11 Movies to Watch If You Liked Robert Eggers’ ‘Nosferatu’
It can be hard to find movie recommendations free from an algorithmic stank. Cursory online searches tend to spit out remakes and usual suspects. And that’s to say nothing of the decision paralysis that can strike even the most seasoned horror veteran.
So if you’re craving guidance that’s a little more bespoke, you’ve come to the right place. Think of me as your local video store ghoul, eager to supply a syllabus to help you become the most well-watched genre connoisseur you can be. I promise to leave no tombstone unturned and to only recommend films I genuinely think are worth your time.
With all that out of the way, good news! If Robert Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu tickled your fancy, you’re spoiled for choice when it comes to what to watch next. You could check out Count Orlok’s earlier cinematic ventures: perhaps F.W. Murnau’s expressionistic original or Werner Herzog’s lush 1979 retelling. You could even spare a thought for the Nicholas Hoult-starring Renfield, the visually indebted Salem’s Lot, or the doomed Last Voyage of the Demeter.
But you deserve better, weirder recommendations that take more than surface-level subject matter into account. Below, I’ve listed a handful of films that directly inspired, resonated, or otherwise compliment Eggers’ take on Count Orlok. From gothic gaslighting to monstrous romance, keep your garlic bulbs close at hand: here are 11 movies you should seek out if you enjoyed Robert Eggers’ 2024 remake of Nosferatu.
1. Vampyr (1932)
Neither fully a sound picture nor a silent one, Carl Theodor Dreyer’s gothic masterpiece is a fittingly liminal experience; disorienting, dream-like, and drenched in a sense of unease. Adapted, in part, from Sheridan Le Fanu’s gothic horror anthology In a Glass Darkly (which was itself a tremendous influence on Bram Stoker), Vampyr follows a student of the occult (Nicolas de Gunzburg), whose fanciful ways lead him to a desolate mansion where shadows wield pistols, maidens sleepwalk in graveyards, and the servants of blood-hungry forces conspire to assist their immortal masters. While less popular than its peers (Universal’s Dracula had only premiered a year earlier), Dreyer’s film remains an essential, if under-seen, example of early cinematic adaptations of the vampire mythos.
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2. Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
You might feel obligated to pay your respects to the first (official) film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But I’m here to advise Nosferatu-heads to check out the less-famous direct sequel: Dracula’s Daughter. Released five years after the Bela Lugosi classic, the 1936 film was catapulted through production so that Universal could extend its claim over the film rights to Stoker’s material. But, rushed production be damned, Dracula’s Daughter surpassed its status as a contractual footnote, influencing the likes of Anne Rice and introducing audiences to a sapphic strain that continues to influence the cinematic vampire to this day. Grounded by a magnetic lead performance by Gloria Holden and featuring more of a female touch than most of its peers, Dracula’s Daughter is the rich gay auntie of the Hollywood vampire film.
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3. Let’s Scare Jessica To Death (1971)
Nosferatu is the latest entry in the long-running gothic tradition of “women being told they’re crazy when supernatural shit is happening to them.” One of the essential films in this space is Let’s Scare Jessica to Death—which, like Eggers’ Nosferatu, took direct inspiration from both The Innocents and The Haunting with a heroine whose hysteria may be supernatural insight. The film follows Jessica (Zohra Lampert), a former New Yorker who moves to the countryside after being released from a mental institution. However, as Jessica begins to experience increasingly violent visions, her husband fears a relapse. Did the local legends of a wandering vampire rekindle her “overactive imagination”? Or is Jessica the only one privy to the malignant presence lurking in this small-town paradise?
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4. The Third Part of the Night (1971)
It’s not hard to see how the Polish legend Andrzej Żuławski imparted Robert Eggers with a certain apocalyptic sensibility. So if Possession is the only Żuławski film that’s graced your watch history to date, strap in because few films contain as much nightmarish energy as The Third Part of the Night.
Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, Żuławski’s debut feature follows a young man named Michal (Leszek Teleszyński) who journeys to the city after the Gestapo executes his wife, mother, and child. Haunted by doppelgängers and hunted by faceless fascists, Michal is only able to support himself by becoming a “feeder” for lice bred to create typhus vaccines. A punishing watch that anticipates much of Żuławski’s later filmography, The Third Part of the Night radiates a palpable menace that must be seen to be believed.
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5. The Beast (1975)
Directed by Walerian Borowczyk (“a genius who also happened to be a pornographer”), The Beast’s provocative reputation precedes it. And now, Nosferatu can join Borowczyk’s masterwork under the ever-infamous banner of teratophilia (a love of monsters).
Loosely based on Prosper Mérimée’s 19th-century adaptation of a Danish folktale, The Beast follows a well-to-do family’s desperate efforts to find a suitable bride for their uninspiring son, Mathurin (Pierre Benedetti). They’re pretty sure they’ve found a viable, wealthy candidate in Lucy (Lisbeth Hummel). Now it’s just a question of concealing the family’s legendary secret: that long ago, their noble gene pool was irreparably damaged by an unholy union between a woman and a beast. Delighting in its satire, The Beast actively critiques how the powers that be try (and often fail) to conceal scandals and controversies. No small irony then, that Borowczyk’s film became one of cinema’s greatest, and most censored, taboos.
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6. Lips of Blood (1975)
The second French erotic horror movie from 1975 on this list (weird coincidence), Lips of Blood is the crown jewel of Jean Rollin’s vampiric output, which means the boobs are out and the day-for-night is a given. Our hapless hero is Frédéric (Jean-Loup Philippe), a young romantic who, like Nosferatu’s Ellen, begins to suspect his childhood encounter with a vampire was more than just a dream. But can a childhood memory be trusted? And what to make of these recurring visions of his childhood crush (Annie Belle) and her quartet of vampire babes? Should he make good on his long-forgotten promise to free her from her castle/prison? Can he even refuse?
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7. Possession (1981)
In an interview with Letterboxd, Eggers confessed that Lily-Rose Depp partially secured her role as Ellen by remarking on Nosferatu’s similarities with Possession. And well yes, Ellen and Isabelle Adjani’s Anna/Helen share a certain otherworldly psychosis that locked Possession on this list. But what I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere is that they both share a penchant for monster-fucking. And not just monster-fucking but REPULSIVE monster-fucking. So if you want to see another film where a wild-eyed leading lady does the nasty with something truly nasty, Possession is the slimy, wriggling benchmark as far as arthouse fare is concerned.
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8. I Like Bats (1986)
Look, sometimes the poster art is all you need to know that a movie is Polish.
A jet-black horror comedy and a worthy inclusion in Severin’s House of Psychotic Women boxset, I Like Bats blends vampiric lore and feminism to delirious effect. There’s only one film on this list where a woman coolly walks away from an explosion and this is it. Grzegorz Warchoł’s fever dream follows Izabela (Katarzyna Walter), a happily single vampire who spends her days crafting bat-based taxidermy and her nights slurping on creeps. Then something horrible happens: she falls in love with a psychiatrist who tries to convince her she isn’t a vampire. Sigh. Another baddie has lost her bat wings.
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9. Cemetery Man (1994)
While mainstream Hollywood is hard at work normalizing prudish blockbusters, Eggers’ Nosferatu is doing its part to keep cinema sexy. And you can’t bump uglies with horny horror without paying dues to Cemetery Man. Directed by Italian supernatural staple Michele Soavi, Cemetery Man follows an impotent, illiterate, square-jawed cemetery groundskeeper (Rupert Everett) whose undead tenants have an annoying habit of rising from their graves. When the hottest woman to walk the earth (Anna Falchi) enters his life and promptly dies, our hero descends into madness, necrophilia, and murder. Morbidly erotic and darkly funny, Cemetery Man is a singular experience and an all-timer for “movies you shouldn’t watch on a plane”. Learn from my mistakes.
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10. Shadow of the Vampire (2000)
Thirsting for more Count Orlok and Willem Dafoe? I have fantastic news.
Produced by Nicolas Cage and directed by E. Elias Merhige, Shadow of the Vampire is a genre-defying love letter to 1922’s Nosferatu and a welcome entry in the “making a movie within the movie” genre. Dramatizing the famously troubled production of F.W. Murnau’s original gothic chiller, Shadow of the Vampire proposes the especially ghoulish twist that actor Max Schreck didn’t just play a vampire on-screen … he was one. See, that’s what happens when you’re a compelling character actor who denies the limelight! People will start speculating. And before you know it, the freak responsible for Begotten will direct a movie where you drink a bat like a Capri-Sun.
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11. The Vourdalak (2023)
It’s neat when vampire movies have nasty sex scenes. But it’s even neater when the vampire in those sex scenes is a big, gross, human-sized corpse puppet.
Loosely adapting Aleksey Tolstoy’s 1839 novella, The Vourdalak follows Jacques (Kacey Mottet Klein), a pompous French courtier who stumbles onto the farmstead of a Serbian family whose patriarch, Gorcha, is off fighting foreign raiders. Before he left, the aging father gave his family a stern warning: should he fail to return in six days, they must assume he has become a vampire. On the evening of the sixth day, Gorcha appears on the edge of the forest, crumpled, corpse-like, and wheezing. Dismissing the pleas of his siblings, the domineering eldest brother welcomes this ghoulish husk to their dinner table with catastrophic results. Shot in 16mm and bursting with production design and queer overtones, The Vourdalak is a must-watch for Nosferatu fans who want to keep their finger on the pulse of the modern cinematic vampire.
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