“It’s a real film, Jack.”

I keep thinking about this quote from Boogie Nights whenever I watch something that isn’t just fodder for streamers or yet another placeholder entry in a long-running series – be it film or TV – and which instead exists in its own moment and on its own terms, with a lived-in texture we’ve trained ourselves to be nostalgic about. The line is uttered from one pornographer to another, as they marvel – with misdirected smugness and surprise – at how a nominally more ambitious project of theirs appears to scale new heights of taste and credibility.

A similar feeling crossed my mind as I sat down to watch Robert Eggers’ much-anticipated remake of Nosferatu. You may be tempted to think that this is because I consider genre cinema in general and horror in particular to be inferior to other forms of cinematic expression, but anyone who knows me would laugh at the mere idea of me taking such a stance.

No, this is more about the way in which Nosferatu feels like a “real film” – more to the point, a tentpole blockbuster of yore – in the same way as George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road felt like a real film.

Something made with excess, and a sense of abandon and sensation (if not sensationalism) at concept stage. But which then proceeds with an evident care and love as it paints itself on the screen. Just because we’ve evolved to understand how film language works doesn’t mean we cannot thrill to witness it being made with the same tools that evoke the true effort behind the magic.

(Better writers than me have delved into the aesthetics and mechanics of how these auteurs do what they do, so I don’t really feel it’s necessary for me to delve into a granular analysis of just how they achieve that spark).

Audiences understand how a story gets from Point A to Point B, and sure – that should be good enough for you to follow the entry of the latest Star Wars or Marvel Cinematic Universe entry. But the engagement you get from those franchises has less to do with your immediate experience of the individual film or TV series in the now and more about how they can reward you with more entries in the future… and who knows? Maybe someday, one of those entries will give you the same thrill you used to get in the early thrill of Phase One, when you were young to its potential, when you believed you were actually experiencing an Event right there and then?

The irony of Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) identifying himself as little more than pure appetite, when in fact it’s Eggers’ film that likely to leave us pleasantly full, sated and satisfied, whereas its erstwhile competitors in the mainstream genre sphere peddle the wares of long-form addiction – an exercise of endless deferral that also speaks to something resembling a pyramid scheme.

Parasites, like the truest of vampires.

Here, have another franchise entry. Just sit through this one, and I promise the next one will be even better. I’ll throw in a couple of cameos for free – you recognise that obscure character in the post-credits sequence, don’t you? Good on you – don’t you enjoy that hit? Don’t you want more?

“It’s a real film, Jack,” is also an acknowledgement that maybe, now, these guys could be readying themselves to make something won’t just bump them into a bracket of respectability previously closed off to them; it could also result in the creation of something socially beneficial… a movie that could be enjoyed as a movie and not just masturbation-fodder to scratch a particular itch, an itch which remains because pornography – and individual franchise entries – exist to leave you craving more.

Of course, anyone who’s seen Boogie Nights will know that the line is poised as an ironic act of hubris. The ‘real movie’ in question is a ridiculous pastiche – what we see from the end product are mostly corny lines pitched purely for laughs. But strip away the trappings of 1970s porn industry that informs Paul Thomas Anderson’s film and you’ll find an earnest beating heart which speaks to the vulnerability of that moment of creation.

To this end, another comparison comes to mind – one that cleaves more closely to the six degrees of separation that lead us back to Eggers’ Nosferatu – is Tim Burton’s Ed Wood. Burton treats the ‘worst director of all time’ with the same compassion and empathy that Anderson reserves for the collection of lovable losers and chancers that populate Boogie Nights, and in doing so makes us feel deeply for someone attempting to make art on their own terms.

Luckily for all of us, Eggers is no Ed Wood. But if you’ll pardon a pun more gross and disgusting than anything you’ll see in Nosferatu (full-frontal Orlok included)… we miss the wood for the trees when the end result is all that we focus on.

Particularly when the well-oiled machine of the rival franchises is all about the result – slick and nicely packaged, but also endlessly deferred with the promise of future packages to come.

What is this if not the same animating force behind art generated purely by AI? And wouldn’t both Wood and Eggers – opposites on the spectrum of quality as they are – stand in direct opposition to such a homogenising machine?

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Now, the texture that enriches the Nosferatu experience is also the kind of thing that would inspire addiction-adjacent rewatches, but I’d argue that this would be more of an act of communion, a revisitation akin to the healthy time spent with a good friend.

And I think this is what’s baked into Eggers’ process – the weirdly wholesome and probably somewhat anachronistic idea that ‘hard work pays off’; that not taking short cuts by doing all the nerdy occult/folklore research and having thousands of live rats on set will actually result in an appreciative response from the crowd you seek to court.

Of course none of these elements would work in isolation, and one of my own fallacies as a burgeoning artist was in fact the belief that churning ahead with the surface-level, craft-based elements will be what will allow me to eventually be taken seriously.

But when the mainstream morphs into an automated machine that can generate something resembling the shell of what you used to love, it is the humans in the mix who will remind you that what you love can still exist, across the same “oceans of time” that Gary Oldman waxed lyrical about in his own take on the vampire Count that served the basis for all the Orloks that followed.