The Romanticism (and Lust) of Nosferatu
When we think of Dracula, our minds leap to an impressive (and oppressive) castle in Transylvania, but an early scene in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu indicates that another location will be the real site of horror. As Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) rushes through the town of Wisborg, Germany, the camera captures various poultry and cattle, all animals set for the slaughter. It’s a portent: the modern city is no safe haven from such ancient evil.
Eggers’ craft has been on display since The VVitch, and his penchant for verisimilitude is all the more impressive for how effectively he puts it on the screen and convinces the audience to believe in it. His films immerse the viewer into alien worlds that are made all the more unsettling for the reality that they once were our world, at least for some. There’s a sense of danger that goes beyond the narratives—these movies are thin places where a new (or rather old) sense of being could slip through time into our own.
Nosferatu does exactly this, though its narrative familiarity slightly dulls the bite of such discomfort. The young Thomas is looking for prosperity in his new marriage to Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and his career as solicitor. After being tasked with selling a decrepit mansion to an “eccentric” buyer, he travels through the Carpathian mountains to arrive at Count Orlok’s (Bill Skarsgård) door. Here, with the stroke of a pen, he transmits an evil from afar into the towns of Germany. It will devastate Wisborg—this is, after all, a story of the plague—but it will have even more fearful consequences for the life of his family and community.
This rendition of Nosferatu is more supernatural than many we’ve seen, whispering curses over the town. He’s also more nakedly lustful: it’s Ellen’s desire that stirs his plot, and she is the ultimate object of his own hunger. The film makes explicit the interwoven thirst for transcendence, sex, and death, and while the sexuality is placed at the forefront of Eggers’ film, that doesn’t make it modern—lust and sex have always been linked to the iconography of Stoker’s creation and its heirs. What’s more, the themes and imagery situate themselves precisely in the Counter-Enlightenment Romanticism of the early 19th century setting. A consistent motif that clouds the distinction between dreaming and waking furthers this Romantic embrace and also furthers the terror of Orlok’s power. This is an evil that touches every aspect of being; there is no respite.
As with Eggers’ films before it, this is a thoroughly unmodern tale, one that even critiques modern rationalism. (There is a betraying touch of the horror genre’s modern hubris in the choice Thomas makes to travel to meet Count Orlok, his quest for prosperity becoming a cause of downfall.) The really alien world is that of the village inn near Orlok’s castle, of people who do not understand Thomas’ motive, nor he their rituals. Shortly after his bizarre encounter with them, Orlok acknowledges how complete his power can be in a town like Wisborg, that “city of modern mind… who believes nothing of such morbid fairy tales.” Those fairy tales and the villagers’ enchanted rites offered a protection against Orlok’s evil that Wisborg has already written off. Willem Dafoe’s Professor von Franz, himself cast out of the scientific community for his spiritual and cultic beliefs, contends that this age is “blinded by the gaseous light of science.” In its quest for rational explanations, modernity makes itself impotent against evil, for in order to confront it, we first “must confront that it exists.”
Nosferatu thrusts us into that enchanted world through its editing and images. Thomas’ visit to Orlok’s Carpathian castle gives the most delirious sequence: Beginning with a match cut between a stand of crosses and Thomas approaching a crossroads, the editing becomes hectic and abrupt. Many of the images evoke familiar tropes—a looming castle, gates which open as if enchanted, even a Cocteau-inspired fireplace—but the pace of edits breaks temporal linearity and puts Thomas (and us) into a world of dream logic. He is no longer sure of his reality, but it is through that uncertainty that he becomes able to recognize and work against such supernatural horror. This disorientation continues as Orlok travels by ship, with his box placed at a nonsensical dutch tilt—an effective bit of design and framing that communicates the sailors’ inability to understand what is occurring.
The film lessens a bit once we’re fully back in Wisborg and the film refocuses on Ellen. Lily-Rose Depp fits the aesthetic requirements, but her performance never allows one to see the character beyond the performance itself. Frequently called upon to portray possession, hysteria, and orgasm, she is consistently, visibly acting. Worse yet, there’s little to identify in her performance that isn’t cribbed from familiar cinematic history. Ellen doesn’t seem possessed so much as she seems to be reenacting what we’ve learned possessions look like from decades of movies prior—and the same holds for her overtures of orgasm. It’s sign theory for the cinema, but it robs Nosferatu of its immediacy and its ability to really unnerve.
The ending cuts in a few too many directions at once (a concern that also clouds The VVitch, which remains Eggers’ most arresting to date). From the start, this is Ellen’s story, and it rightly falls to her to contend with Orlok’s evil—and her own. She is told to crucify the evil within, but, well, it’s not precisely a crucifixion. Is her act a sacrifice or a surrender? A deception against Nosferatu or a delight in his thirst? There’s a fatalism to this rendition, as evil is not overcome but accepted. As Orlok himself declares, “I am an appetite,” and it’s an appetite which must be sated in Eggers’ telling.
While the resolution strikes an off-key note, the film’s power remains in its phenomenological engagement with a world on the border between rational modernity and Romantic enchantment, where dreams can infect reality, where rites can ward off real evil, and where such morbid fairy tales may not be so distant.
