Film Review: Female Desire and Gothic Horror in Eggers's <i>Nosferatu </i>(2024)


Karadağ Ö.

ADAPTATION-THE JOURNAL OF LITERATURE ON SCREEN STUDIES, vol.19, no.1, 2026 (AHCI, Scopus) identifier

  • Publication Type: Article / Review
  • Volume: 19 Issue: 1
  • Publication Date: 2026
  • Doi Number: 10.1093/adaptation/apaf047
  • Journal Name: ADAPTATION-THE JOURNAL OF LITERATURE ON SCREEN STUDIES
  • Journal Indexes: Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), Scopus, Film & Television Literature Index, International Index to Film Periodicals, MLA - Modern Language Association Database
  • Istanbul University Affiliated: Yes

Abstract

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), shaped by fin-de-siècle fears and fascination with science, technology, and late-Victorian anxieties over sexuality, contagion, and imperial decay, has long captivated filmmakers as Gothic horror and cultural allegory. Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) joins this intertextual lineage as both adaptation and homage, operating as a palimpsest of Henrik Galeen and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s A Symphony of Horror (1922)—the unauthorized adaptation of Dracula. Eggers’s film is self-consciously layered, preserving the Gothic aesthetic and narrative structure of Murnau’s film while engaging intertextually with Stoker’s novel, and with Werner Herzog’s (1979) and Francis Ford Coppola’s (1992) adaptations. Eggers’s fidelity to Nosferatu (1922) foregrounds the film’s strengths but also its limitations, particularly in its treatment of gender, sexuality, and alterity.