Sex and death. That’s what all vampire stories are about under the corpse-pallid skin. More to the point, they’re about our mixed horror and fascination with sex and death: the thrill of living dangerously, mingled with the fear of what might happen if we get carried away. That tension pulses beneath the surface of romances like Francis Ford Coppola’s darkly sensuous “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) and other modern “sexy” vampire stories.
There is plenty of sex and death in the new “Nosferatu,” written and directed by Robert Eggers. However, it is not a “sexy” vampire movie; if anything, it is sexually anxious. Eggers’s film walks the line between desire and dread, the thrill and terror of surrender.
Eggers’s “Nosferatu” is the third big screen version of the story, following F. W. Murnau’s original in 1922 and Werner Herzog’s remake in 1979. Murnau’s film was an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with just enough details changed to avoid paying for the story rights. The film was almost destroyed following legal action from the Stoker estate, but today is considered a masterpiece of the silent film era and a foundational piece of horror cinema. It is also the only horror film to ever receive an official recommendation from the Vatican.
Set in a meticulously-realized 19th-century Germany, the story centers on Ellen Hutter (Lily Rose Depp): young, recently married and plagued by dark dreams. Her melancholy worsens when her husband—doting but hapless real estate agent Thomas (Nicholas Hoult)—is sent to negotiate a property deal with a reclusive Transylvanian nobleman. Dreams become sleepwalking spells, waking visions of blood and decay, and violent convulsive fits. Meanwhile, Thomas finds himself in over his head with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a hulking mustachioed ghoul who keeps to the shadows and shows an inordinate interest in blood. Orlok is the source of Ellen’s dreams: He has haunted her mind since youth, and now plans to possess her physically. He tricks Thomas into signing away his marriage rights and then makes for Germany. It gets bloodier from there.
Eggers is, for good reason, lauded as a horror director: His first film, “The Witch” (2015), launched the recent trend of atmospheric arthouse frighteners. But he is also a master of historical fiction, committed to reproducing the period of his stories in rich detail. That talent is on display in “Nosferatu,” with its shadowy and sumptuous German towns and Carpathian mountain villages. But even more vital is how he evokes the attitudes and worldviews of people in the past, which can feel as alien to modern sensibilities as science fiction. In “Nosferatu,” 19th-century ideas of gender and mental health interact with timeless anxieties about sex and desire, and drive the horror as much as the film’s supernatural elements.
These anxieties find their nexus in Ellen. Depp’s performance is extraordinary, combining quiet, nuanced emotion with a viscerally upsetting physicality. When she’s responding to Orlok, her eyes roll back, her spine snaps into an arch, her entire body shudders. There’s an element of religious ecstasy to these fits that brings to mind Bernini’s famous sculpture of St. Teresa of Ávila. But it’s closer to the truth when Dr. von Franz (Willem Dafoe, raucously eccentric), an occult expert brought in to aid Ellen, compares it to demonic possession. In those scenes, Depp blends desire and revulsion in a way that’s both compelling and difficult to watch.
“Nosferatu” is interested in how women’s sexuality (and particularly sexual desire) is demonized and exploited by patriarchal powers. Ellen is diagnosed with hysteria—literally a wandering uterus, which was how contemporary medicine explained socially undesirable emotions in women, including sexual desire—and kept sedated. Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a friend of the Hutters, blames all of the horrors that follow on her purported wantonness. (Although, we suspect, he’s more perturbed by his own response to her sweating and writhing.) Even Orlok, as obvious a predator as you could imagine, tries to make Ellen feel complicit in her own victimization, claiming to be a manifestation of her darkest desires: “I am an appetite, nothing more.”
While many modern vampire stories portray giving into desire as an act of liberation, “Nosferatu” takes a more complicated view. This extends to the film’s climax, when Ellen realizes that surrender—which she has resisted for the entire story—may be the only act capable of saving everyone. Orlok understands surrender as submission to a greater power, as succumbing to desire. But surrender can also allow us to make tremendous sacrifices: not to give in to our basest desires but to transcend them.
