VAMPIRE -'' NOSFERATU ''- VAUNTED : FILM HONOURS

The film begins with Ellen Hutter [ a riveting Lily-Rose Depp], whose haunted expressions seem etched into her pale, porcelain face. Eggers makes a crucial narrative shift by placing Ellen, not her husband Thomas [ Nicholas Hoult ], at the heart of the story.

As Eggers notes in his Guardian piece, the folkloric vampire is as much about desire and disease as it is about death.

Ellen is not merely Orlok's prey ; she is his summoner. In one of the film's most startling opening sequences, she calls out into the void during a moment of desperation and the void answers.

In Robert Eggers' Nosferatu, time folds in on itself. The film is not so much a remake of FW Murnau's 1922 Nosferatu : ' A Symphony of Horror ' as it is a seance, summoning the spectral remains of one of cinema's most influential  monsters into the modern age.

Eggers doesn't merely adapt : he exhumes and reconstructs, with a reverence for the past and an obsession with detail that feels almost pathological. And yet, in true Eggers fashion, his Nosferatu transcends homage - it is a singular work.

Eggers fascination with folklore and historical verisimilitude is well-documented, not least in his own article for The Guardian, where he writes of the vampire mythos as something far older and more sinister than Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Rooted in European superstition, vampires were never merely suave aristocrats in evening wear - they were bloated corpses in their burial shrouds, foul-smelling and pestilent.

Eggers leans into this raw fokloric ugliness with Count Orlok, played with grotesque relish by Bill Skarsgard. With yellowed claws, mossy skin, and an unsettling, wet rasp of a voice, this Orlok feels like something ancient clawed up from the dirt, his presence more of a stain than a character.

The World Students Society thanks Mahnoor Vazir.