My friend Tony and I went to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu last night at the Alamo Drafthouse, which is one of those new-style movie theaters that serves food and drinks and has big, comfy chairs. I had been looking forward to Nosferatu since it was first announced ages ago, mostly because I’ve really enjoyed Eggers’ other movies — particularly The VVitch.

Nosferatu was too…dark. I don’t mean in terms of its story or the inherent violence of a vampire movie, but that the movie tries to build tension with copious use of shadows. When it was over, my friend and I both remarked that somebody could make a cut of the movie that was only the scenes in which you couldn’t see anything, and it would probably amount to 15-20 minutes of video.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with making a vampire movie super-dark, but it’s an artistic shot in the foot for Eggers. Here’s a guy who makes amazing compositions with all of his scenes, and half the time the screen is filled with stuff you can’t see. It’s like if Bob Ross were to paint 1/3 of a picture all black. “Let’s have a happy little shadow, maybe with a happy little eldritch being in there. It’s your world!”

A good movie, though, and one that I’ll watch again when it comes to streaming.

Nikolai Gogol probably would have loved Nosferatu. (Slick transition!) When reading about some of his other works written before Dead Souls, I came across a short story called “The Nose,” which is about a nose that leaves a man’s face and goes off to start a life of its own. There are a few different PDF versions you can find.

Dead Souls doesn’t seem to have any of that same magical realism, but there is something fairly macabre about a man going around the countryside buying dead people. So far, that’s been the entirety of the story. Chichikov (the main character) bounces from estate to estate, meeting a bunch of colorful characters who enter the narrative and disappear just as quickly, never to be heard from again.

What’s impressing me is how funny it is. I rarely expect 100+ year-old novels to be truly humorous, but Dead Souls sure is. I laughed aloud when one of Chichikov’s “business partners” got arrested after blatantly cheating at checkers.

Gogol himself was also a strange bird. From what I understand, he didn’t just not finish Dead Souls, he seemingly burned part of it in a fit of religious fervor. He had a “spiritual awakening” toward the end of his life, became an ascetic, starved himself, and then said, “This book isn’t serving God!” Then he tossed part of his manuscript into the fireplace and promptly died. (Or did he?)

That may be a lot of talk, though. We really don’t know that much about Gogol’s personal life. He never married, was horrible at lectures, and apparently had a fear of being buried alive.

It’s said that, when Gogol was exhumed to be re-buried in a graveyard for fancy people, they found his body lying on its side in the coffin. Is it possible that Gogol was actually still breathing when they put him in the ground?

Or was he, perhaps…Nosferatu!