A Death of Despair in Wisborg

Film is a sequence of photographs. Any two individual cells in a reel may resemble each other. But when shown in rapid sequence, they reveal movement. This past Christmas, director Robert Eggers released a new telling of the now familiar vampire myth, Nosferatu (2024). It is an adaptation of an adaptation: a retelling of Fritz Murnau’s classic 1922 Nosferatu, itself a famously unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. These stories are cells in a sequence. They share a fundamental architecture. In each version an ambitious real estate agent travels to distant Transylvania to conclude the sale of local property to a reclusive count. The buyer, a vampire, preys upon the young agent before traveling across the ocean to his hometown, where he hunts the local population until his eventual demise. But these structural similarities camouflage deep differences in plot, character, and tone. Each iteration of the story offers a snapshot of the moment of its creation. Intentionally or not, they reflect back on their authors, on the societies that produce them. They reveal the anxieties that preoccupy their makers, the quiet assumptions that inform and structure their worldview. The rough similarity of these stories throws their differences into stark relief. Aspects of Eggers’ film that may seem incidental, are revealed to be artistic choices laden with meaning. By flipping rapidly through these cells, we can also perform a crude sort of animation, revealing tectonic transformations in fundamental assumptions about gender, familiarity and otherness – even authority and trust. Dracula celebrated the triumph of Western modernity. Murnau’s film despaired at the horror of the First World War and the folly of Germany’s leaders. By contrast, the dominant themes of Eggers’ new film are terrifying loneliness and exploitation, reflecting our own contemporary exhaustion with atomized, increasingly meaningless, and often predatory, interpersonal relationships.

Stoker’s original Dracula chronicles the triumphal march of occidental civilization, the victory of scientific reason and Christian faith over the barbaric violence and benighted superstition of the wild frontier. Published in 1897, the novel reflects Stoker’s preoccupation with race and empire. Dracula is a racial other, the barbarian at the gates poised to invade Britain and corrupt its essence. He is at once a frontier warrior, an ancient guardian of the Carpathians twisted by centuries of warfare with the encroaching Ottomans. Onto Count Dracula, Stoker projected anxieties of foreign invasion and racial corruption, but also of moral corruption – his fear that the violence of empire and ceaseless frontier conflict could breed monstrosity that would subvert the very project of civilization.¹ Vanquishing Dracula thus requires the protagonists to rely on Christian faith, scientific acumen, managerial acuity, and technological superiority. Christianity armours the protagonists. Dracula recoils from the cross. The blessed host can ward him away. Presented as a literal archive of letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings, and other compiled documents, the novel’s format celebrates rationalism through its mimicry of empirical objectivity. The effort against Dracula is led by Professor Abraham van Helsing, a meticulous and impressive intellect. Careful investigative reasoning and clerical expertise organize their hunt, which depends on their ability to organize, compile, and synthesize evidence. At the novel’s climax, the party ambushes the vampire in Transylvania, mowing down his servants with a Maxim machine gun. The Texan Quincy Morris stabs Dracula through the heart with his Bowie Knife. Jonathan Harker, a veteran of colonial wars along the Indian frontier, decapitates the vampire with his Kukri knife. The hero of the British colonial empire slays the monster, securing the blessings of civilization and domestic order. The social order of empire, scientific rationalism, and Christian faith triumphs over frontier barbarism and superstition.

Released only twenty-five years later, Fritz Murnau’s Nosferatu transformed the vampire legend into a tale of abject disaster. Murnau’s world was defined not by colonial triumph, but by imperial collapse. Written and directed by veterans of the First World War, Nosferatu was filmed in the shadow of German defeat and released to a public still reeling from battlefield carnage, the 1918 influenza pandemic, ongoing economic turmoil, and political chaos which churned across Central and Eastern Europe.² Murnau’s vampire lacked the subtlety and cunning of Dracula. He was not a parasite but a plague. He did not kill Londoners one at a time, but mowed down Wisborgers in droves, a “Great Death” that chroniclers struggled to comprehend. Nosferatu was a force of nature, calamity incarnate, senseless and inexplicable. Like Dracula, Count Orlock was manifestly foreign – an Eastern European count who wrought havoc on Wisborg’s bourgeois domestic order. Nosferatu told the story of misadventure, the promise of conquest dashed. It expressed horror at the evil unleashed by hubris. As revolutions and civil conflict roiled across Eastern Europe and freshly drawn maps redefined borders of inclusion and exclusion, Nosferatu grappled with the unnerving sense that defeat and revolution had blurred previously stable boundaries and smashed the known social order.³ It wrestled with German anxieties about foreign infiltration as antisemitism metastasized across the political landscape.⁴

Hutter’s response to Nosferatu’s appearance in Wisborg is denial. Nosferatu (1922)

Social order, as staged in Murnau’s Nosferatu, is by turns malign and hapless. The devious Herr Knock (Alexander Granach), betrays the young Thomas Hutter (Gustav von Wangenheim), sending him into Orlock’s clutches. Hutter strikes a far less heroic figure than Jonathan Harker. He is a buffoon, headstrong and arrogant, but utterly incapable. After escaping back to Wisborg, Hutter doesn’t mention his suspicions about Count Orlock, instead denying the vampire when his wife points him out. Wisborg’s town fathers are powerless to halt the plague which engulfs their city. Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt) lacks the mental agility and decisive leadership of Stoker’s van Helsing. He is a charlatan. Fussing with carnivorous plants and amoebae, he cannot fathom the “Great Death” that will overtake Wisborg. Inconsequential to the plot, Bulwer serves only to underscore the impotence of the intellectual establishment. A masterpiece of German expressionism, Nosferatu is saturated by the genre’s characteristic scepticism of authority, expertly punctuated by the narrative device which frames the film. Presented as an anonymous “Chronicle of the Great Death in Wisborg” in 1838, the audience is left to wonder about the reliability of what they are about to see. In the wreckage of disaster, Murnau’s Nosferatu pointed an accusing finger at Germany’s cultural, social, and political leaders – at authority itself – lampooning its arrogance, its ignorance, and its incompetence.

Left: Professor Bulwer prattle on venus flytraps and polyps. Nosferatu (1922). Right: Georg Grosz, “Die Gesundbeter” (“The Healers,” 1920). “KV” – The army doctor declares his patient ready for frontline service.

At their core, both Stoker’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu are stories about encountering the other, confronting the foreign and uncanny. Eggers fundamentally reimagines Count Orlock. His vampire is intimately familiar, even interior. He has always been present, at least in some sense, and the plot revolves around the protagonists’ gradual realization of this unavoidable fact. Layered on top of this is a jarring shift in how the new adaptation treats social authority. Eggers’ film simultaneously lacks the triumphalism of Dracula and the abject scepticism Murnau’s film. But it chides the sneering disenchantment of modernity, our innate sense of superiority and disregard for all that is not tangible and immediately apparent. The film prods its audience, suggesting that in our enthusiasm for gleaming material prosperity, we have lost touch with some essential truth – that we are not as afraid of the dark as we should be.

Loneliness defines Eggers’ film. Moments of physical proximity, even carnal intimacy, seem either devoid of tenderness or terrifyingly adversarial. Emotional warmth is rare, unreciprocated, and quickly brushed aside. The advancing ice of winter underscores the frigid isolation which slowly overtakes the characters. To reach Orlock’s castle, Hutter must scramble through deserted felsenmeers and karsts. As he walks through a silent black forest, the serried ranks of sentinel pines emphasize his absolute, desperate seclusion. A driverless carriage conveys him the final miles to Castle Orlock. Eggers’ film recoils from an overwhelming sense of isolation, neither contemplative nor ennobling, but barbarizing in its effect.

Eggers’ Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård) is outwardly foreign, but uncannily familiar.⁵ Though Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hout), travels far to encounter Orlock, his young wife Ellen (Lily Rose-Depp) reveals that the vampire has haunted her for years. If sometimes undetected, the vampire has always been there. Eggers’ version of Van Helsing / Bulwer, Professor Albin von Franz (Willem Dafoe), identifies Nosferatu as elemental, appetite incarnate. This new adaptation thematizes the relentless and destructive corruption of appetite, male ambition and sexual appetite in particular. Murnau’s Orlock was slight, vulpine, almost effeminate. Eggers’ Orlock is his hyper-masculine, a towering aristocrat whose bearing and booming voice fill the room. He commands deference. The new Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) suffers the creeping madness of tertiary syphilis. In scene after scene, men consume women – sometimes with brutal violence, sometimes with domestic obligation. Friedrich, the male child that grows in the womb of Frau Anna Harding (Emma Corrin), is conspicuously described as insatiable in his appetite, his hunger slowly draining his mother. Women are consumed and ravaged by vampires, but only men succumb to their curse. Whereas Dracula featured a host of female vampires, the monsters of the new Nosferatu are uniformly male. Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) degenerates into vampirism towards the film’s climax. Harding was never bitten. Curiously, his wife and children, both savaged by the vampire, do not share the curse. Was Harding a vampire all along? Or was a latent curse simply unleashed by the death of his wife? Orlock is at once elemental, appetite incarnate, but he is simultaneously intimately, sexually, familiar – the abusive ex-boyfriend who stalks and manipulates Ellen.

Eggers too seems to point to a crisis of authority, but not of the same ilk as Murnau’s Nosferatu. Murnau’s Nosferatu excoriated the overconfidence of bourgeois rationalism and established authorities, organs whose credibility had been dashed by the manifold disasters of the First World War. Eggers’ Nosferatu stops far short of such a systematic indictment. But it needles the audience, prodding and suggesting that the habits of modernity are ill-equipped to curb the loneliness and elemental appetites that ravage us – may even feed them. Wisborg bustles with prosperity. For all is wealth, all its order, all its modernity, Wisborgers are effectively blind to Nosferatu, helpless. The city’s relentless commercial activity corrupts its inhabitants. The audience first meets Hutter brushing aside the sexual advances of his new wife as he embarks on his fateful business meeting. Hunger for career advancement, his frantic desire to escape debt into Wisborg’s respectable middle-class, drives him to Transylvania and first estranges him from his wife. As he signs a mysterious contract for a hefty purse of gold, Hutter tears down the final wall containing the Nosferatu.

 The film presses its audience to recognize a metaphysical truth beyond the rational or empirically verifiable – to call evil by its name. Much as we want to dismiss them as childhood fables and superstitions, the Harding children (Adéla Hesová and Milena Konstantinova) are proven right: there is a monster in their room. There are things that stalk the night. It is the fireside charms, the domestic traditions, inherited wisdom, and fervent prayers which initially hold the vampire at bay. In Transylvania, the Christian monastics understand who Orlock is. Hutter credits their prayers with protecting him from the vampiric curse. The local innkeepers know to ward their homes with Garlic. In Dracula, the local Székely are confederates of the vampire. In Murnau’s Nosferatu, the Transylvanians gently warn Hutter from Castle Orlock. In Eggers’ film, they are jail-wardens, guardians of the Carpathians. Their medieval rituals and nightly hunts prune back the vampiric curse and maintain a cordon sanitaire. They steal Hutter’s horse to arrest his journey to the castle. Count Orlock dismisses their “superstitions,” but he longs to escape their grasp, to slip their net and run amok in the more “enlightened” Wisborg.

Right: Locals are horrified to learn that Hutter plans to travel to Castle Orlock. Nosferatu (1922). Left: Transylvanians on a nighttime hunt – wardens containing the vampiric curse. Nosferatu (2024).

Von Franz is neither the heroic rationalist of van Helsing, nor the befuddled academic of Bulwer. He immerses himself in alchemy and esotericism. But this allows him to see into a deeper truth. Von Franz quickly penetrates through the chaos, identifying the adversary afflicting Ellen even before Orlock arrives in Wisborg. Indeed, von Franz has been waiting for this, possibly for decades, drawn to Wisborg by an indefinable instinct. Von Franz, like Ellen, knows that the Nosferatu has always been there. It is his investigations in medieval demonology which reveal what must be done to purge the vampiric curse. 

Marriage, that most traditional of social institutions, animates the horror of Eggers’ film. Nosferatu begins with a marriage, a nuptial pledge of Ellen’s eternal fidelity to Orlock and a psychic consummation of their union. It concludes with a high-angle shot of the nuptial bed, Ellen’s brutalized corpse rests beneath the withered and spent Orlock. In between the film reveals that Ellen was haunted by Orlock until her marriage to Hutter. It is their marriage which contains and restrains the Nosferatu. It is their marriage which the vampire conspires to break open and escape, much as he strains at the tradition and “superstition” which fetter him in Transylvania. In Castle Orlock, it is when Hutter succumbs to temptation and dissolves his marital contract that the Nosferatu is unleashed upon Wisborg. It is only when Ellen re-consummates her union, first to Hutter and then to Orlock, that the monster is finally vanquished. In parallel scenes, Ellen is by turns lascivious and virginal bride. She taunts Hutter, baiting him into erotic conquest. She invites Orlock, veiled and festooned in flowers, a virginal bride to their marital bed. It is indeed only the marital bed that ensnares the Nosferatu, enrapturing and shackling Orlock until he finally withers in the dawning sun. Ellen makes this choice willingly. It is celebrated. Knowing Ellen’s plan, von Franz praises her sacrifice. In a lingering close-up, Ellen’s bonnet forms a perfect black halo. She is a saint, martyred to contain the Nosferatu. Ellen’s deathbed is profane: an eviscerated woman beneath a monstrous husk. Von Franz sanctifies it, spreading around her the very same flowers which Hutter had brought her earlier in the film.

Left to Right: Ellen as lascivious, as virginal bride, and as saintly martyr. Nosferatu (2024)

The arresting terror of Nosferatu (2024) is that it presents a series of seemingly inescapable dilemmas. Ellen is stalked by Orlock and quickly abandoned by Hutter. But she is also bereft without them. Solitude is not liberating but suffocating. The opening shots of the film underscore Ellen’s terrifying isolation. A long-shot lingers on Ellen as she walks alone at midnight from an empty house. The estate is magnificent. But Ellen is drawn to Orlock’s voice, she explains later, to salve her unbearable loneliness. Modernity has no answer to this horror – no reply to the twin ravages of loneliness and male appetite. Commercial prosperity, managerial skill, and scientific acumen cannot bind Orlock. Tradition could at least name him, see his face. It offers answers – charms and rituals, nightly hunts, monastic prayers that can ward him a way. Marriage is the sole institution capable of restraining the worst ravages of the Nosferatu. Within marriage, however, Ellen is tortured, consumed. The consummation of union restores domestic order to Wisborg, but only at the cost of Ellen’s brutal death.

Eggers’ film is not the buoyant celebration of British empire and western modernity first authored by Stoker in 1897. Nor is it the scathing critique of bourgeois rationality and authority offered by Murnau in response to the cataclysm of the First World War. Rather it responds to exhaustion, a growing sense of resignation. the film unnerves by showing a society in which bonds of kinship and tenderness are worn threadbare by relentless ambition, a world of prosperous, splendid isolation. Ellen’s estate, Orlock’s castle, and the Grunewald estate, the vampire’s eventual abode in Wisborg, are desperately lonely places – magnificent prisons of isolation. The film strikes a jarring chord for audiences habituated to falling marriage rates, a constant drumbeat of divorces, the advent of “starter marriages” and “situationships,” casual or nonexistent friendships, and strained family life all pressed the by the drudgery of work and relentless professional expectations. This is the vampire of eighty-hour work weeks, “swiping right,” and doomscrolling into our graves. He is the predator of “pick-up artists” and “alpha-males,” the savagery of “red-pilling” and “incels.” He is a spectre illuminated in the midnight glow of phone screens. This is a monster for the age of fentanyl overdoses and deaths of despair. For all its bustling activity and commerce, Wisborg is afflicted by a desperate loneliness that drives its inhabitants to madness and violent predation. They do not even know it. They cannot understand the evil that stalks them. They cannot name it.

Their ancestors knew this evil well. They respected the inexplicable, the metaphysical, they warded against the arcane evil that stalked the night. They developed rituals, charms, religious orders to manage and ward them. The new Nosferatu casts an accusing glance at the smug materialism of our world. Marriage, it suggests, offers refuge from the bane of solitude, curbing and containing male ambition and appetite into less predatory channels. Artists have long grappled with the confinement of marriage, the burdens of domestic obligation which restrain male agency. In Nosferatu these shackles stave off environmental disaster.

But Eggers’ film does not celebrate a return to some Edenic state of tradition. It is resigned, even mournful. The Transylvanians could contain the Nosferatu. But they could never purge it. They lived in the shadow of his castle. The atomized and rationalized relationships of Wisborg have not liberated, but savaged the city. However, inasmuch as marital union ultimately staves off loneliness and contains the carnage of male ambition, the horrifying conclusion of the film is that it can inflict a terrifying cost, can consume women – whether piecemeal and quietly, or with violent bloodlust. Nosferatu is defined by a horrifying irresolution, laying before its audience an unavoidable choice between abject isolation, solitary hunting, and self-obliteration.

Endnotes