The Dracula story has practically passed into myth. Written as an epistolary novel by Bram Stoker in 1897, “Dracula” was first filmed in 1922 in Germany as “Nosferatu,” and any new adaptation that doesn’t radically deconstruct the narrative has to rely on the strength of its imagery to stand out from the dozens of other adaptations.

What director Robert Eggers and collaborators show us in their otherwise straightforward take on “Nosferatu” is shocking enough to make this old story feel, well, “fresh” isn’t the word for a film where the stench of the grave seems to cling to the very screen.

All the familiar beats of the story are there, but you haven’t seem them quite like this. When an unmanned carriage pulls up to spirit Nicholas Hoult’s credulous Thomas Hutter to the vampire’s castle, it looms out of the fog like the circus truck in Béla Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies,” pulled by nightmarishly large draft horses.

The scenes on the ship transporting the vampire to the German town of Wisborg — a part of the story a recent Dracula movie called “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” made its focus — erupt in a rush of chaos, confusion, vomit and violence. When the vampire claims his victims, he practically uncorks them — no seductive fang jobs here.

Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography exists in different shades of pallor mortis, enough so that we can’t always tell which bodily fluid onscreen is which. A scene inside a candle-lit Transylvanian inn is like a trip into Plato’s cave, and the few scenes that use cheerful colors exist to create a flimsy image of domesticity that will soon be invaded by the all-devouring Nosferatu.

Bill Skårsgard plays the title character close to Stoker’s inspirations in the 15th-century tyrant Vlad the Impaler.

Apparently part of a “very old” lineage, adorned in regal furs and affecting noble airs, he halfway convinces us his vampirism is the result of inbreeding. To a “civilized” German like Thomas, the count’s provincial eccentricities and lordly impatience are as frightening as his animalistic growls and corpse-like pallor.Eggers sees 19th-century Europe as a place where the veil between middle-class domesticity and the horror of maggots and the stench of corpses was much thinner. Our opening shot of the streets of Wisborg pans past a butcher casually chopping up a pig’s head.

Later, when the count arrives in town and the movie erupts in a tide of blood, oozing wounds and rotten corpses, we see the same streets strewn with the dead and wailing bereaved, plus an army of plague rats that surpasses even that in Werner Herzog’s 1979 “Nosferatu the Vampyre.”

“Nosferatu” is Eggers’ fourth film, and it’s his best since his debut of “The Witch” in 2015. His last effort, the Viking epic “The Northman” from 2022, sold itself on brutal heavy-metal violence but blurred or cut away from most of the nasty stuff.

Here, Eggers holds nothing back — children and animals get it in the neck, too — while delivering a picture lavish enough to pass as a costume drama when the characters aren’t being menaced by horrors from beyond the grave.

“Nosferatu” only falters when it ignores or contradicts its own half-hearted attempts at social commentary. A running theme is that no one takes Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter seriously, even though she’s the only one to have been possessed by a vampire, but any attempt at feminist empowerment is offset by the seriously icky sacrifice she makes at the end. There’s evidence of tension between the Romani and the local peasantry during the Transylvanian sequences, but the Romani are still used uncritically as a scary “other” with an innate knowledge of the occult. A gravel-voiced doctor (Ralph Ineson) prides himself on his “modern” mental institution, but once he gets his hands on Orlok’s creepy little sycophant Knock (Simon McBurney) he concludes he’d be better left to rot in the dungeons.

This is not a particularly brainy or deep movie, but it feels like it is because of Eggers’ immersion in European arcana and production designer Craig Lathrop’s attention to period detail. It’s lavish with a nasty edge, and if Eggers’ past films aimed for the psychedelia of the New Hollywood ‘70s, this one is like an R-rated version of the horror-inflected swashbucklers Hollywood was good at 20 to 25 years ago: the Antonio Banderas “Zorro” movies, the “Lord of the Rings” films, the “Pirates of the Caribbean” films, the “Mummy” remake. It’s one of the best times you can have in a theater right now, provided you have the stomach for a film that goes places most blockbusters fear to tread.