If a cinema screen had eyes, all that it would see during a film’s run is faces staring at it from the shadows, and a bright flickering light above them to guide their gaze towards the dreamy images projected on its otherwise blank surface. Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu opens with a perspective something like this, as though coming from the other side of the curtain: the illuminated face of young Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) praying as she stares right into the camera from the darkness. “Come to me,” she intones in voiceover, before she drifts, dreamlike, through the candle-lit rooms of an otherwise empty house at night. In response to her invocation, an otherworldly male baritone replies, initially in German (“Du”, it says), and a void of a figure – a black hole, as much absence as presence, as though embodying the shadows all around – appears in the room, and then outside in the garden, half-embracing, half-raping the young woman who summoned him. If this is the conjured object of Ellen’s enraptured gaze, then hers is the recognisable, if idealised, face of any horror viewer, filled with a contradictory mix of fear and desire, revulsion and pleasure, as it gives its conflicted consent to an unpredictable and terrifying assault on the imagination.
This is an old story – not only because it is set mostly towards the end of 1838 (apart from that prologue which takes place some years earlier), but because its narrative beats, its stock scenes, its expressionist shadows on the wall, its contrasts of pestilence and probity, darkness and light, are all familiar from the story’s many previous incarnations. Eggers’ film is after all just the latest take on the groundbreaking cinematic horror of F.W, Murnau’s Nosferatu: eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), which itself shamelessly plagiarised from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, and was nearly lost when the author’s heirs successfully sued for infringement of copyright, leading to most of its prints being destroyed. There are of course countless cinematic incarnations of Stoker’s vampire, while Werner Herzog reimagined Murnau’s film as Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000) fictionalised the making of Murnau’s Nosferatu with its star Max Schreck impersonated by Willem Dafoe (who in Egger’s film plays the Van Helsing figure Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz).
In other words, Eggers’ Nosferatu comes with a narrative pathway which is by now well-trodden: the journey of Ellen’s estate agent husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult, who recently played the title rôle in Chris McKay’s Renfield, 2023) to the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania and his enchantment there by the ancient, vampiric Count Orlok (an unrecognisable Bill Skarsgård); Orlok’s pestiferous sea voyage (irrational, given Murnau’s change of the ship’s destination from England to the fictive Wisborg in Germany) towards Ellen; the doom brought by Orlok to Ellen’s hosts Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), his wife Anna (Emma Corrin) and their children; the madness of Orlok’s minion Herr Knock (Simon McBurney); and the bumbling band of resistance formed by Ellen’s doctor Wilhelm Siever (Ralph Ineson), his old mentor Von Franz and the returned Thomas.
Yet in shifting the focus of Stoker’s novel even closer than Murnau did towards the character of Ellen/Mina and her inner life, and in making Orlok, right from the start, Ellen’s shadow self, Eggers brings right to the surface a psychological aspect that has always been a subtext of the vampire mythos, but rarely made so explicit. Ellen, who had a childhood of loneliness, melancholy and hallucinations, has become newly centred by her love for Thomas – and although Anna refers to Ellen as ‘romantic’, it is made clear right from Ellen’s first bedroom scene with Thomas just how essentially carnal her longing is for her new husband, even as Thomas’ own desire for profit and success is shown, at least at first, to trump his physical love for her. Both these drives – Ellen’s lust and Thomas’ ambition – are the key tension in their relationship, forcing them apart and separately into the arms of the ancient Orlok, whose predations upon them are presented as unequivocally, thrustingly (bi)sexual in nature.
Orlok may drain them, biting deep into their breasts, but he also, in every sense, enters them, taking possession of their bodies and making the beast with two backs. His seduction of both – respectively with a bag of gold, or a promise of everlasting, orgasmic release from solitude – is also an offer to fill the gaping holes within them, the hungry lack that cannot be sated. “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?”, Ellen asks at one point. It is a crucial question which pervades this Jungian gothic (set in pre-Freudian times). After all, Ellen may have to confront her antagonist, but she will also mirror him, transforming herself into a sexual seducer to defeat the devil inside, and Ellen’s simultaneous embrace and dispelling of darkness (which she explicitly calls her own ‘shame’) will turn out to be equally an act of self-destruction. This is very different from Murnau’s ending, making Eggers’ film much more of a tragedy.
While Thomas shacks up with Orlok in a decadent Romanian castle, Ellen takes to looking out to sea and pronouncing, “He’s coming”, in double-edged words pointing as much to her suspicion (and perhaps jealousy) of her husband’s errancy abroad as to the destined advent of Orlok. Ellen is guilty only of loneliness and horniness, and of the entirely natural act, fuelled by fantasy, that comes from both of these – yet both Dr Siever and Ellen’s host Friedrich force on her a tight corset, constricting bonds and sedative ether as a remedy to contain her somnambulism and ‘hysteric’ behaviour. For like Thomasin in Eggers’ The Witch (2016), Ellen is as much a victim of her own society’s puritanical values as of her own (re)awakening desires – and in the end Ellen too, again like Thomasin, will surrender fully to her own fancies.
All at once ethereal and oneiric, yet grounded by Eggers’ eye for historically accurate detail, this Nosferatu comes steeped in doom and destiny, and not just because its plot is to a degree prescribed by well-established tradition. Commanding an army of plague-spreading rats, yet less ratlike in appearance himself than Schreck’s Orlok, the moustachioed Skarsgård takes his time to come into focus, and cuts an uncanny, imposing figure, all putrescent entitlement, arrogance and amorality, while, as Ellen’s darkly star-cross’d double, he shares his trajectory of yearning with the vampire in Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). This Orlok may follow in the iconic staircase footsteps of Murnau’s, but the most striking image here is the shadow of Orlok’s hand as it darkens the rooftops of the supposedly enlightened city below that has so easily fallen into his deadly grip. Perhaps the corruption sets in so readily because the rot was already there.
Meanwhile, Dafoe (who was also in Eggers’ The Lighthouse, 2018) brings the comic relief as a crazed occultist with one foot in the spirit realm, and therefore appearing, hilariously, to have been beamed in from another dimension – or from another film entirely. Craig Lathrop’s meticulously gothic production design, Robin Carolan’s pervasive, oppressive score and Jarin Blashke’s unnervingly framed, monochrome-aping cinematography work hard to engender and accommodate the rising tension, leading to a literal climax in which Ellen and Orlok finally, inevitably come together in a marriage of cosmic force and counterforce, and simultaneously spring their two-way trap. This Nosferatu has been a pet project of Eggers’ for over a decade, but has come out precisely at a time when both plague and patriarchy are very much in the air again (lest anyone should be inclined to dismiss the film’s themes as mere ancient history). In the end, the film puts us in our place, as it catches us gazing into its shadowy negative spaces and filling them with our own grubby entertainments. For we are left sitting in the shadows, with our own fears and desires projected before us as lonely, grubby masturbatory fantasies.
strap: Robert Eggers’ nineteenth-century horror reimagines Murnau’s vampire story as a Jungian nightmare of repressed desire and impassioned death wish
© Anton Bitel
