#review: Is Nosferatu or The Monkey a better horror film to watch?

David Ho reviews and compares two horror films that have just arrived in Hong Kong theatres – a remake of the classic Nosferatu and a take on Stephen King’s The Monkey  

Nosferatu

The original Nosferatu from 1922 set the blueprint for horror films, with the German production being an unauthorized silent film adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. More than a century after its initial release and a couple of remakes later, director Robert Eggers is bringing it out of the sarcophagus for another haunting.    

Lily-Rose Depp establishes herself as a scream queen to look out for with her performance as Ellen Hutter, a newly wed woman with great psychic sensitivity who accidentally forms a connection with Nosferatu during her lonely youth. Nicholas Hoult is also compelling enough as Thomas Hutter, Ellen’s loving husband who is unwittingly dragged into the terrifying task of becoming an estate agent for the vampire. 

Unfortunately, other members of the star-studded cast are wasted here. Bill Skarsgård’s take on Count Orlok/Nosferatu feels laboured and unintentionally hilarious, but never truly menacing. The most interesting choice here was to make his Count Orlok more like a walking corpse with a (very large) prosthetic penis, rather than the usual suave and seductive Transylvanian. In fact, the rats in the movie and Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, Thomas Hutter’s boss and a devoted servant of Count Orlok, feel much more of a threat than the vampire ever is. 

Aaron Taylor-Johnson is handsome but tedious as a friend of the Hutters. While the usually brilliant Willem Dafoe initially invigorates the film with his screen presence, his wise fool character of Professor Von Franz doesn’t really change the droning pace. 

The staging and camerawork here is fantastic, with much of the film looking grim yet grandiose. The movie tries to work on the despair of inevitability and its atmospheric creep. So what we get is a lot of buildup, from Thomas meeting Count Orlok to Nosferatu’s eventual arrival on German shores. But sadly, the payoff just isn’t worth it.

In a world filled with countless versions of Dracula, this version of Nosferatu just doesn’t have the fangs to puncture our memory banks for long, let alone draw blood.      

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The Monkey

Based loosely on a short story by the King of Horror, Stephen King, The Monkey is a bonkers piece of a cinema that balances Final Destination-esque tension with a wild sense of humour. 

Twin brothers Hal and Bill Shelburn (Christian Convery as young versions of both) find a drum-playing toy monkey amongst their missing father’s belongings. They soon learn that whenever the toy plays the drum, freak accidents resulting in deaths occurs around them, which freaks them out enough to get rid of it. But not before they lose their mother to the monkey’s powers.

25 years after getting rid of the monkey, a now adult Hal is estranged from both his bully of a brother and his only son Petey (Adam Scott). But the monkey’s return forces Hal to return to Maine, where he must race to find it while Petey is with him on his annual visit. 

Theo James of The White Lotus fame does double duty as the adult version of the twins and does it well. He makes both characters believably distinct and different. But the real star here are all the deaths that occur.  

From Chucky to Annabelle, stories of haunted toys aren’t new. But writer and director Oz Perkins adapts and changes Stephen King’s material the right way by infusing it with a dark sense of humour, which helps it be a standout in this niche. We quickly fall into a pattern of expecting a freak accident every time we hear the monkey play and Perkins deserves all the credits for keeping it fresh, funny but still terrifying enough.

Beyond the tension, what makes this film tick is how it makes fun of the absurdity and the arbitrariness of death, the fate that awaits us all. It also reminds us that the best we can do about it is to go out dancing. 

Verdict: If you have to pick just one horror film to watch, The Monkey makes for a far more interesting choice. 

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