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There are some Nosferatu spoilers in this article.
Among the of the many impressive things about Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu is how the marketing team kept the look of its main monster a secret. In posters and trailers, Eggers and his team used shadows and silhouettes to suggest the presence of the vampire Count Orlok, building on the visual style set by German Expressionist F.W. Murnau, who directed the original Nosferatu in 1922.
That sense of mystery pays off with the reveal of Orlok in the film. A grotesque beast, furs draped over his hideous body, Orlock glowers from under a thick mustache. Clearly by design, he looks as if the real Vlad Tepes had survived the grave as a ghoulish revenant for hundreds of years. Yet this cadaverous creature is just the latest monster brought to life by Bill Skarsgård. The Swedish actor, a member of an impressive family of performers under father Stellan Skarsgård, Bill has carved out his own place as a horror icon, one that recalls not just recent standouts like Robert Englund and Tony Todd, but the silent era great Lon Chaney Sr. or the Universal Monsters maestro, Boris Karloff.
Scaring Without Sound
Shortly after the original Nosferatu in 1922, Universal released the first adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera in 1925. And like the recent Nosferatu, Phantom keeps its central monster hidden for much of the runtime. When the Phantom initially courts the ingénue Christine (Mary Philbin), he appears as a shadow on the wall or under a pale mask. But at the midpoint of the film, Christine unmasks her mysterious patron living within the bowels of the Paris Opera House, revealing a hideous creature beneath. The scene is the stuff of cinema legend. The Phantom has a skull-like visage with gaunt cheeks, sunken eyes, bared teeth, and a gap in place of a nose.
The visage is still impressive today, a full century later. But it’s just one of the many onscreen transformations undergone by Lon Chaney, the Man of 1000 Faces. In a career that ran from 1902 until his death at age 47 in 1930, Chaney became not just one of the medium’s first great character actors, as well as a master of makeup and practical effects.
To portray the Phantom, Chaney pulled the flesh below his eyes and on his nose with string. In The Penalty (1920), Chaney played a man driven mad after losing his legs, Chaney used a bucket and straps to make his legs disappear. He donned sharpened false teeth and wrapped wires around his eyelids for the ghastly expression of the Man in the Beaver Hat in London After Midnight (1927), a pseudo vampire movie and one of the great lost classics of the silent era.
Leaving aside the unpleasant stereotypes that conflate body type with moral goodness, Chaney’s devotion to the craft of cinema still stands out. They stand the test of time because Chaney’s character transformations weren’t just skin deep. Although the pulp writer Gouverneur Morris, who wrote the source material for The Penalty, suggests that the loss of his legs made Blizzard into a cruel crime boss (he reforms immediately after having new legs grafted onto his body), Chaney plays him as a man who held hatred deep inside, even before his body changed.
No matter how extreme the external effects of his characters became, Chaney played the creation from the inside out. And this is demonstrated in how many of his creations, from the Phantom to his interpretation of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923) are referenced to this day.
Modern Monster Acting
There’s a lot to like in It, the 2017 adaptation of the Stephen King novel. Director Andy Muschietti, working from a script by Chase Palmer, Cary Fukunaga, and Gary Dauberman, captures the familiar King feeling of a summer adventure while also building off the recent ’80s nostalgia in Stranger Things. But it isn’t always scary. An over-reliance on CGI and shaky jump scares naturally handicap such things.
The are exceptions though, and almost all of them occur when Skarsgård is allowed to just act as Pennywise, the so-called “Dancing Clown” who lures children into the sewers beneath a New England hamlet where he feasts on their souls. Skarsgård can be terrifying, too, and not only because of the great-looking makeup design by Janie Bryant. The actor is unrecognizable, but that is also because of the physical characteristics he brings to the dancing clown. Fully separating himself from Tim Curry‘s delightful take in the otherwise flawed 1990 TV miniseries, Skarsgård melds a child-like giggle with a ravenous hungry look. The way Pennywise freezes while talking with Georgie (Jackson Robert Scott) and then rolls his eyes back—something the actor can do without makeup—is far scarier than the false distended mouth Pennywise sports immediately afterward for the inevitable attack.
These low-budget effects work so much better because they come from Skarsgård’s full-body commitment to the character of Pennywise. Like Lon Chaney Sr. before him, he understands the external to be an extension of the internal. Pennywise’s insatiable hunger for fear doesn’t just manifest in a spider form or a goofy, sped-up dance. Skarsgård conveys it with the drool that drips from his lips, with the way he shudders when a victim comes close.
Similarly, whether playing the perfectly still and serene Kid in the Stephen King shared universe show Castle Rock or the affable, doomed housing renter in Barbarian, Skarsgård makes the monstrous real in a way that so few actors have done before him in the 21st century.
Evil Inside Out
The horror of Nosferatu doesn’t come only from the plot. As a riff on an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, it hits narrative beats familiar to anyone who’s heard a story that’s been told time and again for more than a century. But that makes Skarsgård’s transformation all the more impressive. This isn’t Gary Oldman‘s dapper romantic and elderly creep. Nor is it Bela Lugosi‘s purring aristocrat. This is a beast who walks like a man. A proud, even vain ultra-masculine presence who nonetheless has rotted away to be little more than a self-described “appetite.”
As such, every part of Orlok’s appearance is a cover, a human suit of long faded splendor and prestige that’s now worn over the putrid creature that he has become. And it takes an actor like Skarsgård to make the creature come to life, bringing a fantastic silent tradition into today’s bombastic movie theaters.
Nosferatu is now playing in theaters.
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