I’ve seen a ton of 'em, and I thought Nosferatu was great!
Part of me wants to rebut the negativity in this comment and explain why I loved the movie, but I’m also pretty blue at the moment and can’t summon the strength to write much. I’ll just settle for saying that, for probably the first time in my adult life, it made me feel like a vampire was truly dangerous.
That’s easy for me to appreciate that response. Scary or dangerous vampires have been incredibly thin on the ground. Scariness is in the Dracula model. It’s the social vampires / Twilight, or zombie-ish models of vampires, that have made them feel undangerous to me for a long time.
Don’t know if it’s been mentioned before, but I found the Netflix mini-series Dracula (2020) to be very well done and very interesting to watch play out. I don’t know how it rates among vampire aficionados though.
My exposure to modern Vampire media is mostly limited to manga series like Vampire Knight or Rosario Vampire and the Castlevania series(and even then, Symphony of the Night is the only Castlevania I’ve actuallyplayed to completion or close too), but yeah, Vampires haven’t really scared me since I was a kid… and honestly, even reading Stoker’s novel for the first time did little to scare me(Though to be honest, I also didn’t find Frankenstein or what I’ve read of Lovecraft all that scary either).
Stoker’s novel is… not great, in my opinion. Dry prose. Dull characters. Awkward plot structure. One of the things that I appreciated about this new Nosferatu movie is that it harnessed those elements, funnily enough. The plot remains awkward, most of the characters aren’t what I’d call gripping, but there’s a rightness to this wrongness. A sort of respect for the source material – couched, ironically, in disrespect, since the movie is willing to change whatever it wants. It’s Nosferatu, not Dracula; in other words, it’s already semi-bastardized. But it takes its own bastardization seriously.
Anyway. Yeah. This movie got to me much more than the book.