Nosferatu (2024): Not Your Grandpa’s Vampire Flick
Trigger Warning: Graphic Sexual Content, Horror, Suicide, Necrophilia, Child Death
I wasn’t sure what I was in for when the lights dimmed in the theatre a cold, snowy Thursday evening. Just a few days after Christmas, my Gothic proclivities – inundated with the glittery deluge of the holidays – scurried into the front row of the new Eggers film having avoided every spoiler, reference, and review of the new film. I arrived virginal and naïve, fresh off a rewatch of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), and ready to see what a twenty-first century take on the iconic story would look like.
The opening scene took my breath away.
“Finally, a vampire movie I can sink my teeth into” I thought to myself as murmurs rippled through the theatre.
“This is the Dracula story I’ve been waiting for.”
this article contains spoilers
The film starts with near-total darkness and the sounds of the titular character, Ellen, moaning. It is decidedly, undoubtedly, sexual. It is an intimate, orgasmic opening that encourages a kind of sheepish recoil from the film – not for any sort of prudish impulse – but because it lacks the pornographic invitation to engage. The audience is thrust into the role of unwilling voyeur, and our intrusion on Ellen’s privacy sets the tone for the rest of the film: violation punctuated with intrusion.
Ellen’s moaning, meditative and insular, is interrupted by one of the few acceptable jump scares I’ve experienced in recent horror cinema, and the screaming, seizing, and haunting begins.
I think this film is largely misunderstood, judging by some of the critical engagement it is being met with. Nosferatu is not a blockbuster slasher film. Like Crimson Peak (2015), the critical engagement on it focuses on its “lack of horror” elements rather than its abundance of Gothic elements. The Gothic, as I’ve said ad nauseum elsewhere on this blog, isn’t necessarily concerned with the horror of a narrative as much as it is concerned with the discomfort (or discomfiting) potential of a narrative.
Eggers here, has nailed the Gothic film. There are some explicit moments, of course, but the energy of the film is dark and intense – not necessarily explicit. Like the opening scene, the discomfort is in the quiet intimacy of degradation. The unwilling voyeurism of the camera adds to this, but there are hallmarks of Gothic cinema peppered throughout the film that pay homage to the genre’s roots.
I’m going to break this down into three elements: colour, sound, and pacing. Pacing has been criticized across the board (although I’d argue that it was the most accurate to the original source material – which for layman readers was Bram Stoker’s Dracula). This will be the film analysis portion of the piece. Below that, I’ll dive into some scholarly musings. If you’re not interested in scholarship, or discussions of necrophilia would be a major trigger, I would suggest that you click off after the film analysis. For the more seasoned Gothic afficionados, I welcome your thoughts and your insight.
Colour
I was absolutely thrilled with Eggers’s use of colour grading in the film.
Every scene of the film that mirrors, mimics, remakes, or borrows from the 1922 version is colour graded to feel black & white while still retaining its colour.
Throughout the film, desaturation is employed to drain the film of life. Devoid of colour – and subsequently hope – the threat of Nosferatu and his plague can leech in where the colour leeches out.
The scenes in the film that are colour washed are scenes indoors – intense, claustrophobic and sweat-inducing. Like sitting too close to the fire. Warm, saturated gold tones are reserved for Nosferatu’s introduction, the signing of the contract, Ellen’s seizures, and von Franz’s burning of the crypt.
There is no “normal” in Nosferatu. There is either too much colour or not enough – right up until the beast is vanquished. Gothic excess, and its perils, are present in the very atoms of light that Eggers uses to present his material.
Sound
Firstly – a standing ovation needs to be given to Bill Skarsgård for the work he put in to develop Orlok’s voice. Whether you loved the film (or hated it), the development of the titular character’s voice is absolutely outstanding. Deep, booming, and dark – yet maintaining immaculate diction – Skarsgård’s voice brings a new element to a character that, historically, has been mute.
The sound design in the film is used, rather brilliantly, to manipulate the tension. Punctuating discomfort with startling, explicit outbursts that keep the audience unstable: a helpless voyeur to the narrative’s twists and turns.
The use of sound, at least in certain parts of the film, has solved a problem I’ve had with previous adaptations of the source material (and even the source material itself). Thomas Hutter (or Jonathan Harker, or whichever name is being used for whichever adaptation you are presently indulging in) does not speak Romanian. He does not understand the warnings of the villagers that surround Orlok (or Dracula’s) castle. All he knows is that the villagers are intense, he is unfamiliar with their customs, and they all voice the name of the nobleman he is there to do business with.
Previous narratives have failed at making this feel unsettling. As Dracula was an epistolary novel (meaning a novel presented in the form of letters and diary entries), the most direct way to present this fact was to state it outright. “The villagers keep telling me not to go to the cancel, but I’ll go anyway” is an effective way of building a story, but it’s not particularly realistic. Eggers has solved my longtime gripe on this succinctly with sound: the language spoken is Romanian, not English, and the audience is the only one privy to the warnings heeded by their cries.
Pacing
Many critics have spoken to the film’s pacing. Although I fundamentally disagree with the notion that a story should be told in the least amount of time possible so as not to waste everyone’s time, I do think that certain aspects of this film could have used an edit.
I think the time dedicated to the first act was perfect. In my opinion, previous adaptations were rushed, with Hutter’s travel taking so little time that it feels like’s been gone for weeks – not months – which creates a kind of inertia in other adaptations. Here, Eggers drives home just how long Hutter is gone (and, subsequently, just how long the Hardings have to deal with Ellen).
The third act of the film was also timed well, with the pacing from plan, to execution, to climax pausing enough to capture the emotion but moving quickly enough to keep engagement high.
It is the second act where pacing is inconsistent. Too much time spent on details, too little time spent on the big moments – and overall, I’d argue, too little attention spent to Ellen’s experience of the narrative, not just her expression of it. For me, the overall film was so well done that I can overlook some of the pacing choices. For others, the inconsistency of the pacing choices is disorienting enough to affect their enjoyment. I will leave the final judgement with those of you who choose to watch the film yourselves.
. . .
The Scholarly Note: On Death and Defilement
This film is necrophilic to its core. The Romanian village Hutter visits is full of nude rituals in cemeteries. Orlock is a rotting corpse. Herr Harding’s last moments are spent locked in a grief-stricken moment of intimacy with his late wife’s corpse, and the film is punctuated with scenes of eroticism with the dead and the dying. This isn’t new to the Gothic – nor was it particularly rare to the Victorians.
“The Victorian era’s fixation with necrophilia serves as a haunting reflection of the contradictions underpinning its moral values. While the period outwardly championed ideals of chastity, respectability, and order, its cultural artifacts reveal an undercurrent of fascination with the taboo and the macabre. Necrophilia, as both a literal act and a cultural metaphor, epitomized the era’s hypocrisy, exposing how rigid moral frameworks often concealed a deep-seated preoccupation with what they sought to suppress. This dark mirror underscores the fragility of societal norms, where the allure of the forbidden often flourishes in the shadows of repression.” - Source
The Victorians may have been tight-laced during the day, but the corsets came off at night, and getting down and dirty in nearby crypts came naturally to the death-obsessed and fractiously horny Victorians. This was the era of the séance, and Eggers knows this. It’s not so much death that is erotic here, but decay: the disintegrating remains of former luxury, former wealth, and former nobility provide an unwitting comfort to a society grappling with the existential knowledge that the British Empire was entering its death throes.
Still, beyond the Victorian death eroticism laying the foundation for the film, Eggers is doing something really interesting in this film.
We understand necrophilia as the defilement of human remains through a profoundly sacrilegious sexual act. Eggers’s Nosferatu twists our understanding of necrophilia by positing two alterations to this understanding. In the case of Orlock: what if the remains are defiling the human? And in the case of the Hardings: when is necrophilia decoupled from defilement?
Julia Kristeva, in “From Filth to Defilement”, posits defilement as something that escapes social rationality and order. It is an act that brings us closer to the unclean, the repulsive – something that threatens the cleanliness of the body and the rationality of the mind. Defilement, in other words, is something that fundamentally fractures the social contract and leaves a permanent mark on the psyche. She also posits that we, by and large, use religious ritual to protect against defilement, using the sacred to ward off the risk of defilement – and that we continuously maintain that ritual to cleanse the ego of the mere potential for an act to defile us.
“A whole facet of the sacred, true lining of the sacrificial, compulsive, and paranoid side of religions, assumes the risk of warding off [danger]... The function of these religious rituals is to ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the [mother].”
Orlock, I would argue, inverts our understanding of necrophilia by being the one doing the defiling. Long before he ever feeds on Ellen, he has permanently altered her psyche. He stalks her, harasses her, and rends control of her body from her psychically. Their final meeting centres physicality – eroticism – but it is Orlock that defiles Ellen. It is the corpse that mars her, the remains that are engaging in this act of sacrilege. This inversion pokes at the fragility of our boundaries – and that in and of itself is disturbing. Is it still necrophilia if the corpse is the perpetrator? Is the act of necrophilia still sacrilegious when it is, itself, the ritual that cleanses us and prepares us for salvation?
The fate of the Hardings is somewhat more fraught – and I’ve gone back and forth on whether or not to discuss this scene in such public a forum as the internet. I think the reason Herr Harding’s death is so distressing is because there is no monster to shield us from the reality of the act. Herr Harding at the beginning of the film tells Thomas Hutter his adoration of his wife so strong, and their physicality so intoxicating, that he “cannot resist her.” They show their affection physically, and they are open with it in life. So, it really does not come as a surprise that, when Herr Harding – overcome with grief at the death of his two young children and his heavily pregnant wife – stumbles into the crypt drunk, delirious, and dying of the plague wrought by Orlock, he is later found deceased in his wife’s coffin; dishevelled and half-clothed, holding her as one would a lover in the dark.
The film doesn’t dwell on this. We are not privy to the act itself, nor are any of the other characters. It is known what happened, and the narrative cleanses the site with fire. What struck me here was the emotion that stirred in response to this final scene. It wasn’t disgust, nor was it horror. It was, truly, a profound sorrow for these characters, and with that, the realization that Eggers here has subverted the element of defilement in our understanding of necrophilia. Was the act justifiable? No. It completely disregards Anna’s personhood and autonomy. But was it defilement? And the answer to that, given the film’s circumstances, is ambiguous. Defilement is making something foul, dirty, or unclean, but I’m not entirely convinced that Harding’s act accomplished any of those things. Violation and defilement are not one and the same, and as violating as Harding’s act may have been, there is no foulness in his final moments, nor is he made unclean by what happened in the crypt. As brutal, devastating, and wrong as it may have been – there is a stark decoupling of the act from defilement by removing it from lust and placing it squarely in the realm of grief.
I’m still sorting out my thoughts on this film. I have not rewatched it since I saw it in the theatre, and as new and (in)famous as it still is, I am going to give it a few more months before I rewatch it. Maybe even a full year. This is a film that is worth digesting – which is rare in our current cinema-scape.
Some of you may be reading this and wondering what the hell is wrong with me. Why, on God’s green earth, would I spend my time viewing, reading, and analyzing such disturbing media? The truth is: because it makes me think. I do not have a brain that shuts down when given something intense, or distressing – I have a brain that searches for the reasons why it is intense or distressing. The urge to find answers far outweighs the urge to disengage from the material that sparks the questions.
And with that, dear reader, I will bid you adieu.
Until next time.
L
