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[COLUMN] Nosferatu is About an Irrational Horror Intruding Into a Rational World | by Darren Mooney - Note: This piece contains spoilers
🕑 Added 2024-12-30 15:00:27 +0000 UTC
Note: This piece contains spoilers for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which is in cinemas now and well worth sinking your teeth into.
At their core, Robert Eggers’ movies have always been stories about what happens past the edge of reason. Nosferatu just finds that insanity doubling back upon itself, intruding into the urban spaces of ostensibly civilized society.
Eggers’ films all take their characters to the literal edge of civilization, away from the safety and security of the familiar structures of human culture. In The Witch, William (Ralph Ineson) and his family are exiled from a Puritan settlement, cast out into the wilderness of 17th century New England. In The Lighthouse, Thomas Howard (Robert Pattinson) takes a job on a remote island off the coast of New England at the end of the 19th century.
In The Northman, Amleth (Alexander Skarsgård) pursues Fjölnir (Claes Bang), the man who killed his father (Ethan Hawke), to “the backwater frontier” of Iceland after Fjölnir is deposed by King Haraldr of Norway. Early in Nosferatu, real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) journeys from the German township of Wisberg to the remote European nation of Transylvania to sign a deal with the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård).
In each case, Egger’s characters journey into irrationality and superstition. They abandon a world of reason and certainty, drifting into some twilight realm where the laws of nature do not apply. Early on his journey, Thomas awakens one night to follow the local villagers on a journey into the woods, where they place a stake through the heart of an undead creature. Thomas screams in horror, and bolts awake in his bed. Was what he just witnessed real or a dream? Does that difference matter?
Eggers’ films accept the world as his characters experience it, never slipping outside of their perspective to reassure the audience that there is some perfectly logical explanation for what is happening. This is not to suggest that these experiences must be magical. As he has pointed out, the rot on the family corn in The Witch is the hallucinogenic fungus ergot, even if such a reading of the events of the film is “not necessarily [his] route” to understanding the film. All that matters is that there is something beyond the main characters’ understanding.
“The real world and the fairy tale world were the exact same thing in that period,” explained of his approach to The Witch, which also applies to his subsequent films. “When someone was calling you a witch they really believed you were an archetypal, fairy tale ogress capable of doing all the things that happen in my film. That was actually what they were accusing you of, it’s what they believed. When I understood that, it's when I understood how something like Salem could happen.”
Academic Mary Louise Pratt coined the phrase “contact zone” to describe a liminal conceptual space where different cultures could intersect with one another. In such an environment, with two radically different perspectives, there was the constant threat of “miscomprehension, incomprehension, dead letters, unread masterpieces, absolute heterogeneity of meaning.” This is perhaps one way of looking at Eggers’ films.
However, Kathleen Donegan took Pratt’s argument even further, contending that “the contact zone” was really “the chaos zone”, extending it to apply to “both social and mental spaces within the colonial contest where the ability to understand what is happening is recurrently and threateningly disturbed”, where “explanatory structures do not steadily accrue by adapting and realigning new data with a new ability to decipher. Instead, disorder is eruptive, endemic, and usually unresolved.”
Eggers’ films unfold in “the chaos zone.” The boundaries between a world governed by logic and one ruled by superstition are often environmental: the forest in The Witch, the ocean in The Lighthouse, the volcano in The Northman. There are forces so elemental and so strong that – to characters with a limited understanding of science – they transcend rationality. Eggers has talked about how growing up in New Hampshire informed his writing.
“The family cemeteries in the woods and all the old colonial farmhouses, the witches and werewolves in the woods around me, were very much part of my childhood imagination, for sure,” he acknowledges. However, while Eggers’ first three films all take place outside the confines of an organized civilized societal structure, Nosferatu is interesting because it sets that primary horror – the irrational, the illogical, the irreconcilable – against a more rigid framework.
In Nosferatu, evil is not something that exists in the wilderness. Instead, in classic vampire movie fashion, it is invited in. After centuries lying dormant, Orlok is awoken by the desire and lust of Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), and he is drawn towards her in Wisberg. Nosferatu is not the story of seemingly civilized people who leave an ordered community and find insanity waiting for them on the margins, it is a story about the intrusion of such a primal force into a modern town.
As the town falls under the corrupting influence of Orlok, Doctor Wilhelm Sievers (Ineson) guides Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), an expert in “alchemy” and “the occult.” Von Franz warns Harding that “the gaseous light of science” cannot explain Orlok. “I have seen such things as would make Sir Isaac Newton crawl back up inside his mother’s womb,” Von Franz boasts, insisting there are things for which science cannot account.
It is interesting that Nosferatu should so directly invoke Newton. In some ways, this makes the film feel like an odd companion piece to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, another movie about the limitations of a Newtonian understanding of the universe. Nosferatu and Oppenheimer are not just rejections of the idea of some objectively discernible singular truth about the way the world works, they are also about the folly and hubris in assuming the world can be made to conform to such rules.
Although Nosferatu is obviously set in Germany rather than the British Empire, it is still based on a film that was based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In interviews, Eggers has described the film as “set in the early Victorian period” and jokingly described the modern concept of the vampire as the work of “a repressed Victorian hack.” Despite its German setting, the audience is clearly meant to understand Eggers’ Nosferatu as engaged with Victorian culture.
Arguing that The Witch was a more traditional fairy tale than those familiar to modern audiences, Eggers explained that “these watered-down fairy tales aren’t going to survive because they were designed to fit inside a post-Victorian epoch, and the fairy tales that are earlier and closer to myth, they’re just human.” In this sense, Nosferatu is perhaps best understood as the culmination of Eggers’ filmography to this point, crashing his classic fairy tale structure into a Victorian epoch.
Wisberg sees itself as a more sophisticated and developed urban center, which makes it easy for Orlok to spread his supernatural influence. He confesses to Thomas that he looks forward to leaving the superstitious peasants of Transylvania behind. When he first arrives in Wisberg, the deaths of his victims are attributed to disease. “Can’t you see that there is a bloody real plague, gentlemen?” Harding demands. “A real epidemic that is really killing real people?”
The truth is that, for all the perceived superstition and irrationality of the villagers in rural Europe, they at least understand something of the nature of the world in which they live. In contrast, the ostensibly more civilized town dwellers are unwilling to even acknowledge the existence of anything that exists outside their frame of reference. They cannot conceive of something as monstrous and grotesque as a vampire, so they are ill-equipped to handle it.
In this sense, Nosferatu neatly mirrors Edward Berger’s Conclave, which focuses on the election of a new pope. Central to Conclave is the tension between what can be known and what must be believed. “And over the course of many years in the service of our Mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others,” argues Cardinal Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes). “Certainty.” Nosferatu is anchored in a similar anxiety. Certainty can be blinding.
The vampire has long been understood as an expression of repressed sexuality, what Stephen King described as “the ultimate zipless fuck.” Nosferatu makes this explicit. At night, Ellen tosses and turns in her bed, screaming, “He is coming!” When Orlok feeds on Thomas, he leaves his love bites on his chest, particularly around the nipples. Ellen talks about the “shame” and “sin” that she felt as a child, particularly being judged by her father, when she connected with Orlok.
Orlok is implicitly repressed sexuality, desire and appetites that have been buried and sublimated by a society that deems the expression of such ideas improper. When Ellen tosses and turns in her sleep, Sievers suggests to Harding, “You could try tying her down.” He also suggests that she should wear her corset while sleeping. The corset itself serves as a metaphor for this repression. During a heating argument with Thomas, yearning to break free, Ellen rips her corset off.
“Particularly in the 1980s, there was a lot of literary criticism talking about all these Victorian male authors who created these female heroines who have sexual desire and sexual energy, and then need to be killed and punished for that,” remarks Eggers of the vampire genre. “It’s this misogynist thing.” In this sense, Nosferatu feels like a companion piece to The Witch, another story about the reaction to a young woman’s coming of age as something grotesque and unnatural.
Appropriately enough, Nosferatu is packed with animal imagery: dogs wander the streets, cats keep company inside homes, rats and pigeons clutter the urban environment. Nosferatu constantly reminds the audience that the natural world does not conform to human standards of reason. There is something more primal at play beneath this civilized exterior, something stirring in the shadows, waiting to find expression outside the narrow confines of polite society.
Tellingly, Nosferatu avoids the traditional ending of these sorts of vampire tales, which often conclude with the male heroes penetrating the undead monster with a phallic stake. Von Franz leads Thomas and Sievers to hunt Orlok, but this is a distraction. Ellen kills Orlok by sacrificing herself, by inviting him to feed on her until dawn, when the cock crows and the sunlight consumes him. Ellen surrenders her body – and her blood – for the greater good.
Although Eggers has been working on Nosferatu for the better part of a decade, the film feels of a piece with the post-Dobbs canon, the recent wave of horror movies about women’s agency over their own bodies, and the sense in a woman’s life is often seen as a secondary commodity. This theme is literalized through Harding’s relationship with his wife Anna (Emma Corrin), the mother of his three children and whose body seemingly remains his even after her death.
Nosferatu is a Robert Eggers movie, in that it is a film about how mankind’s greatest fear is that the world does not conform to any rational understanding of it. However, it is also a clear evolution of that central theme, in that it understands that the senseless and the insane are never more dangerous than when unleashed within the framework of a society that believes itself to be perfectly logical. Only a fool claims to know what is lurking in the shadows.
Comments
JR
Terry Pratchett's "Carpe Jugulum" is an interesting take on vampires too: It asks what would happen if the vampires tried to go the civilized rationality route, implying that a horror which can be named as such is a relief compared to its institutionalised form ("At least [the traditional vampire] didn't expect us to like it!, says the villager from beneath the castle"). And (spoilers, I guess) it resolves the central conflict by allowing the strong-willed female protagonist (a witch, by the way, but that's a whole different motif here) to ascert her will over the vampires who themselves made the mistake of "inviting" her into their domain by (forcibly) drinking her blood to turn her subservient. You can read that in all kind of ways - I just want to note in how many fascinating ways this motif can be used, turned around and reused, profiting from the fact that everyone knows the basic concepts about vampires.
Darren Mooney
Very true and very fair. I'd see that as an extension of the film's sexual politics, in that it is a movie about the way that even ostensibly "rational" societies treat women's bodies as objects to be controlled and policed, their autonomy denied, and how - as a result - women take this incredible burden upon themselves. (My friend very astutely pointed out that this is a film about how, under such conditions, the process by which women give life becomes fatal to them - away of victimising them, feeding on them, killing them.)
Darren Mooney
Eggers is interesting, in that I think "The VVitch" is maybe his least accessible movie. I'd almost start with "Nosferatu" or "The Northman", which I think are more mainstream, if you Eggers agnostic or Eggers uncertain. (Those are the two my parents have seen and enjoyed. I can't imagine trying to get them to watch "The Lighthouse.")
Darren Mooney
Yep. It is, I think, fascinating that so many of the adaptations actually manage to get around the "scary foreigner" subtext of the novel. (Which I love, to be clear.) I think the fact that Lugosi and Oldman make him truly tragic and almost sympathetic - and that Lee is possibly the most British man who ever lived, and established a trend of the more assholish takes on Dracula being particularly British - probably helped with that.
Darren Mooney
I love Stoker's book. And I like Shelley's "Frankenstein", which has this incredible mournful atmosphere that I don't know that any adaptation has actually managed to capture. (That said, I remember two relatives who worked in English departments in university tell me that apparently "Frankenstein" is not as universally beloved among literary types as "Dracula.")
Stephanie Flynn
(Hit enter too early) At one point, when Sievers is tending to her, I turned to my sister and we both whisper-quoted that "Hm, you have ghosts in your womb, you should do cocaine about it" meme and he damn near said the exact same thing in the film. Yet modern women's medicine doesn't feel much improved in the "believe women" realm with our fight in getting adequate healthcare for any kind of pain, mental health, reproductive rights, etc.
Stephanie Flynn
One theme/moral I felt coming from this movie too was "Believe women". Ellen tried to tell her family of her encounters with Nosferatu in her childhood and was accused of being mad and depressive, she tried to warn Thomas not to go to Transylvania and was ignored, she repeatedly tells Friedrich there's something wrong with Thomas and there's possibly a demon after them and he doesn't listen until another man, Thomas, shows him proof, but by then his family has already been horrifically killed. At one point,
Angelnickl
Good read to go to sleep to. I haven't watched any of his films, been meaning to see the Witch, but the themes about irrational existences being easier to accept when not confined by modern logic interests me. In a paranormal podcast I listen to, the idea of the simplest explanation often being the right one gets brought up often. But not as a skeptical argument enforcer but rather sometimes the arguments that something fantastical is just mundane gets so absurd and convoluted. Where logical leaps and coincidences are accepted readily because it fits our preconceived notions...but maybe the simplest answer there just being a vampire running amok is actually more likely scenario. In a painting, sometimes we can't see the forest for the trees, or the trees that are the forest. But the frame is often overlooked as well. I don't know what that has to do about anything but I might be rambling at this point...
Jack Philipson
I've often felt that an aspect of Dracula that goes underappreciated in adaptations is that it's about well adjusted, noble, rational men *not* buckling to madness when faced with ancient evil, but that's not especially frightening and emphasises some of the books more reactionary readings.
Bryan Cybershaman(X) Logie
When I read the Stoker book, I was struck by the technology vs an old-world horror. Almost a technology thriller in places. Have to read it again someday... 😎 (Still have to watch this movie! 😉)
