
Mike:And we're getting a director's cut soon. So excited.
Cody:Oh, baby. One thing I'll say about the director's cut, I'm not sure where the story has pieces missing. Like it's all put together very well.
So it's not one of those situations where you're looking at like, oh yeah, I bet they chopped up this third act just to get underneath two hours. Don't get those vibes at all. So I'm very curious to see what they add back in.
Mike:I could easily see that being very. Just tonal stuff and a lot of like exploring scenery and environments.
Because so many of those scenes, especially with Holt exploring in the first act, like I could see a cut where those just go on and on forever. I would be satisfied. Might be a little more bits and bobs. I wouldn't be surprised. There was more ship stuff to all ship.
Cody:They do an entire like separate movie. Just basically the last voyage of the Demeter.
Mike:Again, this version makes money. God damn it.
Cody:It does blow my mind that this is somehow the one version of Dracula in like the last three years that has turned a profit.
Mike:The least audience friendly Dracula.
Cody:And this is the one. Everyone's like, fuck yeah. Give them the money. To put this in perspective, I think the movie is made for about $50 million.
It's in weekend two, just finished weekend two, I believe. And it's crossed $100 million worldwide. So it's the most successful movie I believe Eggers has made so far. I feel like is four.
And it's the most successful Dracula movie we've had in the last handful of years. It blows my mind. It just doesn't make sense to me. I love it. But it's so weird.
Mike:We were talking about this the other day.
It's kind of Robin Hood syndrome, I think, where it's been so long since anyone's just done a straight version of one of these without a gigantic twist that makes it half something else. People are just hungry for straight up Dracula even in a slightly distorted version like this.
Cody:And it is true because I think back of the ones we've got in the last few years and they are all either hiding the fact it's a Dracula movie or it has to be a twist on Dracula. You know, there's Renfield okay, well, now it's more about his sidekick. There's the invitation.
Which kind of tricks you to be like, oh, these aren't just vampires. It's Dracula inviting this girl to hang out at his house that he loves. Or even, oh, fuck, I've forgotten the actual name.
Mike:Dracula Untold. Dracula's a superhero now.
Cody:Yeah, that too. I'm blanking on the name. I'm thinking the more recent one where it was, you know, originally billed as Dracula's Daughter and then it was Abigail.
Abigail, yeah. Which. Sorry, spoilers for that as well, I guess. Now at this point, to be fair.
Mike:It was originally filmed under the title Dracula's Daughter, so.
Cody:Yeah, but it just.
It does feel like studios didn't want to do straight up Dracula and Edgar just came along and basically went, hey, what if we stripped out all the bullshit and just did Dracula? Which is the exciting part about doing Nosferatu again, in my mind, because it does give him that freedom.
He doesn't have to hit all the tropes and homages that you would necessarily expect if you're doing Dracula because people are slightly less aware of this twist on the formula.
Mike:And it's already a super condensed version of Dracula, which gives you a lot of extra room to add stuff onto it. And you also have the hersock movie to pull from as well.
Cody:Yeah, well, you can even see it, like in the original Dracula too. They decided, like, oh, fuck, this doesn't make sense to have the return trip to Transylvania and the death of Dracula there. Or the cowboy.
Mike:Let's the cowboy.
Cody:It's a shame. But this version, you know, Nosferatu, they've never had the boat trip back, so it doesn't feel like you're losing anything.
And that works in the books because it's already kind of a spread out, funky version of a story in the movies.
It definitely always makes more sense in my mind if you can just contain it more to being like, we're in England now, we're going to finish the story here.
Mike:Yeah, yeah.
Herzog's Nosferatu is definitely my favorite Dracula movie. Time will tell if this one inches it out, because they're right now, they're both kind of neck and neck for me.
But I think the reason for that, why I kind of prefer the Nosferatu take on. On the book Dracula as opposed to direct adaptations, is that very direct streamlining.
Because Dracula as a novel is filled with lots and lots of chuffa, and every adaptation deals with that bloat in its own way. And again, there's there's something almost like machine perfect about the Nosferatu formula. Just beat for beat.
This is everything you actually need for Dracula.
Cody:And I appreciate it too.
Not just trying to streamline the formula, but going back a little bit further on audience's understandings of vampires, because so much of it is built on Dracula. You know, that set the gold standard for every vampire movie for the last hundred years.
But this one allows us to kind of go back and reexamine some of those and we can avoid some of the tropes. Like, we don't necessarily. I don't think there's a mirror scene in this one where he doesn't have an appearance in the mirror.
Mike:No, not that I know.
Cody:So we're missing that. He doesn't have, like his fangs pop out of his face. He doesn't burst into flames at sunlight. It kills him. But it's, it's.
I think Eggers would say it's very specifically the purity of the dawn that kills Dracula. It's not necessarily sunlight.
Mike:Yeah.
Cody:It's a symbolic start of a new day.
Mike:Yeah, yeah. It goes back to how the same way he died in the original Nosferatu. Jed Black comes out and says, twas beauty killed the beast.
Cody:So I enjoyed that. I also.
I feel like this is slightly against the grain for Eggers himself, but he does not shy away from the fact this is a fairy tale or supernatural telling Dracula.
Not that other Dracula stories become overly scientific and try and explain away the magic, but there's a certain amount of rules you have to follow in most Dracula movies where he's very classified, you know, maybe even, oh, well, his blood's a virus or does this or that. This one is purely, you know, this is some sort of ancient evil. This is pure occult territory.
Mike:This is folklore. Dracula.
Cody:Yeah. This is great.
Mike:Which, I mean, that's like. That was very much the original Nosferatu. And occasionally adaptions go a little bit that way. But usually see like other vampire media and the.
The actual novel Dracula, people forget is very folklore centered, but it's also a mystery.
And it's also almost a piece of detective fiction in a lot of ways, where there's a lot of investigating the folklore to try to get to the bottom of things.
Cody: t came out just a hair shy of: Mike:I get very much blood transfusion, faith story in a certain way.
Cody:Yeah. And it doesn't play like that nowadays because we look back at them, like, deciding about blood transfusions. And they're like, what's.
Good heavens, Van, you're bleeding her. It comes off as a period piece and you forget. No, at the time this came out, this was cutting edge. This is like Scream.
Having the characters use mobile phones.
Mike:Yeah, Miasma.
Which I think is what I like about both Nosferatu in general and this movie specifically, how it leans super into that aspect. Because, yes, like Dracula in many ways is a science versus folklore, like science versus superstition story.
But it's a rare one where science is what gets its ass kicked.
And it's appealing to the old ways and the old rules for doing things that wins the day and allows specifically, Eggers's Nosferatu ends in basically a mad appeal not only to the rules of folklore, but I think kind of the rules of storytelling, of just. No, like. Like we are in a world right now where only the purity of a maiden sacrifice can make the bad man go away. Like, this is bigger than us.
This is cosmic. And I love the, the horror of that, of the dawning realization that, oh, this is. This isn't a drama we have any say in.
Like, this is almost like predestined. That's something very spooky about that to me.
All the actionable elements you would expect out of one of these stories, normally one of these stories are futile and they aren't supposed to be serving the purpose we think they're serving. And it really does just come down to this one most ethereal idea.
Cody:I want to.
I want to bookmark that because obviously the whole ending and Ellen's choices are tied into the whole thematics of the film where it's, you know, women's agency. But I want to. I want to circle back around to that in a minute here to use some corporate talk.
And one, one idea, though, that just kind of fascinates me is we're four movies into Eggert's filmography, really right now. You know, we've got the Witch, the Northman, the Lighthouse, and now Nosferatu. Before this movie, his.
His films have dabbled in the supernatural, but people have found ways to try and explain away or around the supernatural aspects. You know, like you watch the witch and it clearly ends on a very supernatural note with like Satan himself coming out and offering this girl.
People fly, but people still. There's a very strong segment of people online who made up fan theory saying, no, no, no. Well, the family was eating, you know, tainted crops.
They're hallucinating. They had a very in depth reasons for why it couldn't be supernatural and was a trick on the audience.
And I think even in the commentary, Eggers mentions this briefly, but he basically, you know, plays coy with it, like he doesn't want to get into it. So people found a way to say, okay, well, this is filmed very realistically. The setting's very realistic, therefore it can't be supernatural.
You get to the lighthouse and that one can all be explained away through madness. So you can ignore any trace of the supernatural in that because the narrators are so unreliable.
And then even when you get to the Northman, there are moments of magic in that film and they're presented pretty much on their face as magic.
But it doesn't necessarily impact the narrative that much, where you could easily ignore those or just call it like superstition upon the main character. You get to this movie and Edgar's putting his cars down on the table. He's like, this one's full out supernatural.
And if you are denying that it's supernatural, you're one of the stuffy bad guys who might be a shipman but also a moron. There's a darkness here and you need to acknowledge it.
And I thought that was very interesting because four movies in, I think people kind of have a bead on what they think an Edgar's movie should be like. And this movie is saying, no, no, no, you're missing very parts of it. We're going to focus in on those. That's. That's what we're doing with these.
Mike:This is a spook show.
It also gives Eggers a little bit of a different way to go about. Some of his more like sleight of hand and some of his, like, reality break stuff is usually it's very.
The perception of the audience as to what the unreality of the movie is at any particular time. Whereas in this, he's able to know it is the unreality is invading the reality of the movie.
And it really is whenever Orlok is there, or there's something about Orlok's presence even when he's not there.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:The way that Eggers films that to change, like there's something invading the environment. Like everything is just off a little bit and it seems inherently wrong as to what. As to what's actually normal in that universe.
Cody:Well, the building kind of nightmares Hutter has as he's moving closer to Count Orlok's castle. The moment where he stops in the village and he doesn't know what's going on.
He thinks he dreamed walking out and kind of chasing the village as they destroy a vampire, only to wake up and realize there's still mud on his feet. And then the kind of rush to him being at the crossroads at midnight and the phantom carriage picking him up all the way into Dracula's castle.
I'm sorry, Nosferatu's castle. Nosferatu. Now it's easier.
Mike:I'm get sued.
Cody:Oh, no.
That whole thing just feels like such a pitch perfect fever dream where you can tell the character doesn't really have a grasp on what's happening around him. And you're not quite sure either. That stretch there was absolutely phenomenal. Like, being in the theater for that was just, oh, chef kiss.
Mike:I'm so glad I got to see that on the big screen. Yeah.
That's probably my favorite interpretation of Harker approaching Castle Dracula I've seen in any adaptation. That really is one of those instances where Eggers really nails how you remember the story going.
More opposed to maybe, like, the actual factual events of the novel or of any adaptation. This is very much. It feels very much like the Dracula that pop culture would conjure. Like, when imagining, like, okay, what is.
Like, what would an actually terrifying Dracula story be like for a modern audience? Feels very much like that, which I think is very interesting. Almost like a.
Almost like an ultimate refinement of the story and of each particular moment maximized for discomfort and horror.
Cody:And the way it plays out, we really get to see Thomas stripped of reason and logic because it plays almost like a dream. You can interpret all of his actions as being a very sincere distillation of the character. So when he's in there and drag. Almost did it again.
Damn it, Dracula. When Count Orlok, you know, kind of dresses him down and says, lord, I am a Lord. I'm going to be referred to as a Lord.
And he immediately starts referring to him as my Lord, which doesn't make any sense. It's not his Lord. You know, he is a lord. He's not your Lord. You're a German. You don't have to worry about this.
Yeah, but he just falls into it because he wants to placate the man. He wants to do everything he can to make him happy. There's kind of a subservient nature to Thomas. You immediately gleam just from that interaction.
Mike:There's also something that kind of turns.
It turns preconceived notions on its head there, like, okay, he's calling him Count, which anybody who's, you know, watched or intake Dracula media always knows Count. And you're essentially having Orlok go, do not fucking call me that. You will call me Lord.
That takes what people expect and turns us on its head a little bit.
Cody:Or the moments right after that too, when he's told, here's the contract, you need to initial it. And he goes, oh, I must have missed that.
Mike:Like.
Cody:No, you can clearly tell Orlok wrote this himself. It's in gobbledygook, occult, cursed language. You didn't forget to sign this, bud. You can be honest here, you know. And he is hesitant to sign it.
He's hesitant to sign it. And then he sees the gold and he immediately signs his name. And it feels like the curse has kind of snapped.
Even though it's the curse taking hold in that moment.
Mike:And it feels very fairy tale in that.
Cody:Yeah, it's dreamy. And it's like you can almost tell that he's not quite in control of his actions, but it's going after his heart.
He's making a decision with his soul when he takes that money, which obviously makes problems later on. And Ellen does try to defend him, saying, you know, you must have lied to him or something.
But it's something where kind of warlock can really insist, no, no, this guy bent. He snapped. I gave him the choice of money. And he went, yes.
Mike:Yeah. Hey, anybody else get this sense that at one point during that scene Eggers filmed Hull upside down.
Cody:I'm not sure about that.
Mike:There's at least two, maybe like two or three moments in the movie and that was one of them where it felt like he was filming the scene upside down and then reversing it just because it had that feeling of whenever actors or sets are filmed upside down and then re straightened again and where the video is flipped. And it felt like that and it just made you feel a little bit off.
There are some shots like that around that time. Yeah. I cannot wait for a Blu Ray to come out if we hopefully have some behind the scenes info on stuff like that.
Because there's so many moments where I don't know what exactly is going on. I just know that it's off.
Cody:The specific for me, the opening when Ellen rises out of bed and the camera's locked with her step to step, so it's just her face appearing out of the darkness. You. You don't quite follow her movements out of bed. So it looks like she's just kind of floating or flying to the window.
To me, I was having a very difficult time wrapping around my understanding, like spatial awareness of what she was doing that One kind of blew my mind to start the movie. One thing I did want to mention, though, I found a fun little quote today when I was going through Reddit.
The cinema photographer, cinema cinematographer, was talking about the movie and why they never used Steadicam on any of Egger's films.
And he mentioned basically he doesn't like using the Steadicam because it doesn't have precise and repeatable marks, which was basically a non starter for Eggers. Like he wanted to make sure if they did the take five times, it could be done exactly right each time.
And then you can play with the scene through the actors. Like they can move around where the camera goes. The camera isn't chasing the actors.
And it also allowed the cinematographer, Jaron Blasky, to give very precise technical notes to his camera operators. Because I knew, okay, we did it this way last time, let's adjust the camera and do it this way.
And he says the important thing with this is it gives a stifling level of certainty and omniscience to every scene, which I can definitely see. And I think that's something you'll see throughout all of Egger's films, which I wanted to point out. It's amazing.
This guy, I haven't looked into his history, I don't know where he came from, if it was like old money or something, but this just pop up and have like four films with your style basically baked into them immediately and not have to spend like a decade developing that or being like a TV guy or something, or journeyman.
Mike:It's like something we haven't seen since like the indie boom of the 90s. Just. Anyway, this guy, yeah, just fully formed. Out of the ether.
Cody:I mean, I don't.
Again, I haven't looked up his career, so for all I know he did spend like 15 years shooting Nike commercials or something before he became a movie director. But it doesn't feel that way.
You know, even normally when you look at early films from a director, it's kind of like, oh, okay, they're still finding their feet, they're finding their voice. He's locked in. You know, the four major movies that have come out from this guy have all been, oh yeah, that's definitely Eggers, that's his movie.
Mike:And I think that style of shooting is so interesting for a, for a period piece you don't get to see very often, but also for the specific energy that the actors have to use where it makes it feel almost stage play, like where they just get the environment to play around in the other.
Cody:Mystery to me is why do you think he's collecting Skarsgard? What is his plans?
Mike:He's assembling the Key of Time. Stellan has to be the next one, right?
Cody:I'm amazed he didn't start with that guy. Does he not get along with Dafoe? What's, what's wrong here?
Mike:Can that be the next one? He brings all the Skarsgard's together.
Cody:I would love to see that.
Mike:Also, is it weird that fucking Skarsgard is now my favorite Dracula?
Cody:What a transformation. If you, if you hadn't told me that was Bill Skarsgard underneath the makeup, I never would have guessed it. From the performance.
He, you know, the makeup fully transforms him. It's such a unique design going with basically rotting corpse of actual Vlad the Impaler.
And the voice, you know, it's deep and wheezing and halting, but still demanding. Incredible choices. Big swings on every part of Count Orlok. And I think they all really work.
Mike:And I was not expecting going into this that it would just kind of be book Dracula actually brought to the screen for the first time. That is for the most part just book Dracula. He's never really been portrayed that way in any other media but that was a great representation.
But like book Dracula but through a little bit of like the Orlok lens, specifically the fact he's even bigger of a dick than Dracula. Like there's something so amazing. Like the first thing you hear is Orlok admonishing Hutter for being late. As if. As if Orlok was up during the day.
Cody:I also like the fact that he sent the magic coach to go pick him up. This is all on you fault. Yeah. You fuck man. I don't know. Make a faster phantom carriage. This is your problem again.
Mike:I think that's one of the reasons I like the Nosferatu take on the Dracula mythos a bit more. Is it just.
There's something so much, at least to me more appealing with a streamlined Orlok who is just a monster and does not have like a whole like side hustle going, wining and dining the London aristocracy.
Cody:Well. And this approach too fascinates me because it's. It's one your classic monster. This guy is just evil. There's nothing redeeming about him.
But they also present the idea in the movie. Oh, he's also a metaphor. He's both. We're gonna have Arcade Andy because he even says I am nothing but an appetite.
He kind of casts himself as the dark reflection of what Ellen wants secretly what she's kind of repressing about her herself.
So if you really want to go into the movie and look for it as analogy or something like that, it's giving you everything you could possibly want with the vampire just flat out stating, yes, I am. I'm a representation of that kind of shit.
And if you don't want to look at it that way, if you just want to look at it as a story of the supernatural, no problem, bud. He's still just an evil motherfucker that has no problem killing children. Yeah.
Mike:If you're not into talking about sex shaming, we can just talk about Orlok sucking Nicholas Hoult's neck.
It's funny to think of how much, quite often tongue in cheek discourse there has been over the years to how actually quite terrifying even the most positive vampire inhuman pairings are when you consider these spectacular age gaps there.
It's very interesting to see a take on the romantic side of the Draculamina relationship through the lens of like, what could be seen as just a groomer child relationship with Dracula as that kind of predator.
Cody:The downside to that, though, is I've seen way too many goddamn tiktoks about people being like, yes. Yeah, I can just stop there. But just people complaining about the movies like, I can't believe you guys like Nosferatu. That vampire is a groomer.
Like, yeah, he's evil.
Mike:If you stand problematic characters like Orlok, get out of here.
Cody:Right. Or there's the fact that, you know, Ellen is in some level, you know, actually attracted to him.
There is a certain amount of returning lust from her side to him, despite the fact that he is disgusting.
Mike:She's actually striking a nerve with people. I think people like that because that's complex and that's a super gray area aspect of life that a lot of art is very ill prepared to talk about.
So I think seeing that, like, yeah, that's. That's really surprised people. A lot of people are responding to that.
Yeah. Ironically, it's going towards the oppressive nature that the movie is calling attention to. And once again, the sec.
The sex shaming involvement of it, like, oh, no, we're very uncomfortable that Ellen's actually kind of into it.
Cody:Not to be too much of an old man, but this generation is just not prepared for monster fuckers.
Mike:Just people wanted to King Kong.
Cody:Yeah, well, Guillermo del Toro got lucky. If he put out the shape of water like now, the kids would have turned on. They've been like, oh, yeah, that lady fucked a fish. That's. That's wrong.
Mike:It couldn't consent. She molested that fish man.
Cody:The fish man liked it. God damn it.
Mike:Sorry. That fish God.
Cody:Fish God, yes. They really stress the God part of it in the novelization. They go very hard on him just being a God who's fucking around that whole movie.
I forgot the beat I was gonna drop after that. I really just wanted to talk about monster fucking.
Mike:I guess we got stuck on fish dick again.
Cody:It happens. It happens. But there's been a lot of. It's a frustrating trend in my mind of people trying to virtue signal on movies.
Like there's younger audience that are talking about, oh, they set, you know, a scene in a Romani village, and their treatment of the Romani is bad. Well, yes. I don't know what you want me to say here. Dracula is, in fact, a dick to the Romani people.
Mike:Once again, he's Dracula. Movies are not religion.
Cody:And I get frustrated by the idea that a lot of people want to see movies where everything is presented in the most morally just way, or if someone is doing something that is bad, that it has to be clearly marked as bad and gets a punishment immediately after.
Mike:But you also see people still reject that as well. Yeah, It's a weird bit of modern movie discourse. Movies are simultaneously too moralistic and not moralistic enough.
Cody:Yeah. This one fascinates me, though, because we've been seeing kind of a pushback on there being sex in films.
And this one isn't necessarily graphic, but there's fucking. We have horny scenes. Yeah, it's a very horny movie.
There's not necessarily nudity in the fucking, but you can tell there's fucking happening on screen. And I was really surprised that the backlash wasn't primarily focused on that.
But I think the disgust level of Orlok was enough to kind of disguise the disgust level over sex.
Mike:There's necrophilia.
Cody:Yeah. There's even that.
Mike:I did not have Kraven the Hunter fucking the corpse of Cassandra Nova on my bingo card.
Cody:Nobody did.
Mike:With the, honestly, ugliest caskets I've ever seen.
Cody:They were very oddly shaped. I get they were for children, but still, oddly sh.
Mike:Just that seemed like this adding weight for no reason.
Cody:This movie's all about big coffins, which.
Mike:By the way, I'm so glad I can add Nosferatu to my Fuck them kids list on letterboxd.
Cody:Going back to the idea that Eggers does not do funny moments in his movie, I am convinced that the shot in, like, perfect golden light of the two children praying, basically marking them as dead meat, is 100% a joke. Like he knows you watch horror movies.
Mike:The most gorgy ass children I've ever seen. Yeah.
Cody:You know, it was like the moment putting that shot on screen, which is so different from everything else in the movie. He's like, this is a bullseye. These two children are dead and they don't even know it.
Mike:So I'm convinced he also found it amusing to have Willem Dafoe say cock probably.
Cody:Let's just spend a moment on the cast and crew here, you know, across the board. Excellent. I think really everyone here deserves their laurels.
I expected Willem Dafoe to just be fantastic, but he was very different than I was expecting, honestly. Still a great performance.
But I wasn't expecting an alchemist who is most of the time pretty reserved in his madness until it comes to burning rats down. A guy who's, you know, fairly forward thinking even though he's an alchemist. He's the only one who understands what really needs to be done.
But he's also smart enough to keep his mouth shut because Helen knows the deal as well. He doesn't want to spoil it.
Mike:The only accepting of Ellen as well.
Cody:Yeah.
And again, you would think that's an interesting pick because they picked a guy who's, you know, like the upper 60s weirdo scientist to be the one to really understand her instead of like her husband or anyone, even her age range. But they go all the way around. They're like, let's take the grandfather figure and make him the guy who really gets it.
Mike:Someone say that the closest Van Helsing he is related to is Mel Brooks. And I really agree with that.
Cody:Yeah, Anders did say he watched Dracula dead and loving it. To figure out, okay, what are the parts of Dracula that have been done so much Mel Brooks felt they were fair game to make fun of?
Mike:That's really smart to do, honestly.
Cody:Yeah. Those are the moments I don't want to include in my movie because they're overplayed. And he's completely right.
Mike:I am convinced the reason Rocketman is so good is they just watched WOLC hard before that and said, don't do this movie.
Cody:Yeah, that's 100% it. Like, okay, these are played out. We can no longer do these beats as is.
We really either have to re engineer them or drop them because audiences have had enough. But to get back to the cast here, let's just run down them pretty quick. Lily Rose Depp, an actress I've never really paid much mind to.
Huge performance here. And I guess this proves that it really. You gotta trust your director.
And if you get the right guy allowing you to do your thing, if that trust is there, you're gonna come up with a really, really big swing.
Mike:Nicolas Colch, by the way, a performance that absolutely sets the tone for this movie. Like, I feel like if you swapped her out with any other actress, you would fundamentally change the DNA she captures. The.
She's almost like made in a lab to perfectly capture the melancholy of an Edgar's movie.
Cody:There's a bravery in the performance too, where she is not afraid to let a trail of snot come out of her mouth. You know, it's not like she's obsessed with. I need to take where I look.
Mike:My prettiest, very unglamorous performance from a very beautiful young talent. You don't really see that very often. Like, that usually comes much later in the career.
Yeah. And that's why the comparisons to Possession are so strong and so dead on. Honestly, it's that level of performance. Long way from yoga hosers. Yeah. Well, the scenes assume we never see her again after that.
Cody:Yeah, that's where I was at.
But besides the physicality of the scenes too, where she has to rip her dress and she's got to throw things around the room and roll her eyes back or go into an epileptic fit, there's a lot of moments in the film where she needs to switch on a dime from being her normal self to being the possess possessed self. Tough work. That is. That's a hard thing to pull off without looking silly.
Mike:So, you know, and it's hard to see where the line is. Like it's in so many scenes in this movie, both with her and Holt. It's like the perf. The shifts in performance can be so subtle, moment to moment.
You don't know when Orlok's influence is. If. If Orlok's influence is supernatural at that moment or psychological at that moment, or.
Cody:If it's even her being honest, if she's letting something out that she would necessarily hold back. So I think there's a lot of really wonderful layers to that performance. Like I said, I didn't really have her pegged as having that in her.
So, you know, foot in my mouth.
Mike:Also, I really want someone to take, she says, make him see our love. And just cut to Orlok grumbling and grimacing and kicking a can down the road.
Cody:The Charlie Brown music's playing as he just walks back to his castle.
Mike:I can find a new girlfriend.
Cody:I love the amount of jokes on instagram right now about this. There was one like, what is your.
Mike:Wife'S Instagram going to slide into her DMs? The wifi password, please.
Cody:So Bill Skarsgrd apparently worked with an opera vocalist to get his voice down another octave to be able to do.
Mike:Isn't that which.
Cody:Holy cow. That's some commitment. I love. This is.
This is a little bit like the Bane voice in the fact that nobody would have predicted that was the sound we were going to get out of this. And now it's going to live on.
The whole movie could have been a failure and it wouldn't have mattered because we've gotten that incredible voice out of it that we're all going to joke on for the next decade. Luckily, this one, it all worked. So that's just a bonus.
Mike:It's just the Dracula voice now.
That's amazing that Skarsgard and Klaus bang for half of one episode of the Netflix.
Dracula are like the only times we've gotten like Hungarian as fuck Draculas or Orlocks, despite the fact that that is such an essential part of the character in the novel. How deeply, deeply Eastern European he is in a very specific manner. Yeah, right.
Cody:Well, that used to be the whole interpretation of the fear of Dracula. Right. Oh no. A sexy Eastern European is invading the West. He's going to take our women. And he was just.
Vampires were just a stand in for basically foreigners. Oh.
Mike:With all this strange money and disease and superstitions. Yeah, and dirt.
Cody:They bring the plague with them.
Mike:Oh God, I've never thought about that. Dracula does literally bring foreign soil to London.
Cody:Yeah. So that was always, you know, kind of the early racist origins of Dracula as a thematic villain.
So it's interesting we've brought that back, but no one's latching onto that idea anymore. No, there's better thematics in the movie. We're just gonna focus on those.
Mike:And it also queer angle of Bram Stoker than the other angles. Yeah.
Cody:And I'm very glad too, because this movie, I'm shocked that people have not made it. A think piece about COVID You have doctors making the wrong calls. You've got fucking plague rats that are coming to town.
Because there's a very powerful man who's his way and he doesn't care what others say about him.
Mike:Nosferatu feels extremely timely by sheer coincidence.
Cody:Well, Eggers has been working on this. I want to say, didn't he say for like 10 years, like at one point he thought about making it a stage performance.
It was supposed to be like his first movie. And it kept falling apart, falling apart.
So maybe that's why it doesn't feel like, you know, this was adapted to be a Covid story or a post Covid story, because it was always the same thing. I don't think he's drastically revised the script since he envisioned it. Maybe some of his techniques in the actors, but not the story.
Anyways, I'm glad this has not become, like, everyone just pointing out, like, mmm, he's talking about COVID here, the plague rats. Because that'd just be unbearable.
Mike:Talking more about Skarsgrd's performance, though. The thing I thought was really cool was the way Edgar's.
It feels like he crafts the scenes around the fact Skarsgrd is giving an unexpected performance. Like those scenes with Orlok. It feels like they almost were unexpected to him.
And he was able to build the scenes around what Skarsgard was giving him and really accentuate what he was doing.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Ironically, maybe, like a bit like what? Like Coppola and Oldman where it's just the second he's on stage. Like, just everything pivots around the oddness of his presence.
Cody:Well, it works to the fact that Orlok. His account and he demands fealty. Everyone needs to kind of bend to his will. So it makes sense. All the scenes feel the same way.
Like they're also under his influence. But I think that's what makes the interplay between him and Ellen so exciting, because there's finally one character who can stand up to him. Yeah.
Which pisses him off, but he's also into it.
Mike:I do love that so much. Her just insulting him and him. Just three days.
Cody:I'm gonna kill all your friends. Bye. Three days.
Mike:I'm talking old movie riddles now.
I won't with you on your wedding night.
It's very much just someone who terrorized someone in childhood, just expecting to meet the child again and being genuinely surprised that they're an adult now. Who can say no? Moments like that feel very, very. They ring very true.
Yeah. And, you know, there's something about the backstory to. To this version that, to me, adds a little bit of the layer.
The way the Exorcist is really terrifying. The idea that you can just be going about your business and suddenly become possessed. Like, I always like that aspect of that.
And I think this has a bit of that in Ellen calling out to the universe for help and assistance. And the thing that answers back is Orlok. And there's something really terrifying about that idea.
And there's something so cosmically malevolent that his power is like that great that he can essentially call back to, like, God. So he's practically the shadow king at that point. Yeah.
Cody:So dumb thing here.
And this really shouldn't play any major part into interpretations of the film, but I was just curious on a lore level, which is the nerdiest thing, like, someone should dump me in a toilet. Throughout the movie, it's alluded to that when Ellen has that moment at the start of the film where she calls out into the darkness for someone to.
To be her guardian angel and Orlok responds, it's kind of implied that he's just out in the ether and this brings him back to the mortal plane. But you could also take it. Yeah, he was just fucking around in Transylvania and this gave him motivation to come to Germany.
And I'm not sure what would be the correct interpretation, if there is one.
Mike:I think the interpretation, he was just already fucking around in his castle, and then he essentially had someone to psychically around with and belonged to him. It was only after she got married and her connection to Orlok was then severed.
And that's why he has to come to essentially get her back, because she is his property.
Cody:I think you could still apply that same interpretation to the idea of him being awoken from the darkness. Like, literally from the darkness. He's just a lost soul until she gives him a barometer to reinhabit his corpse and come back to life.
That idea kind of threw me off because we're so used to Dracula's where. No, he's just been fucking around in Transylvania for like 600 years.
Mike:Locals with his babes.
Cody:Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, what if that is the lore we're going with here, where he's just kind of been manifested?
I think that would add a little bit to the character's guilt because Ellen does believe this is her fault when there's 10 other people along the way that share just as much blame. But it's also kind of a fascinating idea that she was so powerful she could just draw a soul from hell essentially to her.
Mike:And this kind of would be kind of a literalization of the idea of him being just an appetite. Like, no, he is just a disembodied will that wants to steal life.
And everything, everything physical about him is just a means to an end to achieve that goal. Also weird to think that this movie is essentially art house, Satan's Little Helper.
Cody:Oh, no. The thing here that I like, lore wise, is returning Back to very old definitions of vampires before the Hollywood definition took over.
Everyone's thinking where a vampire used to be kind of a wayward soul that was more or less just possessing a corpse to get up and do its thing, or not even that, just draining the vitality from people as a soul.
So to get this version where warlock soul has come back and he's just possessing his own corpse and kind of making it dance around and do all these things. And then the end when his soul leaves and you see he's just a bag of bones, there's nothing left. There's no vitality.
Very cool visual way of doing that and a neat way to hearken back to old school folklore.
Mike:It's always fascinated me that Buffy is one of the only vampire mythologies to keep the idea that vampires are just monsters wearing the bodies of dead people.
Cody:Yeah. I've never.
Honestly watching Dracula as a kid growing up with it is when people said undead, I never quite got it because, like, yeah, Dracula seems pretty alive. Like he plays by different rules. Yeah, he's playing by some different rules. But like he's out there, he's got a feed and all that.
Mike:He's from the other side of the tracks.
Cody:But this version really stresses like. No, that is clearly like just a corpse that's walking around. Like it's not truly living, it's being puppeted.
Mike:Yeah. God, I love that look so much. And I love.
I love the fact that that Egger's version of Orlok standing up in the coffin, it's been done so many times and done really well that there is no point in. In recreating it. So let's do it viscerally. Let's have him naked. Let's show him as a rotting corpse that just has lesions and shit like all over him.
Cody:Coming off of his body. Yeah.
Mike:And just have him like stand up triumphantly and seem like He's. He's fucking 12ft tall. I love it so much. I've never seen a film character hang wang more terrifyingly. And now it's owned by Nicholas Hoult in a framed shadow box.
Cody:Great segue. I want to talk about Nicholas Hoult's acting here for a moment. Holt is a fantastic actor.
We've seen him in so many genre pictures, though, where he's playing, I think, roles that are beneath him. But he's having fun, so it doesn't matter.
Mike:My partner and I realized the other day Nicholas Hoult is the world's prettiest character actor.
Cody:Oh, yeah?
Mike:Yeah, 100%.
Cody:But it's so weird because he keeps starring in all the genre stuff, so he must enjoy it. Or I guess he's just being typecast into it now. But he's got leading man looks. He could just be doing romantic comedies if he wanted.
He wouldn't have to deal with all the fake blood and, you know. Well, time to get in my zombie costume for the third month in a row.
Mike:Make me beast again. He has made it known that he is a giant nerd, so I could see him just wanting to do those roles.
Cody:But for this character, I love the juxtaposition where, one, it's very, very handsome Nicholas Hoult. Two, he's absolutely goddamn shredded.
So the assumption is this is going to be our brave lead hero most of the movie, even when he has the right intention. Not the case. Like, even at the end when he vows he's going to destroy Orlok to save everyone.
Ellen knows that it's not gonna do shit, so she has to, like, make up a chore to get him out of the house to make sure he doesn't fuck things up. And that's. That's him at his best. Literally, the best thing he does in the movie is accidentally kill his boss.
And Willem Dafoe steps in to finish the job. He doesn't even, like, no, no, I don't want this on your conscious limb. Yeah, he can't because, yeah, he doesn't finish the blow off or anything.
He gets mad, but he's, you know, kind of taken aback that he just kicked the wrong guy. Dafoe's like, no, no, no. I have no qualms murdering this little freak.
Mike:Been to a lot of stakings. It's all where you stand.
Cody:So I love the traditional leading hero man look that Hulk brings and the fact that he is so good at portraying a guy who cannot meet those demands. But we also don't hate him. We don't think of him as a slimy worm or anything.
Mike:It's not 70s Hunter.
Cody:Yeah, he did sell out his wife for a sack of gold that he doesn't even leave the castle with. But you still kind of get the sense. No, he deeply loves his wife. He is just a very flawed man.
Mike:And he is. He is under the impression he's doing it for Ellen.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:So they can have a life.
Cody:Well, that's his justification. But we also get the line earlier where he apologizes to his friend for all the debts that he will now pay back. So I think there's.
I think that's him papering over his own shame. You know, he's got a rich buddy that he's had to take advantage of and it gnaws at him.
Mike:There's some class shadow stuff going on there.
Cody:Oh, yeah, well, and to run that for a bit at the end of the movie when Ellen is kind of chewing out Aaron Taylor Johnson, you know, like, hey, man, we can't leave the house. There's vampire shenanigans and he's like, come on, I let you stay at my house when you were being a weirdo. There's that.
Mike:I like this dialogue. You know, he even mentions, in this. Day and age, I'm just a simple Bolton.
Cody:But he mentions too, you know, I'll call you a cabin. My expense.
You know, he's got to rub it in that he's been spending the money in all this and he's been supporting them and it's one of those, you know, like, God damn it, man, you're rich. It doesn't hurt you at all. Your daddy gave you a boat business that you apparently you barely have to do anything at.
Mike:Look at that mustache.
Cody:Yeah, there's definitely a lot of class baked into this. It's not in the forefront as much, but it's clearly there.
Mike:Yeah.
And again, it's like it's very easy to look past it because of how much bloat there is to the original Dracula novel. But a lot of ink is spilled about the transfer of deeds and titles and finances moving around. So financial insecurity is at.
At the forefront of that story, and that's hard.
Cody:I was mostly impressed, though, that Taylor Johnson was able to arrange a funeral for his entire family apparently within four hours of it happening. He got the coffins specially made, like orphan baby, like baby sized coffins. He got the burial plot already, to.
Mike:Be fair, the plague was happening there. They were doing. They were doing funerals like every five minutes in that. Baby coffins for sale. Baby coffins for sale.
Cody:Hardly used.
Mike:Oh, it looks like your daughter might be a little bit too tall. Don't worry. We just take her off at the ankles. We should be able to fit her in there. No, don't worry. We'll put the ankles up by her head.
Cody:Another. Another bit of lore I didn't quite understand is they. They burn the bodies of the victims, right? Like they go into the little.
Whatever you want to call it, like the little burial house. I'm forgetting vocabulary at the moment.
Mike:Crypt.
Cody:The crypt. Thank you. That's what I needed.
Mike:The charnel house. The fuck house. The fuck house. As it is now called.
Cody:Yeah, the.
Mike:Oh, the Stabbin Cabin. Yeah, that's what Edgar's called it on set.
Cody:The Masturbatorium. So they.
Mike:Dracula's Goon Cave.
Cody:Yes, that's what we call her basement in college. So anyways, they go in there and they burn the bodies. But the movie doesn't really make an emphasis on the fact that Dracula can. I did it again.
That Orlok can turn people. We don't really get the sense that he is making other vampires.
They still go through the effort of burning the bodies because they're unpure at this point, which is interesting. I didn't know if that was supposed to imply that they believed they could come back as vampires or if it's basically like, these guys are nasty.
They got the plague, just burn them. Yeah.
Mike:I didn't know exactly what the aim was there with the. With the body burning. If it was implied that they were still infected with. With vampirism as well. It's like, oh, Orlok, these. They're gross.
Or if it was just. Even though they're dead.
And like, it's not just about getting rid of the plague, but also they've been touched by Orlok in some way and they are unclean because of that. And this is the only way to fully release them from Orlok's grasp.
Cody:Yeah, it's hard. Maybe that'll be one of the details they put into the extended cut.
I guess there are other vampires theoretically in this world, because we did have the scene right at the Romani town where they go out at night and kill a vampire that looks very much like Count Orlok. That's part of the dream aspect of it.
It's tough to say, but it seems like that's implying that they have their own methods and there are other vampires out there that they have to clean up on occasion. Anyways, that's not important to the film whatsoever. Just a weird little lore question I was curious about.
Mike:About what route did Orlok take to get to Germany?
Cody:And then we loop to the beginning of this episode because we've been talking for an hour and 14 minutes and then people can never leave.
Mike:No, hold on, let me pull. I mean, I ordered a map that should be here any day. We'll just sit here for another two days and we'll get. It'll get here.
Then we crack it open and we'll plot a course. We'll go there. Oh, we'll go there.
Cody:Let's.
Mike:No, we'll do that trip.
Cody:Wow.
Mike:Yes, we're Gonna take an 18 day.
Cody:Voyage from Germany to Transylvania. We're going to take that boat ride. This is how we start our Patreon. We're going to have people pay for our trip from Wilshofen down to Oltenita.
I'm probably pronouncing that very wrong.
Mike:That place. Yeah, we just got it. We just want to prove that Orlok made good travel plans.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:That he knows what he's doing. And, you know, it is really weird that technically he went out and made a box, put himself in it, arranged for it to be picked up.
I guess at the same time he. I mean, it was through supernatural means and. But he did arrange real estate.
Cody:Yeah.
We are missing the scene, unfortunately, from the original silent Nosferatu of him picking up his coffin and running around in super speed in the middle of the night.
Mike:I was so hoping that was gonna happen. We got to see Klaus Kinski do that.
Cody:That's really my big complaint about the movie. We didn't get that.
Mike:I'm just imagining a scene of scars guard in full nostril for R2 makeup. Reenacting the dream sequence from Breaking Bad where Jesse makes the box. Beautiful. PIANO music playing Makes his own coffin. Honestly, it was a nice box.
Cody:I'm sorry, I'm just stuck on Geppetto. Orlok. Now you will be a real boy.
Mike:I call him son. It's still jtt. Miracles are made in the heart. Papa.
Can I say I've discovered that Orlok's coat has leopard print on it. It does, it does. It has leopard print on it. I saw a picture of it. I. I guess, like behind the scenes on a mannequin or something.
And it has leopard print. And Orlok is. He's a. Honestly, can we gas up Orlok's Bane coat a little bit? My favorite Dracula affectation of all time.
Cody:When will they be putting that in the NBC Universal Store? I can buy a $20,000 replica of his sarcophagus, but I can't buy his pimp coat.
Mike:I want his coat. His pirate coat. I loved the fact that some people on the Internet called him a pirate.
Cody:I didn't really get pirate vibes out of it so much, but if you.
Mike:Don'T know what a Romanian is, I. Guess I got more. All I could think was Rasputin. Yeah, very Rasputin.
Cody:But it gives him a great silhouette. It's a callback to the original Max Shrek costume without being the exact same thing. And obviously, like, hey, there's Dracula dressed all in black.
There's Ellen dressed All in white. You know, the very obvious visual connection between the two. It's a cool costume. Yeah, that's really the big thing. You can't have everything.
Mike:I love that hat.
Cody:I love hat.
Mike:I wish he rocked the hat more, honestly.
Cody:I'm sorry.
I'm still just stuck on Dracula Dead and loving it, where Leslie Nielsen takes off the hair, his entire hair, his wig, and hands it off to the servant to go hang on a hook.
Mike:I watched that after Nosferatu. I'm down.
Cody:I watched it before Nosferatu because I couldn't get to the theater in time.
Mike:So I want this in my head before I. Yeah, this is me ramping up evil.
Cody:This is me ramping up for Nosferatu.
Mike:I'm sure you saw it at the Alamo Drafthouse. They would have played a clip from Dracula Dead and Loving Him. Just the dream sequence beforehand.
Cody:I'm trying to remember what my theater played beforehand. They. They did some Dracula clips, but it was like a collection of bad ones.
cula Untold and, like Dracula: Mike:Oof. Oh, don't. Don't put that in people's heads.
Cody:It was fine. I barely remember it anymore. So it all faded quickly.
Mike:As those movies are wont to do.
Cody:To that end, within one week, I saw Red One and Nosferatu. And let me tell you, only one of those. Can I recall any of the character names or plot details on.
Mike:And that's Red One, right?
Cody:Yeah, definitely.
Mike:Yeah. Polar bear. Chris Evans is in that movie.
Cody:Oh, yeah, I already forgot about that. Yeah.
Mike:You know, that movie's bigger than Oppenheimer.
Cody:Is that like the new age version of Big in Japan?
Mike:Oh, oh, oh, oh. You know who else is big in Japan? Oppenheimer.
Cody:Too soon, Mike. Too soon. Well, we have gone on nearly an hour and a half, I think, at this point about this, and I feel like we've barely scratched the surface.
Mike:Commentary. Commentary. As an excuse to talk about all of the Nosferati.
Cody:Yes.
Mike:Nosferatu month.
Cody:No, we still have wax to finish.
Mike:After we're done with wax, we will do Nosferati. We have melted the winter's wax.
Cody:We swear to God, people, we're coming back with more wax soon. There was just a very exciting vampire movie in the way. We had to do this first. You understand how it is. We gotta.
Mike:Have you seen Orlok's penis? His penis?
Cody:Better.
Mike:I'm here. Uncle Ben.
Cody:Poor Uncle Ben, laying on the ground as Nosferatu suckles the life out of his chest. Peter, Peter, Peter. I need electricity. I need electrolytes.
I was trying to wrap this show up, and now it's just gonna be fucking 20 minutes of Uncle Ben dying. Jokes.
Mike:Also, my audience wanted to laugh at the sucking sound so bad, but they were so visceral and weird, they couldn't bring themselves to do it.
Cody:I. My audience was not laughing at anything. I was very happy about that.
I've heard some audiences kind of laughed at the final shot of the movie where you see more laughter. Yeah.
Mike:For some reason, I have no idea why was that funny.
I mean, to be fair, the ending of that movie is hilarious. If you forget that. That. That.
If you forget that Emma is going to die and you think the entire tension of that finale is Holt trying desperately to not get cuckolded. No. A bad man's gonna. My wife. No, no, no, no, no, no.
Cody:I'm too late.
Mike:No, see, now I'm just stuck on. If Ellen was still alive, then they would have to try to get Orlok off of her.
So it would just be like this awkward moment of her just, like, sitting there waiting as they're trying to move Orlok.
Cody:But at the end, Orlok looked like he was made of firewood. Like, he just picked him up.
Mike:He was, like, 15ft tall. I mean, that's gonna be heavy, bones.
The only addition to the director's cut is it ends like Herzog's Nosferatu. And the chief of police walks in and arrests all of them for whatever the hell is going on in that room.
Cody:It's gonna be tough to explain. This is the one where there's actually a vampire corpse left behind. They have to be like, boy, this one's hard to explain, Officer.
A lot of people are dead. Let's just sweep this under the rug, though.
Mike:This is still better, because actually, no, Orlok's body stayed around in Herzog's version. I mean, perfectly fine. Like, he just. Like, he didn't burn up or anything. He just collapsed onto the floor dead. Weird dude.
Cody:To deal with, one little fun fact Eggers gave out the other day was when they designed the corpse puppet for the end movie shot.
It was designed to bleed out from, like, the eyes and from underneath the fingernails and the ears, you know, like, all of his orifices are bleeding, including the. When.
And when they set it all up, they realized, oh, no, this is gonna look very, very silly if he's just bleeding out his ass in our dramatic final shot. So they had to literally put a cork up. Up the anus of Orlok's corpse to stop him from leaking blood out his butt in that final dramatic shot.
Mike:I just love how that's in somebody's garage. Now, once again, release the butthole. Cut.
Cody:Oh, no.
Mike:Okay, movies. You gotta stop it with the buttholes.
Cody:People like buttholes, Mike. I don't know what you mean.
Jamie:Final Frontier. It's 4D
Mike:But I love a good butthole in the safety, the safety of my home.
Cody:Folks, we've been box office pulp. Thank you so much for listening to us tonight.
If you would like to hear more of our show and our deep critical analysis of movies and buttholes, you can find us on boxofficepulp.com, we're also on Spotify, pretty much anywhere you get podcasts. We're probably lurking in the shadows talking about buttholes. Anyways, thank you so much for listening.
We'll catch you soon, we swear to God, or we'll kill Jamie. Sorry, Jamie. There will be more wax commentaries coming. We still have Wax works. We still have the House of Wax, something.
I don't think we're doing the Chamber of Terrors or the Black Museum.
Mike:Yeah, other things. Yeah.
Cody:There's like, 400 wax movies. We're not doing them.
Jamie:It's gotta have wax in the title.
Cody:We only have a couple more coming, but they're coming. We swear we'll get back on track.
Mike:Waxwork 2.
Cody:Yeah.
Mike:Lost in time.
Cody:Is that the one with Bruce Campbell or is it Waxwork? People don't. We'll say.
Mike:I think that's the one with Bruce Campbell.
Cody:Yeah. Okay.
Mike:Yeah.
Cody:That reinvigorates my interest in Waxwork.
Mike:He was in Maniac Cop.
Cody:Yes. Yes, he was. Credits. All right, folks, that's a wrap. Get the hell out of here. Like. And subscribe. And like that.
Jamie:I didn't really have a context to bring this up, up in the episode, but I've been fascinated since seeing that movie about, like, the specific choice to have Orlok too wrapped up in drinking Emma's blood to, like, to notice the sun coming up and the obvious, like. Like, sexual metaphor there. That reminds me so much of the end of the Company of Wolves.
I can't remember if that's in the Neil Marshall movie, but definitely how Angela Carter's short story ends, because I think that's based on, like, the very, very original versions of the Red Riding Hood story where she sleeps with the wolf and, like, that distracts him while he's killed. And I. I'm really curious because I didn't see, like, that come up in anything, but I'm very curious if that was on Egger's mind in any way.
Mike:Maybe.
Mike:But I mean, that's also something that's. I mean is in both the original and the Hersock movie to a degree. So it might be because it's extrapolating from there. It might be coincidental.
But I can also see Eggers doing that.
Cody:This just makes me think, Jamie, there is a Japanese term that basically translates to wise man time for post coital clarity. Like you ejaculate. And then it would be post nut clarity.
Jamie:Basically I'm calling that wise man time forever.
Cody:Wise man time. And just imagine if they had included that. Like Orlok gets like two beats where he's like oh, it's bright out. I banged my too hard when you.
Jamie:Already busted another rito and she keeps slopping on the diddly.
Cody:Thanks Ned.
Mike:Vampirenos imagining Orlok saying all this is delightful.
Cody:I have the wise man time upon me.
Mike:Orlok, is that pussy juice all over your mustache?
Cody:Why are the ends white?
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