Nosferatu is unexpectedly the perfect comfort blanket for Christmas

The familiarity of the Dracula legend makes this creepy new take on it almost reassuring, says Xan Brooks – just like other classic horror films

It was beginning to look a lot like Christmas on the December day that I saw Nosferatu, which is to say that it was unseasonably warm and all of the snow was confined to the screen. Robert Eggers’s vampire tale glides from the Carpathian Alps to small-town Germany and from frosty forest landscapes to cosy lamplit interiors. There is a Christmas tree by the hearth, bedecked with tinsel and candles, while the mood of the characters is one of thrilled expectation. “He’s coming, he’s coming,” sighs the picture’s excitable young heroine. This is the cue for the monster to materialise in her darkened bedroom, wearing a big fur coat and sporting luxuriant facial hair.

If Die Hard and The Apartment can be classed as Christmas movies, then so too can Nosferatu, which is hard and fierce and plays the festive season as an incidental bauble, at one remove from the action. Beyond the glow of the tinselled tree, the world is dark and full of terrors. There are beasts that creep and things that bite and the figure by the bed isn’t Santa after all. That’s basically the message of every good horror yarn – that there is no safe space; that we are all on our own – but say it loudly enough and often enough and the story itself becomes reassuring. Perversely, that’s the case with Nosferatu. It tells its old dark tale with such respect and conviction that it feels like being wrapped in a warm comfort blanket.

Was that the intention? I’m guessing not. Eggers has set out to make a frightening film. He wants to chill us, shake us and ideally make us scream. Nosferatu, moreover, is the director’s passion project, at least 10 years in the making, a remake of a 1922 German silent classic by FW Murnau that was itself an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (so much so that the author’s widow launched a lawsuit). Eggers’s film is a tale of civilisation and savagery in which a band of timid innocents, hopelessly constrained by good manners, are menaced by a growling, cackling, bloodthirsty beast. Specifically, it’s the tale of a young estate agent (Nicholas Hoult), his virginal wife (Lily-Rose Depp) and the enigmatic Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), who wants to buy a pied-a-terre in their town. Orlok’s family seat is a creepy castle in the mountains several hundred miles to the east. Shrewdly, the film resists uttering the dread word “Transylvania”.

Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror was the original Dracula flick. It was antic and strange, altogether unique, but it wrote the script for all the films that followed – even those that came to riff on it or play the whole thing as a joke. In the hundred-odd years since the film’s premiere at the Berlin Zoological Garden, the vampire has become horror’s hand-me-down. He’s been picked up and passed around by everyone from Polanski, Herzog and Coppola to Abbott and Costello and Mel Brooks. He’s starred in blaxploitations and sexploitations, Hammer Horrors and the Twilight franchise. He’s fallen in love with the vampire slayer and taught the kids how to count on Sesame Street. As my colleague Clarisse Loughrey has pointed out, Eggers does a magnificent job in dragging the story back to basics, stripping it of its accrued dust and bunting (the capes, the bats, the air of camp suavity) to play Stoker’s saga as a hardball goth-metal nightmare. But the tale’s bones are familiar. We know its shape and direction. It can’t terrify like it used to because it’s such a known property.

Assuming that this is even a problem, the obvious solution is to watch a horror film only once. Or if the plot feels familiar, give the thing a wide berth. The genre hits hardest when it’s a journey through the dark – when you don’t know what’s lurking and when the jump scares come as shocks. If you want to be chilled you had better go in cold. All of which makes perfect logical sense – but it’s also a reductive, joyless enterprise. It misses the point of the great horror movies, which is that they gain depth and texture with each fresh rewatch, haunting us where they once simply scared us; implicitly allowing us a small degree of control. Every “symphony of horror” eventually becomes a kind of glorious karaoke. We know its beat and melody and love it all the more for that.

Love is a notoriously subjective concept and so I’d think twice before recommending Nosferatu as wholesome Yuletide fare. It’s hardly Elf or Deck the Halls. Its festive spirit takes the form of a bout of demonic possession. But it’s a part of the holiday tradition all the same; the film equivalent of a fireside ghost story or an eerie, pagan-tinged Christmas carol, like the one that spooks Kevin near the end of Home Alone.

Overall, I’m a fan of comfort-blanket horror. It’s a vibrant, largely self-curated sub-genre, inhabited by unruly, uncompromising old berserkers that have, by dint of simply sticking around, become a part of the furniture and achieved a measure of respectability. Some of them might be films that we know back to front, such as Rosemary’s Baby or Psycho, The Wicker Man or The Thing. Others, like Nosferatu, are new versions of antique classics; chestnuts re-roasted and served piping hot. They’ll still burn you, they’re still scary – but only up to a point.

Lily-Rose Depp in ‘Nosferatu’ – Robert Eggers’s alternative Christmas film (Universal Pictures)

In Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice, we are warned that the demon is awakened if his name is called three times. Rewatching horror gives us the Beetlejuice spell in reverse, drawing the monster’s sting and smoothing its fur to the point where one can sit beside it unafraid. Three views make a marriage; you can almost feel the film come to meet you. The first time it’s a beast, the second time it’s a blast and by the third, it’s your friend.