Nosferatu the Third

It Harrows Me with Fear and Wonder

Spoilers abound. If you’re interested, you can listen to the Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics episodes on the original Nosferatu (1922) and Werner Herzog’s version (1979). We’ve also done episodes on Eggers’ The Witch and The Lighthouse.

After Horatio sees the ghost of Hamlet’s father, he says, “It harrows me with fear and wonder.” That’s exactly the reaction I had to Nosferatu: it’s harrowing, frightening, but also wonderful in the way that art makes us sit in silence with open mouths, like Horatio, not believing what we are seeing. We pay directors (with money and time) to show us what they see when they read the same books as we have; what Robert Eggers sees when he reads Dracula and has recorded for the rest of us is wonderfully different (and better) than what I saw when I first read those pages, just as Coppola’s vision of the Corleones surpasses anything in my mind’s eye when I read Mario Puzo’s clunky prose. The best adaptations all satisfy us this way as they make visible what we have only seen—or attempted to see—in our mind’s eye. Many people read A Clockwork Orange in 1962, but Stanley Kubrick saw it as nobody else did.

Nosferatu is the demonic love-child of The Witch and The Lighthouse, a combination of textured art direction and expressionistic audacity. You can almost smell the streets of 1838 Wisborg just as you can feel, in The Witch, the dampness of the air in 1630s New England—and there are images in it as shocking as the mermaid in Robert Pattinson’s fever dream. Every detail is perfect, from the pig being butchered in the corner of the frame during a street scene, to Count Orlock’s wine glass, to the snow that seems to fall in slow-motion, to Professor von Franz’s pipe. There are as many shades of grey as there are reputed shades of Inuit white and a soundscape that’s always working on the viewer. When a horse whinnied, the sound came from a speaker behind me and for a second I was almost disoriented; when Orlock first speaks, his voice seems to hang over everyone in the theater like a poisonous cloud.

It’s also—finally!—a film in which the characters are as afraid as we would imagine them to be. Thrillers are filled with characters who are unnaturally brave or even cavalier in the face of the supernatural. Not here: characters shake, whimper, sweat, cry, and scream just as we expect they would. The screams of Frederich’s daughters are almost as terrifying as their cause.

Again like Hamlet, the film is saturated with death; unlike Hamlet, there is no great wrestling with how to best live or find meaning in light of what we all know is coming. No one in Wisborg asks “What is a man,” ponders “To be or not to be,” or comes to the realization that “the readiness is all.” Death is absolute and as grim as the skies under which the characters walk on a beach dotted with tombstones. No one is half in love with easeful death. There’s almost no acknowledgement of Christianity in the world of the film: a nun nurses Thomas back to health and Professor von Franz alludes to Jacob wrestling the angel, but these are incidental. There are no crucifixes held in defiance to which Orlock reacts, no holy water, no appeals to God to deliver them from evil.

Vampire literature has always been the sexiest supernatural subgenre: the tag line to Coppola’s imagining of Stoker’s novel was, “Love never dies” and some of Anne Rice’s characters are more like Cary Grant (or Tom Cruise) than Vlad the Impaler. But in this godless, nihilistic setting, sex and death are interchangeable. Ellen’s death wish is like lust, and when we see Orlock feed from Thomas, it’s impossible not to see it as a sexual violation. When Ellen wants to defy Orlock and show him how deeply she loves Thomas, their coupling is as horrific as anything in the film: it’s a sexual act prompted by hatred instead of love. After we see Frederich wail over the tiny coffins of his daughters, he returns to the family vault to (in a scene that Poe would have admired) once more lay with his dead wife. And when Ellen sacrifices herself, the scene is a perversion of the nuptial bed and of the film’s opening scene, in which she and Thomas keep giving each other just one more kiss (“No, you hang up first!”) before he has to leave. Orlock is called a villain, but he corrects his accuser with, “I am an appetite,” and it’s Ellen’s appetite for a forbidden desire—coinciding with the onset of puberty—that first awakens Orlock from centuries of suspended animation. Ellen assumes her desires are shameful and will bring moral and actual death, but part of her doesn’t care. She cannot stop herself and the smell of sin is intoxicating. She tells Thomas of a recent dream:

It was our wedding ... and when I reached the altar, you weren't there... Standing before me, all in black... was... Death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced, and when we turned round, everyone was dead. Father... and... everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible... it overwhelmed the lilacs... and... But I had never been so happy as that moment... as I held hands with Death.

The film owes more to The Exorcist than the past versions by Murnau or Herzog. The scenes in which Ellen is possessed by Orlock—and tries to resist him—are like those in which Regan MacNeil begins flipping on her bed. The calisthenics, the voices, the agony are found in each case. Both films also ask how such a force of evil is unleashed: The Exorcist begins with the title character, Father Merrin, on an archeological dig in Iraq and realizing that he has uncovered a sign that the demon Pazuzu will be in search of a host. Nosferatu begins with young Ellen courting some supernatural force: “Come to me,” she asks. “A guardian angel, a spirit of comfort—spirit of any celestial sphere.” Like young Regan calling upon Mr. Howdy as the spirit that moves the planchette on her ouija board, Ellen’s innocent request signals to a malevolent force that she is ripe for the picking. Like the Pinkertons, demons never sleep.

This idea that evil is more powerful when it is sought is what makes Nosferatu such a hard portrait of our fundamental fallen state. Orlock cannot simply do as he likes and drink the blood of whomever he pleases. His victims need to make the first move. Think about any destructive force in human lives that leads to death, either literally or of the soul, and the film offers a metaphor. Drugs, gambling, adultery, abuse—open the door just the slightest crack and the rats will be pouring off the ship and infecting everyone you love. Thomas signs the contract that gives his wife’s very life force to darkness; one could defend him on the grounds that he doesn’t know what he is signing, but dealing with evil isn’t like drawing up a set of rules or playing fair in the schoolyard. The devil doesn’t play fair and will mock your chances for hoping he will.

Disgusting in appearance (this is no Frank Langella) to reflect the corruption he seeks to spread, Orlock is a dead man walking, rotted flesh housing a rotted soul. He makes promises to all who will listen, like his servant Knock, who was promised to become a prince of France and ends up dying in Orlock’s place. In The Witch, Black Phillip asks Thomasin, “Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?” She, too, signs a contract and, despite the far-flung yet trendy opinions of some who think she has found some kind of freedom, has accepted a fate literally worse than death: a place in a circle of the damned. Evil is never liberating, but confining. Thomasin becomes a slave to her desire to taste the devil’s butter; Ellen becomes the slave to Orlock until he has fed upon her like the parasite he is—a parasite so deadly that it even sacrifices itself in order to continue to feed.

When Ellen asks Professor von Franz, “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” the answer is, “Yes.”