PROTECT YA NECK, KID!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: with three films writer/director Robert Eggers claimed a neglected niche as an artisanal horror scenographer, creating unique environments with an obsessive fastidiousness that surely frightens and confuses any execs used to funding facsimiles of other films. At first The Witch disoriented the unsuspecting viewer with stylized Puritanical dialect before plunging them into a malevolent maelstrom of what Salem might’ve looked like if the witch-hunters hadn’t been making it all up. The Lighthouse was an intensely claustrophobic, black-and-white duel over Mellvillian obsession and 19th-century on-the-job training. As if those weren’t harrowing enough, The Northman retold the tale of the turn-of-the-ninth-century Jutland prince Amleth (you may recall Shakespeare’s watered-down adaptation called Hamlet) as a visceral, deafening Dolby Cinema experience in which its antihero, a doubt-free rage-monster, waged relentless revenge atop a sonic tsunami of pummeling war drums. Such are the hypperrealities that Eggers, diviner of realms unseen, has dared us to watch.

Whereas The Northman was less a do-over of existing material than a savage interpretation of the historical record, Eggers’ latest is his first total remake — a full-throated cover of the 1922 silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, F.W. Murnau’s unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that took on a life of its own despite the ensuing lawsuit. Eggers’ Nosferatu has no subtitle and is twice the runtime, and follows in the footsteps of other movie-monster aficionados-turned-pros such as Guillermo del Toro and Leigh Whannell, but as one might expect, it’s no ordinary Dracula flick to throw on the ever-mounting pile.

Continue reading →