“Nosferatu” by Robert Eggers, spoiled rotten – Libération

The rotten vampire Robert Eggers version, more barbaric than his previous incarnations, is a formidable cinema monster in a film which is much less so, full of references and smoky scenes.

During the epidemics of old, the line between life and death was even more blurred than usual. Without tools to certify the death, people doubted whether they had buried a living body or a corpse, and faced with the adversity of contagion, they buried quickly and poorly, rushing the rituals, even taking the risk of burying unconscious people whose some sometimes woke up, stirring in their graves before emerging from the earth. In this context, it was not so rare to witness what were interpreted as resurrections. In Of the miracles of the deadthe German doctor Christian Friedrich Garmann lists several examples, such as Smacking deathswho came out of the ground chattering teeth and uttering pig-like cries – which the anthropologist Philippe Charlier, a great connoisseur of vampires, associates with “revenants in body”. Nosferatu, ghost of the nightremake by Werner Herzog de Nosferatu the vampire by FW Murnau (1922), opened with mummified bodies on display at the museum in Guanajuato, Mexico. That of Robert Eggers, of which we have not quite understood whether he intended to be a remake of one, of the other