I absolutely adored Nosferatu for the first hour or so.
I’d heard it was beautiful, and that was underselling it. It seems to have taken “every frame a painting” as a challenge: can you make something with a run time over 2 hours in which you can pause at literally any moment and get a fantastically gorgeous image?
But more than that, I loved that it was so gloriously ultra-gothic in just about every aspect in just about every moment. Every member of the cast was completely committed to the concept, somehow balancing a sense of overwhelming Victorian repression with a director who must’ve ended every take shouting “MORE!!!”
Lily-Rose Depp deservedly got praise for her performance, since it required her not only to be sympathetic and believable in a world in which the melodrama was kept at dangerously high levels throughout, but also to contort her body and give in to violent epileptic fits. But I was almost as impressed by Simon McBurney as Herr Knock, for making the most interesting version of Renfeld that I’ve ever seen. He wasn’t content with the stock actor’s exercise of playing a madman, but took a character that had to be visibly over the top in a movie populated entirely by batshit crazy people, and somehow made it genuinely frightening and compelling.
I was also surprised by Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s performance, although I probably shouldn’t have been, since he’s well established that he embraces weird parts that don’t just rely on his being impossibly good-looking. His part is kind of a thankless one, requiring him to be the voice of reason and skepticism in a world that is clearly irrational, and he could’ve just disappeared into the background as nothing more than the guy who occasionally drives the plot forward. But from his opening scene onwards, he managed to give off a paternalistic arrogance that matched the energy of everything else. He seemed to love playing a cartoon.
All of the performances worked because the filmmaking itself was so committed to the bit. The story shifts between dreams and the waking world so frequently, and so abruptly, that it was never really clear which was which. Is the entire story a dream, or is the world so weird that the dreams are just as real as anything else? One scene I loved is when our heroine and her husband are at their friends’ home, their hosts bid them good night to take their bizarre children up to bed, and Thomas and Ellen kiss… and it just turns into a full-on make-out session right there. The door’s barely even closed before they’re going at it!
I think my favorite thing about the first half of the movie, though, is how the filmmaking itself becomes dream-like. With rare exceptions, it’s not prone to melodramatic flourishes like cross-dissolves or dutch angles or elaborate camera movements. There are hard cuts, sometimes timed so as to be disorienting, as a scene abruptly ends. And for the most part, the camera is either static or on a slow horizontal pan, as if the viewer is dispassionately taking everything in. When the camera does do something exotic, it stands out as especially significant and unnerving — our first time seeing Knock conducting one of his rituals, for instance, in which the camera sweeps up as if we’re watching him from above.
But the best of all of this is as Thomas gets closer to Orlok’s castle, and then within it. We’ve already seen Ellen seeming to coexist between dream and reality, and now we’re getting an increasing sense of Thomas falling into it as well. He’s already woken up abruptly in the Romani inn in the middle of the night, to follow the people in some kind of ritual where they’re taking a naked young woman to a grave. It cuts suddenly to his waking up in daylight, so we’re still not entirely sure how much of what we’re seeing is from his nightmares.
As he’s walking (perfectly framed) through a dark, snowy forest, Orlok’s coach threatens to run him over, the camera spinning around in a slow, disorienting 360, until we see that it’s now stopped and oriented to invite him inside. And he floats inside, seeming to have little ability to or desire to resist.
Once he’s spent his bewildering first night in the castle, and he’s now wandering around the empty castle in the daylight hours, the camera seems to have reverted back to “real world” mode. Except that as it pans across the various rooms, the camera movement doesn’t glide to a stop. It halts abruptly and unnaturally when a dark doorway is perfectly centered in the frame. Or it suddenly stops to put the focus on a looming staircase. It’s weird and unsettling. It suggests the feeling of a dream that feels like being awake, until you suddenly have absolute certainty that this is what you need to do, or there is where you need to go, as if it were a premonition.
All movies work by focusing your attention on (or denying your view of) exactly what they want you to see, and we accept that that’s just the language of film. But this makes the intention so forceful that it doesn’t feel like we’re just an invisible observer, but we’re being compelled to focus on a certain thing.1In the off chance that nobody else saw this effect in Orlok’s castle, and it was just a coincidence that that’s exactly when my internet connection decided to stutter, multiple times, please don’t tell me. I like my version so much better.
At the hour mark, I felt like Nosferatu had done for Dracula what Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Dune had done for that book: taken something that was so firmly established in popular culture, which I knew by reference far more than I knew the source material, and presented it in a way that made me finally see the appeal.
Because I’ve never liked Dracula. The book is so laden with Victorian repression that it seems to be more about the suggestion of horror than actual horror, and the epistolary style means that you’re always at least one level removed from the action. The Universal movie defined the look of vampires, but it’s easily the least scary of any of the classic monster movies. And no offense to Mr Lugosi, but I never understood exactly why pop culture was so fixated on vampires being sexy and seductive, until I saw the adaptations starring Christopher Lee.
As for Nosferatu2The original; I’ve never seen Werner Herzog’s version., itself an adaptation, it never stuck with me. I’m sure that I’ve seen it, but I remember nothing about it except for the iconic — and absolutely terrifying — images of the vampire rising from its coffin, and its shadow creeping up a staircase. I remember so little of it, in fact, that I was impressed by how much Robert Eggers had improved the plot of Dracula, until I learned afterwards that almost every change I liked was in the original Nosferatu.
So as I watched the first half of the new Nosferatu, I appreciated that it was stripping away decades of imagery and symbolism and getting to the real horror at the root of a vampire story. These things aren’t sexy; they’re monstrous, blasphemous, and diseased. And this isn’t a love story, or at least not a love story between a monster and a human woman. I kind of hate that adaptations and re-interpretations over the years have corrupted the idea of a horrible, destructive, compulsion to turn it into an exciting, passionate, seduction.
I keep saying “the first hour” because around the time Willem Dafoe’s character was introduced, that’s when the movie lost some of its magic for me. I still liked it a lot, and it’s absolutely not a criticism of Dafoe’s performance. It’s just that a story can’t work on pure gothic vibes alone, and it was inevitable that something or someone would have to come in and start putting the plot into motion. That’s Dafoe’s not-quite-Van-Helsing character.
The characters of Van Helsing (Dracula) and von Franz (Nosferatu) serve the same purpose to the plot; they both arrive to start explaining things after a first half that was spent pumping up the Doom and Dread to maximum levels, and they allow the characters to come up with a plan to defeat the vampire.
But they’re almost entirely different thematically. Van Helsing — at least in the original and most adaptations — is a man of science who’s familiar with the occult, and he uses his knowledge of non-Western European folklore and “superstition” to systematically root out and destroy the monster. Von Franz treats science, religion, and the occult as all being on equal levels. His curses and pledges include Biblical names alongside more obscure names that I didn’t recognize.
The Victorian sensibility says that Western European science and civilization are superior, and they can make sense of backwards traditions and rituals (and in modern adaptations, give a rational explanation for how those rituals really work) to solve a problem that might have seemed unsolvable. The character of von Franz acknowledges that he doesn’t know definitively how to defeat the monster, and a “civilized” city is no better positioned to confront the evil than the Romani camp and Romanian church that we saw earlier; if anything, they’re better prepared since they’ve been doing it for longer.
Thomas’s witnessing of the Romani ritual — whether it was a real event, or a dream foreshadowing the conclusion — served in the moment to emphasize that he was completely out of his element, and he’d entered dark, dangerous territory, not just physically but for his soul. But the young woman being sacrificed to the monster didn’t have the demeanor of a young woman being sacrificed to a monster. She was riding on horseback, above all the men and women surrounding her, and calmly resolved for what she was about to face. Thomas sees it as backwards and blasphemous, but the staging and the attitudes of the characters suggested that it was desperate and tragic, but noble.
Which leads to the other thing I loved about Nosferatu, which is that it gave the character of Ellen near-complete agency and control over her fate.
I didn’t think much about the opening scene of the movie, which has younger Ellen calling out for anyone — literally anyone — and then entering into some kind of dark covenant with Count Orlok. Without the context of the rest of the movie, and just having the context of decades of vampire stories, I took this to be just the first sign of the vampire exerting his psychic control over her from the beyond.
And it was much the same for all the scenes that showed Dr. Sievers’s and Harding’s “treatment” of Ellen, diagnosing “blood congestion,” dismissing her episodes as hysterics, bleeding her, tightening her corset, tying her to the bed. I took this as world-building. People in the 1800s working with an incomplete understanding of science (that was still rooted in superstition as much as the “backwards” people they felt superior to) and even just the basics of women’s biology, but arrogantly assuming that they had all the answers.
It was only when Orlok and Ellen first confront each other in person (at least, I think it was in person?) that all the pieces fell into place for me: he accuses her of cursing him. She’s the one who woke him up. She instilled this compulsion in him and brought doom to her town.
To be clear, I don’t think that Nosferatu intended the bloodthirsty monster to be its voice. But he was stating outright the prejudices of a paternalistic society that has for millennia considered women to be the root cause of all their problems. He — an undead creature, the remnants of a man who was cursed because in life he’d made compacts with demons — was using the tired old line that a woman had exploited the basest parts of his nature.
This is such an important change from the original(s): his compulsion with Ellen isn’t because he saw her photo in Thomas’s possession, and it’s certainly not some nonsense like her being the reincarnation of the one true love of his former life.3See also: Blacula. She, in her extreme loneliness, had called out for anyone to answer, and she had the misfortune that he was the one who was listening.
All of the things that had seemed like disparate elements now seemed to fit together with a common underlying4Okay, maybe barely underlying theme: that the most often-told version of modern vampire stories, all the way back to Dracula, is not just blasphemous but deeply misogynistic.
None of the “treatments” for Ellen were done for her benefit; they were all intended to have her behaving normally or at least not imposing her hysterics on decent people. Harding was basically a good man considering his time period, and he ends by expressing his love for Anna, but for most of the story, he considers his wife to be first and foremost the bearer of his children. Orlok summons Thomas to his castle not to buy a mansion and then find a locket that ends up sparking his obsession, but specifically to have Thomas sign a contract for Ellen — from Orlok’s perspective, she is his property.
And these are contrasted with the glimpses we see of how the people in Romania respond to the threat. It’s the older woman of the Romani village who shows any sign of concern over his welfare5Or I guess it could simply be foreknowledge that by “activating” the monster, he threatens all of them, while everyone else is mocking, untrustworthy, and foreign. And it’s in a church led by women that Thomas finds sanctuary.
Which is part of what makes Thomas’s character more interesting. There’s no sense that his passion for Ellen isn’t genuine, but he’s still a creature of his time, motivated to do all the things that men in the early 1800s are supposed to do. His decision to go to the Count despite Ellen begging him to stay is clearly a mistake, but it’s not simply a work mission to drive the plot forward, but is motivated by his feeling of obligation to provide for her. To establish himself, and in his own words, to not be a pauper.
There’s been no shortage of interpretation and re-telling of Dracula that talks about Bram Stoker’s extremely Victorian repression, which makes the seductive allure of the vampire a threat to the church and to proper society. The idea of proper women being compelled to give into their most base desires. The blasphemy of vampire “brides” under an unholy covenant that mocks the concept of a proper Christian wedding. That’s why I like that Nosferatu doesn’t have the feeding-is-like-sex metaphor of a bite on the neck, but instead shows it as ravenous and monstrous.
Another favorite topic is how Dracula is supposedly an expression of Stoker’s latent homophobia. If vampires are sexy and seductive, then the idea of Jonathan/Thomas falling under the spell of the vampire is an affront to everything. A proper Western man behaving just like some hormonal woman?! Preposterous!
But in Nosferatu, Thomas’s fears are not of being gay, but of being emasculated. I didn’t see any element of sex to it at all. In fact, that’s why I thought it was perfect and not gratuitous that Thomas first gets a full view of Orlok when he leaps naked from his coffin and hangs in mid-air, his (prosthetic) junk fully on display. There is nothing at all sexy about this monster, but it’s simply a blasphemous creature.6And I’m rejecting outright any attempts by the internet to suggest otherwise.
(That’s also why the “controversial” design of Orlok as having a mustache — transforming him into a kind of decomposing, haggard, undead version of Peter Stormare — was inspired. He wasn’t supposed to be seductive, but Slavic. In other words, something foreign and scary to Western Europeans).
The only time the movie does get outright sexy7Not “sexy” in a good way, but “sexy” in actually depicting something sexual. is when he’s confronted by the fact that he’d left Ellen alone, he’d signed her away to another man in exchange for some money, and most significantly: he wasn’t able to provide for her in the way she really wanted, with intimacy and passion instead of wealth and a comfortable house. It’s not what I’d call a romantic scene, but it does take the couple making out in their friends’ house and turn them from doomed lovers into a couple of adults getting their actual conflict out into the open. And again, it’s the paternalistic attitude that was causing Thomas to want to be her protector instead of her partner.
So I’d been thinking that the two things I love about Nosferatu were exact opposites. I loved that it spent the first hour just reveling in pure melodramatic dread and gothic horror, with none of the decades of baggage treating vampires like sexy symbolism, instead just treating the vampire as a horrific and monstrous bringer of doom. And I loved that the second half was thematically a rejection of the paternalism and misogyny inherent in a story of a monster that seduces victims into giving into their carnal desires, until the heroes of a society based on faith and reason can rescue them from their basest impulses.
But maybe they’re both aspects of the same thing: Nosferatu strips the vampire story down to the bone, then rebuilds it as a story of how it’s our humanity that lets us defeat darkness, even if our individual stories end in tragedy.
Ellen’s completely justified desire for human connection instigates the story. It was exploited by a monster. And it was realized by her connection to Thomas, which gave her hope, until the artificial demands of a repressive society made him lose sight of what was important. She’s not rescued by brave men of science, she’s not sacrificed by men of faith or superstition. She realizes that she no longer has to be paralyzed by a sense of powerless terror, but instead has a sense of clarity about what she has the power to do, and she chooses to sacrifice herself. Her final scenes flip the script on sexy vampires; the monster is the ravenous beast unable to control its basest desires, and she is in complete control. And her last words to von Franz was that she felt no regret or shame, since she was always acting according to her nature.