Bram Stoker’s horror novel, Dracula, wasn’t the first or even the second work of fiction to center its narrative on the vampire figure drawn from European folklore, but as a trope-setting and convention-creator, it redefined the genre and sparked the popular imagination like nothing else before or arguably since its publication more than a century ago. Not surprisingly, adaptations in adjacent media followed, including a stage play written by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane and revised by John L. Balderston in 1924 and 1927 respectively, and filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s (City Girl, Sunrise: A Tale of Two Humans, Faust) exemplar of German Expressionism, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror.
Released in 1922, Murnau’s Silent Era masterpiece almost completely vanished from public view, the result of a lawsuit brought by Stoker’s estate for copyright infringement. (Murnau failed to secure the rights before beginning production on Nosferatu.) Despite a court order to destroy extant copies of Nosferatu, a few prints of Murnau’s adaptation managed to survive unscathed. Apart from Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, however, Nosferatu has stood on its own, influencing practically every adaptation since, but never directly remade or retold, giving writer-director Robert Eggers (The Northman, The Lighthouse, The Witch), a lifelong Nosferatu super-fan, the opening to bring his preoccupations and obsessions to a singularly idiosyncratic, brilliantly realized reinterpretation of Murnau’s seminal horror film.
Where, however, Murnau and his screenwriter, Henry Galeen (The Student of Prague, Waxworks, The Golem), treated Stoker’s novel as a template for their adaptation, removing scenes, condensing characters, eliminating plot points as needed both for budgetary reasons and plausible deniability in case Stoker’s estate sued, Eggers ably subverts both Stoker’s novel and Murnau’s subsequent adaptation. Eggers reframes the central conflict from Stoker’s xenophobic tale of vampirism, plague, and infestation to a proto-feminist narrative foregrounding Ellen’s agency, autonomy, and desire, each one in turn frustrated, stifled, or repressed by the men around her and the patriarchal institutions they represent.
Eggers tips his hand – and his narrative focus – from the first moment when a supplicant Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp, delivering a finely wrought, hyper-stylized performance), praying to an unseen force, for guidance and deliverance, receives an unexpected reply from thousands of miles away, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård, unrecognizable as a rotting corpse), newly awakened from a centuries-old slumber. Through a telepathic connection, Orlok offers a naïve Ellen erotic fulfillment. He becomes her demon-lover, but her behavior marks her as an outsider and potential pariah in a socially and culturally repressive 1830s Germany, specifically the (fictional) town of Wisborg.
It doesn’t last and several years later, a seemingly “recovered” Ellen finds some measure of domesticated bliss as the wife to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), a newly minted real estate agent with more ambition than means outside of a lifelong friendship with Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), the heir to a successful shipping company. Ellen and Harding’s wife, Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), are even closer emotionally. When Thomas’s boss, calls on him to deliver documents, including a deed, to an eccentric count in Romania, Ellen stays with the Harding as their houseguest. Social norms in 1830s Germany dictate that women, whether married or not, shouldn’t – or to be blunter, can’t – live alone or risk the social consequences (e.g., judgment, ostracism, banishment).
Well before Thomas approaches Orlok’s isolated castle deep in the Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania, Ellen’s emotional stability, already fragile due to Thomas’s absence and the return of the nocturnal visions that troubled her earlier life, begins to crumble. Emotional anguish leads to increasingly violent seizures and the seizures in turn lead to the intervention of Harding’s confidant, medical doctor, and sanitarium administrator, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson). Sievers prescribes treatments typical for the time, up to and including bloodletting, sleep-inducing anesthetics, and an ever more restrictive corset (metaphor alert). Individually and collectively, they represent the repressive tools of a patriarchal institution that diagnosed heterodox women with generic terms like “melancholy” and “hysteria.”
As Ellen fights for an agency repeatedly denied her gender by society, Thomas learns the awful price for his haute-bourgeois ambitions: In a phantasmagoric, reality-breaking sequence magnificently shot by Eggers’s frequent collaborator, Jarin Blaschke (The Lighthouse, The Witch), Thomas witnesses a bizarre Romani ritual involving a naked woman on a horse, an unearthed, if not quite fully dead, corpse, and an iron stake, rides in a driverless carriage to Orlok’s caste, meets his elusive, demonic host, and inadvertently signs away his life, if not his soul, in the bargain. Their repeated encounters over several hazy, hallucinogenic nights leave Thomas physically drained, mentally confused, and imprisoned in Orlok’s castle.
Ellen’s increasingly dire condition convinces Sievers to call upon an old mentor, Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, a welcome, darkly comic presence), for help. Once a well-respected teacher and scholar, von Franz’s obsession with alchemy and the occult ended his academic career, leading to self-exile in Wisborg, surrounded by stacks of dusty books, free-roaming cats, and whatever odd thoughts entered his head. After some reluctance, he joins Sievers and Harding to investigate the source of Ellen’s deteriorating health and a recent influx of plague rats brought to Wisborg aboard a familiarly doomed ship.
Count Orlok – like Stoker’s aristocratic vampire count before him (minus the seductive aspect) – represents pre-Enlightenment folklore made of rotted, stinking flesh. He also embodies the conflict between superstition and rationality, between tradition and modernity, and at least in one reading, the conflict between a destabilizing incursion of a disease-carrying foreigner and the inhabitants of an unsuspecting Western European country. Orlok’s ravenous appetites doom practically everyone who crosses his path, but his appetite for Ellen, the woman who accepted and then rejected him, remains, at least until Nosferatu’s final jarring moments (Eros and Thanatos joined in unholy matrimony), unquenchable.
Ultimately, Nosferatu comes full circle, ending where it began, with Ellen and the choices she makes. Ellen expresses her agency and autonomy through an act of redemptive self-sacrifice. With every other alternative unavailable to her, Ellen makes the only choice possible: An act of self-abnegation likely to result in her own annihilation. In its purest form, it’s also an act of love, love both for Thomas, imperfect, flawed, undone by ambition, and for the townspeople she doesn’t know and who, in other circumstances, would likely accuse her of witchcraft and seal her fate at the end of a hangman’s noose or burned at the stake.
Nosferatu opens theatrically on Wednesday, December 25th, via Focus Features.
