A Review of Nosferatu: Vampires, Hypergamy, and the Death of Tragedy
The following first appeared on the Substack ‘Culture Crusade’ and is syndicated with the permission of the author.
As storm Eowyn ravaged the Irish coast, I finally got around to seeing Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu in my local cinema —one of the few places in the county left with electricity— unaware that I was about to witness ravaging of equal severity, if different in kind. But before we get to said ravaging, you might forgive a brief prologue to explain the significant pedigree of the film. The film’s predecessors will be important for framing this newest rendition. There will of course be plenty of spoilers ahead.
The history of cinema and the various iterations of the Dracula story have been intimately linked since their beginnings. Nosferatu, in particular, has, perhaps, the most venerable cinematic ‘heritage’ of any film series. As the Victorian era entered its final stage, Bram Stoker was busy penning the first paragraphs of Dracula circa 1895, the very same year that is regarded as the beginning of projected motion pictures when the Lumiere brothers displayed their short films to a cinematically-virgin audience in Paris. As the 20th century rolled on, 1922 brought the release of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which has become not only a founding father of the horror genre but also one of the defining films of the silent era. Directed by F. W. Murnau, a Weimar-era director heavily influenced by German Romanticism and Expressionism, the film possesses haunting visuals which have been highly influential throughout the ensuing century. Murnau made several changes to the original Dracula story, though not enough to avoid a copyright battle with Stoker’s widow, which nearly resulted in the total destruction of all copies of the film by way of a court order. Furthermore, Murnau changed the names of the characters, moved the location from England to Germany, and the means of fighting against the vampire shifted from the antidote of Christianity to the occult. Nosferatu’s cast is not only renamed but also stripped down from Stoker’s novel; Mina becomes Ellen, Jonathan Harker becomes Thomas Hutter, and Dracula becomes Count Orlok.
For a motion picture now over one hundred years old, the original Nosferatu holds up well, but for those averse to the unusual style and acting of the silent era, there is, luckily, the 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, courtesy of Werner Herzog, which is far more palatable to modern audiences. The project was intended as a retelling and often a scene-by-scene reshooting of Murnau’s classic. It also happens to be my favourite Nosferatu. Herzog does make some interesting innovations that dial the German romanticism up a few notches. For instance, Harker’s(Hutter’s) ascent up the mountain to the score of Wagner’s Rhinegold left a particular impression on me during my first viewing. It is hard not to be taken in Herzog’s vision and for anyone lucky enough to have not seen it, I would implore them to do so. The enigmatic Klaus Kinski as Nosferatu cuts a melancholic figure, a vampire who victimises but is, in turn, victimised by his own bloodlust and the burden of eternal life.
These German adaptations of the Dracula story bring an added tragic element that goes beyond the plot of the novel. The quirky tonal shift of Kinski’s vampire is one example, but the penultimate tragedy in these Nosferatu films is epitomised by the sacrifice of Ellen(Mina), the fair maiden who gives her life at the end of both movies. In these versions, Ellen sadly recognises that she must lure the vampire to his doom by letting him feed on her, distracting the beast until he is consumed by the morning sun and destroyed. A critical element in this is that her character possesses a certain purity, which necessarily accentuates the selflessness and makes the act of self-sacrifice truly tragic in nature. In this moment, Ellen embodies a tragic female archetype, an ingénue that pays the ultimate price to restore order, and, as a result, has her heroic status conferred by her moral purity. This is an important difference between the 20th century Germans’ Nosferatu and Eggers’ version, which I will return to shortly.
Now, with that added historical context, let’s get to the meat of the issue at hand. Eggers’ Nosferatu was just okay as a period horror. It would be remiss of me not to laud the interesting shot composition, beautiful costume design, refreshingly non-diverse cast (a minor miracle given the enforced values of modern Hollywood), and the omnipresence of European gothic aesthetics. All of this is deeply appreciated by a jaded moviegoer such as myself, who has come to expect the absence of such things in modern films. Eggers has a distinct visual style which he retains here, and no one can doubt his technical mastery, a reputation cemented by the brilliance of his previous works. I won’t even attempt to hide my admiration for Egger’s oeuvre. The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman are, in my view, some of the best films of the last ten years, breaths of fresh air in a decade that has largely been a creative famine. With all that said, I could not help but feel underwhelmed with Nosferatu, which, in my opinion, did not reach the heights of his previous three releases. It struck me first that the pacing was off in the sense that the more interesting ideas were not sufficiently fleshed out in the dialogue, and things were too tightly edited. Shots did not linger where they could have and were frustratingly ephemeral, lessening their potential impact. Herzog’s Nosferatu, for instance, was a masterclass in letting a shot linger, almost forcing the audience to imbibe the weird ambience of his gothic tragedy. Colour-wise, Eggers went for a very dark and muted palette, which one may argue, at a minimum, adds to the menacing tone through its obscurity, but it also has the unfortunate effect of making many scenes washed out and overly dark, hampering the transfer of information to the viewer.
Things did not fare better in terms of sound either. While there is much to admire in the ample use of archaic language, which lends credibility to the 19th-century setting, there were also some frustrating choices. Count Orlok has an original look this time around and, perhaps more distinctly, original vocals. The voice of Bill Skarsgard is warped out of all recognition by a deep, raspy and heavy Eastern accent. The effect of this diabolical voice wore off quickly for me, however, and I found it somewhat overegged and irritating. Skarsgard’s type of monster is far removed from human, and if that was the goal, then he plays this aspect well, and yet, for the exact same reasons, it is a less memorable vampire menace than Gary Oldman and Klaus Kinski’s renditions. The strongest cast member was Lily-Rose Depp, who turned in a very solid performance as Ellen, given the extensive emotional and physical distress the script required of her. Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Hutter’s wealthy ship-building friend Friedrich Harding was a bit flat throughout, but his character was not particularly interesting anyway. Daniel Day-Lewis himself could not have salvaged the role.
The plot of Eggers’ Nosferatu is similar to its predecessors but makes some notable changes. From the opening scene, a teenage Ellen is beset by loneliness and, pleading for an entity for companionship, has her wish answered by the nefarious Count Orlok. She makes a psychic pact with him, which quickly turns into an aggressive sexual encounter-cum-blood-feast. This is about as much backstory as we get in terms of the Ellen-Orlok connection, which leaves us bereft of details; an unfortunate script choice, seeing as their relationship becomes so central to the narrative. This introduction is a far cry from the emotive and sumptuous prologue of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, whose iconic silhouette battle scene and theatrics are still the gold standard in vampire lore exposition. That opening served as the perfect set-up for the story that followed. I cannot help but feel that Eggers should have given us something equally as thorough or else just held back his opening scene and let the mystery of the relationship simmer throughout the film. It might have worked well as a flashback in the final third, but at the very least, as an opening, it could have given more context, lore, myth, or anything grounding.
After this opening, Hutter(Harker) is sent on a business errand by his firm to see a client who is also a count, leaving his newlywed at home despite her describing disturbed dreams of ill portent. His journey to the Carpathian mountains brings him to the Count’s castle, where he signs the deed for the vampire that will give him property in Germany. The Count is an intimidating, archaic figure, and he also takes an unsettling interest in Hutter’s wife. After the contract is signed, Hutter is trapped in the castle by the count, fed on, and barely escapes with his life. The Count makes his way in a coffin to Germany, causing carnage along the way and spreading pestilence and disease by way of an army of rats. All the while, Ellen is becoming increasingly delirious and, well, horny, apparently. Ellen is staying with Hutter’s friend Harding while he is away, and duty-bound in caring for her, he calls upon the services of a doctor to diagnose her frightful fits. Ellen is now suffering what looks like demonic bouts of possession, the scenes of which wouldn’t look out of place in an Exorcist franchise. The doctor, having failed to help her, calls on the services of an eccentric occultist, Albin Eberhart Von Franz, played by Willem Defoe, who recognises the solution as outside the bounds of modern science and enlightenment thinking. Shortly after, Hutter returns from his castle escape, and the couple are reunited at home. Both, however, are worse for wear mentally and physically. Ellen becomes seemingly possessed in front of her husband and in a vindictive tone declares that Orlok was her first lover and that Hutter could never please her as he could. Yes, that’s right, Ellen was alpha-widowed by a rotting corpse with a dodgy moustache. Hutter then attempts to prove his manhood and gives his possessed wife a good going over. We are none the wiser if he has disproved her. From this point, the theme of cuckoldry, which was implicit in the beginning, becomes very much explicit, hit-you-over-the-head-with-it levels of explicitness, in fact.
The fight against Orlok continues, and he gives Ellen the ultimatum that she must willingly submit to him within three days or he will kill those whom she loves. Ellen delays, and true to his word, Orlok brutally murders her friend and Harding’s wife, Anna, and her two children for good measure in a ghastly and frankly unnecessary scene. Call me a prude, but even cinematic portrayals of infanticide are best left out of the medium, and it is not something we need to take root in popular culture. Sadly, we have had enough of it in the real world these days. This relates to some of the tonal issues in the film. Eggers never really lifts the foot off the proverbial gas with the sense of dread, or moreover, the morbidity. Outside of the few sarcastic quips of Von Franz, and the parts where the exposition got boring, there were few moments of reprieve for the audience. This lays the horror on thick, which some no doubt enjoy, but in my view, it affects re-watchability. Both Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and Coppolla’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) are eminently rewatchable because the horror, gore, and morbidity, are applied at intervals, and a full spectrum of emotions is induced in the audience. Conversely, Eggers’ Nosferatu oscillates between tension-sapping excesses of exposition, and a pervasive morbidity that seems the only means of spiking cortisol; altogether it makes for an unpleasant emotional cocktail. Most of my own uneasiness, however, was related to issues with Ellen’s story arc. In the final third of the film, and after Orlok has made his ultimatum, Von Franz and Ellen conclude, with the aid of occultic texts, that the only way to defeat the vampire is for Ellen to submit to him, sacrifice herself, and hope for the best. Von Franz then brings Hutter on a wild goose chase, where he thinks he is going to destroy Orlok, but this is merely a distraction while his wife gets ready to lay with her ‘problematic ex’. She succeeds in her sacrifice, and seemingly in her orgasm, laying with Orlok and distracting him until the ‘cock crows’ and the morning sun’s rays destroy the creature. Hutter and Von Franz arrive just as Ellen is dying, and the film ends ridiculously abruptly with a shot of the repulsive creature heaped on top of her in a bloody deathbed. After I left the cinema, it took me several hours to digest fully why I was unsatisfied with the portrayal of Ellen’s sacrifice.
I concluded that the one bit of salvation that we could have had in this bleak affair should have been through Ellen’s noble death, and even that has the rug pulled out from under it through the libidinal depravity of her character. The ‘sacrifice’ is just blatantly undermined by the clear willingness of her last carnal act. I don’t know how the final shot of the dead lover’s embrace could do anything else but sear this fact into the brain of the viewer. This nausea-inducing image of their embrace belies the solemn sacrifice we are supposed to recognise. What should be the apotheosis of the moral message, which many right-wing commentators believe is a conservative one, is destroyed. The older Nosferatu films showed the virtuous self-sacrifice of an innocent Ellen, purity standing against the depraved, which was, in its own way, moralising, even if her life is tragic. But in Eggers’ finale there is an uneasy feeling that exactly the opposite has triumphed. Through parts of the film, we are led to believe that Ellen is possessed when under the spell of her erotic episodes, and so her innocence is protected. Plausibly, at least, it’s not really her as she is under the sway of an evil force. But in the final act of satanic coitus, she certainly has her wits about her and the clarity necessary for the task at hand; she is setting a trap, after all. Ellen, by way of much moaning and heavy breaths, clearly enjoys the pornographic excess of the scene that follows. The tragic element dissipates here because, as is now clear, the real Ellen cannot be separated from her lustful possessed fits. Eggers may even be hinting at this dilemma when Ellen questions ‘whether evil comes from within or without?’ The problem is if it is not from ‘without’, then her act of self-sacrifice is less selfless heroics and more an addict giving in to the destruction of addiction because, well, they kind of want to. It feels good for them, after all. If it is from ‘within’ for Ellen, I’m left asking, was there even an innocence to sacrifice? Maybe not. The issue is compounded by the fact that Eggers’ version of the vampire has no sympathetic qualities; he is a far cry from the charming nobleman portrayed by Gary Oldman back in 1992. Rather, he is a return to the putrid monster of Stoker’s book, simply a hideous living death, or as we are told by Orlok himself, he is simply ‘an appetite. Nothing more.’ A consequence of this is that Ellen’s attraction can only be framed as carnal; they are certainly no doomed romance in the Tristan and Iseult mould. She is simply enthralled by the putrid creature that ravaged her, irredeemably so. It’s as if the licentious, siren-like Lucy of Coppola’s 1992 retelling has been amalgamated with Ellen’s character, but they sit together about as well as oil and water, at least for purposes of a narrative of self-sacrifice. After all, if she is not innocent —honestly, she is far from it in many scenes— what is truly tragic about it really? Are we even capable of showing this kind of purity in cinema at the moment? If not, is this not the death of tragedy?
In fairness, one might still try to read into her self-destruction, searching for a more salubrious moral lesson. The archetype of the vulnerable teenager playing with atavistic forces she doesn’t fully comprehend mirrors the sorry state of our own licentious culture, where large body counts and Onlyfans abound, and adult virgins are sighted less than unicorns. Ellen’s spiritual implosion might be framed as a warning to keep closed the Pandora’s box of unchecked sexuality. Evil forces beyond our comprehension, things that go bump in the metaphysical night, these are very real threats to vulnerable psychologies who lack the right defences. However, there is still the issue of the threat from within. Indeed, there is a sense in which Eggers’ choices give a remarkably candid display of the darker aspects of female nature. An impulse to hypergamy of sorts on the part of Ellen leaves Hutter the victim of infidelity. That the hypergamous instinct is directed at a violent monster like Orlok makes for some interesting subtext. Orlok, in many ways, is the mirror image of Ellen; he displays the darker aspects of male nature, and the monster’s antics in the film are a caricature of masculine urges. Whereas previous Nosferatu films made the link between sex and the violence of the bite and blood feasting implicit, Eggers makes them explicit and intimately connected, even one and the same thing. Hutter’s love is more sentimental, and though he is taunted into having vigorous sex with Ellen after she declares, ‘you could never please me as he could’, this is clearly not something that comes naturally to him. He has to be goaded into a frenzy to be this dominant. His tolerance for freakiness, apparently, is rather low. Thus, the more violent, more physically imposing, and more atavistic (and freaky) Orlok becomes the superior sex object desired by Ellen. It’s also notable that amongst the ubiquity of sex, whether with the dead or the living, there’s a marked absence of the actually erotic.
So, the rotting vampire gets the girl. Perhaps the manosphere types had a chuckle at Hutter’s expense. I must admit that I didn’t really. My problem is that Hutter is a noble character and more relatable than anyone else in the script. Contrast this to Coppola’s 1992 version where Harker(Hutter), played by Keanu Reeves, is a bit of a goofball, something very much accentuated by Reeves’ ‘so bad it might be good’ acting. In my view, this demotion of Harker by Coppola is a feature, not a bug, as it allows for sympathy to develop for the main love plot between Mina and Dracula. Hutter in Nosferatu possesses many good qualities, a ‘chad’-like physiognomy, and is brave when he must be. The cuckolding, already a weird theme, is in even worse taste because of this. Back in 1992, nobody cared if Dracula stole Mina from Harker. Mina was pure, Dracula was a charmer; it was a romance echoing through the ages, exhibiting the power of love. Eggers, however, offers us a much more nihilistic picture. In 2024, our cinematic zeitgeist suggests that romantic love, based on sentiment, is an illusory institution to be swept away and destroyed by the reality of atavistic carnality. And so, while there was always a touch of nihilism in Eggers’ oeuvre, for me it boils over in this retelling. It is exhibited in The Witch, which, in my view, was a much more tasteful portrayal of the same themes of fatalism and triumph of evil; it managed to do so without gratuitous violence against children.
What are we supposed to take from all this then? An uncomfortable psychosexual truth? A depraved aspect of human sexuality without any discernible redemption? A carnal and pornographic refutation of sentimental love? Eggers has made great works and should be lauded for the appropriate castings in his films, and resisting the reigning multicultural dogma, but -and I am not the first to comment on this- it is interesting to note that the only time in recent cinema that we get wholly white worlds on the big screen, is when these white worlds are set in the past, a bleak and unforgiving past in which evil forces triumph. The Northman might be an exception here, and perhaps it is no accident that I count it amongst his best. It possesses something life-affirming even amongst the violence and tragedy of the Norse saga. But Eggers’ films are horror, after all. There are no guarantees, and he does not owe us a non-nihilistic message. That said, I believe the greatest art within the genre does not have a fully nihilistic message but infuses something life-affirming amidst the carnage and tragedy, and I wish Eggers had taken heed of that in his latest film. Great horror often has something or someone to redeem the misery, and this is certainly true of Stoker’s story itself. It is why I believe this newest iteration of Nosferatu would have benefited from less ravaging and more redemption. Had it given me something noble, a sliver of it amongst the cuckoldry, copulation, and carnage, I might have liked it more.