This article is a guest submission. To submit your own work for consideration, send your piece to redwoodvoicedn@gmail.com. Thumbnail photo courtesy of Focus Features, from the film Nosferatu (2024).
Written and submitted by Urma Fassinger.
This article contains spoilers for the film Nosferatu (2024).
From the streets of Wisborg, Germany to the forest of birch trees in Transylvania, Nosferatu (2024) is strikingly beautiful, haunting, and nauseatingly disgusting. Gothic horror has been on the fringe of cinema until Robert Eggers showed the world how valuable it is. This isn’t the director’s first project that could be described as strange and off-putting—films such as The Lighthouse (2019) and The VVitch (2015) have stunned and mystified audiences who seek out the dark.
Nosferatu (2024) is a faithful adaptation of Nosferatu (1922), which was a creative adaptation of the novel Dracula written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897. Many believe that Dracula is the first modern vampire novel, but it is not; it has two predecessors: Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, published in 1872 and The Vampyre by John William Polidori, published in 1819.
Nosferatu (2024) follows Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) as he is sent to visit Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in Transylvania on business to sell him a castle located in Germany. In his absence, his wife, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp) is left in the care of their dear friends, Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor Johnson) and Anna Harding (Emma Corrin). On his trip to Orlok’s castle, Thomas encounters a village of local Rromani people and witnesses them uncover a dead corpse they believe to be a strigoi (a spirit who can turn invisible and drinks blood). In the castle in which Count Orlok lives, Thomas becomes almost feverish with fear when facing the Count who hypnotizes him and drinks his blood. He falls from a window of the castle after being chased by wolves and is rescued by an Orthodox nun.
Meanwhile, Ellen is sick with “melancholy” which manifests as sleepwalking and epileptic seizures. Before Thomas is able to return home, half-dead on horseback, Herr Harding seeks out the medical advice of Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson), a lead doctor of a mental hospital where Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) is being held against his will since going mad from his correspondence with Count Orlok. Dr. Sievers seeks out his former teacher, Professor Franz (Willem Dafoe), to help with the strange case of Ellen Hutter. Professor Franz quickly diagnoses Frau Hutter as cursed. Bedlam breaks out in the German village as Count Orlok arrives, having traveled on a ship which brought the plague to Germany. Count Orlok visits Ellen in the night and gives her three nights to give herself willingly to him, “not only in spirit but in flesh also”. After Anna is infected with the plague, and she and her two daughters are eaten by Count Orlok, Professor Franz, Dr. Sievers, and Thomas set out on what Professor Franz calls “a false hunt” to kill the nosferatu, Count Orlok. Unbeknownst to Thomas, Ellen is sacrificing herself to the Count to save her husband and her village.
Professor Franz is an eccentric, and he seems to be familiar with information in a magical and unexplained way. When Herr Harding and Dr. Sievers visit him in his apartment to seek help, he is able to ascertain immediately that Herr Harding has a house guest who is troubled by sleepwalking just by looking at the man. Professor Franz is also able to sniff out that Herr Knock is not the nosferatu they seek just by visiting the cell that Herr Knock was imprisoned in, but had escaped from.
Laying on her bed, having been tied up by Herr Friedrich Harding, Ellen Hutter looks to Professor Franz and asks, “Does evil come from within us or from beyond?” This seems to be the only question that Professor Franz is not able to answer. He looks shocked that she’s put this question into words, in such an earnest manner. This is not the question that Professor Franz’s character is most concerned with, instead he seems to be concerned with getting those around him to face that evil – divine evil – is real at all.
Even as Herr Harding is buffeting him with questions about the identity of the creature who is responsible for the town’s maladies, Professor Franz is not able to answer these exactly, but says emphatically, “If we are to tame darkness we must first face that it exists. We are here encountering the living plague-carrier, the vampyre. Nosferatu.”
Thomas Hutter is facing evil, drenched with sweat as he runs around the schloss of Count Orlok in terror, beset by horrors beyond his comprehension, and with only the goal of leaving Transylvania to see his wife again. He is the classic hero of the gothic horror genre, he is an attempted-demon-slayer and a romantic, carrying a wisp of his wife’s hair in a locket he keeps on his person. This is a modern piece, though, so the demon-slayer is not him, but his wife, and he subverts the trope of the disbelieving husband by the end of the film. His terror, as he faces Count Orlok in the schloss, who stands naked in his tomb, is palpable.
In the penultimate scene of the film, Ellen walks Professor Franz to the door of his apartment. She remarks, “His pull to me is so powerful…so terrible…but my soul cannot be as evil as his.” He replies, “We must know evil to be able to destroy it. We must discover it within ourselves, and when we have we must crucify the evil within us.”
This is the providence of Nosferatu (2024) and this is the providence of horror as a genre. The audience is not just Thomas Hutter desperately looking for a road out of Transylvania, having encountered evil first-hand. We are not just Ellen Hutter, haunted by evil in wake and sleep, suffering epilepsies. We are not just Professor Franz, a self-proclaimed “able tourist” in the occult world. We are also the citizens of Germany who find their town infested by plague rats, we are patients in a mental hospital, and the duty of horror is to look evil in the face.
Ellen is splintered in love between Thomas and Count Orlok. She loves Thomas a great deal and it was in meeting him that she felt saved from the illness of her melancholy. Since girlhood she had been visited by Count Orlok, and her and Count Orlok had forged a bond stronger than human love. “We are fated,” Count Orlok says to Ellen, “You are not for human kind.” The love that Thomas and Ellen have for each other is real, but it is obstructed because Thomas cannot truly see her. Orlok sees that Ellen is a conduit for divine magic, for the shadow realm. During his visit, Orlok must speak English to Thomas, but he can speak fluent Romanian to Ellen and she understands – their connection transcending language. Orlok is the only entity that knows this about Ellen, until she meets Professor Franz. He is an outsider just as she is.
Thomas gifts Ellen a bouquet of lilacs before he leaves for Transylvania. In Victorian flower language, lilacs mean “first love” and “remembrance”. In the castle, Orlok steals the locket of hair from Thomas, smells it, and comments, “Lilac.” In the final shot of the movie, as Ellen and Count Orlok lay dead in their marriage bed, both covered in blood, and Orlok not much more than a skeleton, Professor Franz begins laying the lilac flowers down around their bodies. To be seen, instead of just looked at, is providence.
