When it comes to creating an aura of occult menace and eerie atmospherics, Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu is a triumph. His is such a rare talent that it seems almost unnecessarily picky to note the film’s unevenness, with sensational sequences followed by weaker ones of uncertain effect. Nevertheless, I note with regret that Nosferatu can’t match either Eggers’s The Witch (2015) or The Lighthouse (2019) for bold unity of vision.

And of course, it can’t touch F. W. Murnau’s 1922 masterpiece, Nosferatu, which has inspired Eggers’s imaginative flights since childhood. Fortunately, this new version isn’t trying to match it, offering instead a different approach to the same source material, Murnau’s unauthorized appropriation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, which was in turn sourced from Eastern European folklore. There’s no point trying to be a purist about vampires as a pop fiction subject — everybody is free to take a bite out of them.

And it’s been such a rough year cinematically, Eggers’s Nosferatu still gets a slot on my Best Films of 2024 list — the shortest list ever — because there are sections of Nosferatu that are so memorable, so well done, you may feel slightly uncomfortable alone in the dark well into the new year.

Perhaps the film’s most brilliantly spooky sequence involves the journey of Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a young German estate agent, to a remote castle in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania owned by a mysterious old-money client, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). Though he’s warned away from what is believed to be a vampire’s castle by the Romani people he encounters, who either scorn him or pray for him, Hutter is broke and desperate to prove himself to his new employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), a strange fervent little man who insisted he make this trip. Hutter is worried about supporting his new bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who is subject to fits of melancholia and begged him not to leave her side.

Hutter’s stay at the castle is terrifying from the start. He’s weakened by his disorienting overnight stay with the Romani, especially when he awakens in the morning to discover they’ve all moved on, taking his horse with them. He has to walk through the harsh snowy terrain the rest of the way, an exhausting trek, and arrives at night. This is where Eggers goes to work on the senses — Hutter’s, and ours — in a way that evokes the best Gothic writing. So many nineteenth-century horror novels work on the uncertainty of perception, with darkness, flickering firelight, huge projected shadows, mists and rains, gales and thunderstorms, all obscuring what one can see and hear.

Illness, exhaustion, hallucinations, disturbing dream states, and perhaps encroaching mental derangement all call into question what the protagonist is experiencing. We share Hutter’s disordered state when a phantom carriage drives up in front of him and the door seems to open by itself. He gets in numbly and is transported to the medieval fortress of Count Orlok. There he passes through entryways that are somehow perfectly constructed to strike fear into your heart — two rhyming peaked archways leading to the castle yard, and through them in the darkness stands a chilling figure, still and waiting.

Hutter moves slowly and automatically toward what seems certain doom, and we go with him inside the stony edifice lit only by the fire in the massive fireplace. The Count is tall and looming but dressed in a covering cloak and hat — any particular features are lost in the deep shadows of the room and the brownish haze crated by the smoke from the fire. Only once do Count Orlok’s eyes light up and become visible, like two sparks, perhaps reflecting the firelight or some more devilish inner light. His strange guttural voice, sounding as if it were dragged up, echoing, from the tomb, pounds away at Hutter to get him to cosign the elaborate document laid before him.

Hutter’s nights in the castle are feverish, as he dreams he’s visited by the Count in a series of grisly yet erotic attacks that leave large fang marks on his chest. And his days are ever more desperate, as he tries to find a way out of the weirdly empty castle, where every door is locked like a prison. His pleas that he must return home immediately are rejected when Count Orlok insists he remain till he is well and rested.

It’s all magnificently done, right up through his hair-raising escape.

Skarsgård and Hoult are giving the film’s two great performances, which add to the superb effect of these early castle-bound scenes. Skarsgård is unrecognizable as the Count, who is suddenly revealed in a shocker moment, rising up craggy and naked from his coffin, with a dome of a skull, burning eyes, predatory beak of a nose, and a massive moustache right out of that famous portrait of Vlad the Impaler aka Vlad Dracula, the historical figure most often cited as inspiring Stoker’s original novel. With Eggers’s famous mania for historical research and accuracy, he makes clear in interviews his ambitious plans to represent Count Orlok as “a dead Transylvanian nobleman,” accurate even down to the “shoes he would’ve worn.”

And Hoult has an even tougher job: that of conveying the strange, numbed state of characters in horror films who even in their terror feel compelled to persevere through every insane development, supernatural or otherwise. He’s perfect as the hapless worker in this class-conscious fable, offered up by his brownnosing boss as a light snack to the monied aristocrat, who is portrayed as a bloodsucking monster trying to forge a modern life in the German city of Wisborg. After all, there’s more human prey in cities.

That narrative line is obscured by the film’s shift in emphasis toward Ellen, languishing in London waiting for Thomas’s return. While he’s away, she suffers increasingly from fits and fugue states that resemble epilepsy or, perhaps, demonic possession. “Too much blood” is the diagnosis of her doctor, amusingly repeated by the Dr Van Helsing stand-in, named Professor Von Franz in this version. He’s the expert in the occult played by Willem Dafoe, who looks wonderful in 1830s clothes and fulsome facial hair, and gives an increasingly wild performance in the film.

“Too much blood” is a clever line that represents well the dense paternalistic view of nineteenth-century women, whose supposed tendency toward excess — of roiling emotion, of sexual desire, of mental torment — was oppressively policed. The script leans hard into the oppression of Ellen, from the opening scene in which she’s shown as a lonely girl praying hard for affection and understanding in the form of “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort — anything.”

How her prayer is answered in the form of a “demon lover,” manifesting as Count Orlok, is the result of her own “excessive” power in the form of her paranormal gifts. She can to some extent foresee the future and ultimately, despite all the frenzied efforts of Thomas, his friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), and Professor Von Franz, the job of saving civilization from Count Orlok and his accompanying plague will fall to her.

“He is coming,” moans Ellen repeatedly in sexualized horror as she both longs for her husband’s return and psychically intuits the imminent ship-borne arrival of Count Orlok.

As Ellen, Lily-Rose Depp is getting rave reviews, and indeed she throws herself into the role, reportedly portraying her character’s violent, body-contorting seizures herself, with no stunt-person. She looks ideal for the part as well, with her enormous dark eyes and strong, serious features that can carry the severe, plastered-down hair and confining clothing of the era.

But dramatically, she falters in a few key scenes, especially her confrontation with Count Orlok in which she defies him, refusing to be a willing participant in a bloodletting, which is apparently necessary to their unholy union. Suddenly she’s treating him like an old boyfriend after a bad breakup. The writing also gets a bit silly as they argue over these “rules,” such as the three nights he’ll grant her to call him to her while he wreaks havoc on the lives of everyone around her.

And who really wants more rules or explanations anyway, in the vampire genre, which is already chockful of rules and explanations? Eggers jettisoned many of the most familiar ones that have grown up around the vampire legend in stories and films, so there’s no brandishing of crosses or hanging up of garlic in Nosferatu. Eggers wanted to unearth the vampire lore of older, harsher folklore:

Vampires of folklore didn’t always even drink blood. . . . Sometimes, they would strangle their victims. Sometimes, they would fornicate with their victims night after night until they died. And while it makes perfect anatomical sense, Anglo literary vampires would drink from the throat. But because of waking nightmares and old hag syndrome and the pressure of that feeling on your chest, many types of folk vampires would drink from the chest, which is what I do in the movie.

In general, this reversion to the folkloric serves Eggers well. And though there are weaker aspects of Nosferatu, mostly concentrated in the second half of the film, when Count Orlok is in Wisborg, the stronger scenes are the ones that stay with you. There’s a great interlude on shipboard, for example, when a quaking seaman, one of the last ones alive, is desperate enough to go down to the hold and confront whatever is in the mysterious coffin-sized box. It’s dark in the hold and the shifting movement of the lantern light reveals flashes of the background that all seems, in our fevered imaginations, to be teeming with ungodly life.

Eggers also loads up the soundtrack in certain sequences with vague murmurs and chuckles and rustlings that are a brilliant way of portraying the living world beyond humankind. Really, he’s so gifted at Gothic horror, I’ll be grateful if he spends the rest of his career fine-tuning his abilities in atmospheric unease — a sense of the world as fundamentally strange and ungovernable. We’d be more careful with the world, if we took that attitude.