Some images transcend the boundaries of the silver screen. The Extra-Terrestrial. One of these enduring images is Count Orlock, played with otherworldly death and menace by Max Schreck in F. He was an overgrown rat, emaciated and sunken, lurking in the shadows until he, too, became a shadow.
He was nightmare writ large, a wraith haunting a reel of celluloid. You are instead invoking a demon. He was Orlock, but he was also Kinski, and that was freaky enough, thank you very much. This Count Orlock is a gruesome monstrosity, gnawed on and gnarled, as repulsive as movie monsters get.
But he is now also that sexual creature, a hypermasculine s porn star, as virile as he is virulent. Her visions resume, her sanity is cracked, and her wedded friends Anna Emma Corrin and Friedrich Aaron Taylor-Johnson are helpless to protect her.
An eccentric professor, here named Albin Eberhart Von Franz Willem Dafoe , is the only person of science who believes in superstitions, and holds the key to understanding the monster, even if he cannot defeat him.
All of them find humanity on the brink β of society as well as our own sanity. Depp matches him point for point; her scenes of spiritual possession are physically exhausting, for us and presumably her, and her temptation is viscerally uncontrollable. She throws herself into her roles, quite literally, letting her torments run amok on camera.
