Doomed By Blood: A Review
Of Nosferatu (2024)

Contains Spoilers

What do you see when you lie alone, awake at night? What fills your head before sleep comes? Do you take in the room’s shadows, or do you journey elsewhere in your mind? What anxieties or pleasures do you indulge yourself in?

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) opens with Ellen Hutter, played by Lily-Rose Depp, alone in blackness, sobbing into the void. She calls out, “Come to me, come to me, a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, a spirit of any celestial sphere, anything.” 

The voice that answers is just as dark as her surroundings, beckoning her to the window where the light is ashy gray, devoid of warmth but full of fire. 

Like the 1922 original, Nosferatu is a loose yet faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The names and story are altered, but the essence remains: a solicitor goes to meet a Romanian count who rots in a coffin by day and gorges himself on blood by night. In many respects, the tone and themes of the novel are matched with gothic enormity. The palette welds harsh white highlights against black, meaning the viewer is finally relieved from a plague of modern nighttime scenes that obscure their actors with dim lighting. The dialogue feels straight out of 19th century literature, and so do the frames; I cannot recall a vampire’s castle in film that felt so grand yet so oppressive in its must and stone. Count Orlock himself is identical to Stoker’s original descriptions of Dracula, down to his heavy brows and mustache, which distract little from his decaying flesh and cavernous voice (the mustache, alas, causes an unfortunate resemblance to Jim Carrey’s Dr. Eggman in the Sonic The Hedgehog films, but I digress). As a horror fan, I was thrilled to hear how disgusting a vampire drinking blood would actually sound; sensual neck nibbling has at last given way to parasitic slurping. 

Though Bill Skarsgard and Nicholas Hoult receive top billing for their respective roles as Count Orlock and Thomas Hutter, the most important character to the film is Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen. Though her husband gets the iconic first meeting with the count, she is already familiar with his presence and is the only one who can defeat him. Ellen has been visited by Orlock in her dreams since she was young, accepting him carnally. She is constantly haunted by him, succumbing to violent seizures and delirium whenever he wants her. “Do you ever feel at times as if you’re not a person . . . nor alive, as if you’re at the whim of another, like a dog, that someone or something had the power to breathe life into you, to move you?” she asks her friend Anna. Orlock, who is obsessed with her and smuggles himself in a shipping crate to reach her, insists that her visions of his love are “. . . your own nature . . . I am an appetite, nothing more”. Despite her torment, Ellen admits to gaining pleasure from Orlock’s visits, describing a dream to Thomas in which she wedded Death itself and embraced him in joy as everyone she loved died. Professor Albin von Franz, the film’s Van Helsing stand-in, deduces that the Nosferatu (a vampire that brings plague to a village, which Orlock does) can only be vanquished if a maiden gives herself willingly to him. Ellen, in her guilt for the many deaths caused by Orlock’s descent upon her hometown of Wisborg, agrees to sacrifice herself to the vampire’s fatal embrace. As Franz and her unknowing husband burn Orlock’s coffin, Ellen spends the night in gruesome union with the vampire until daylight, warm at last, finds them entwined in death. 

I have written about my grapples with spiritual anxiety before (see “Do You Hate Worshipping Too?” in issue one, New Beginnings). Every time I worried that a demon was controlling my actions, I always wondered if something I did attracted it to me. I was convinced I was doomed for Hell every time I watched something that had a swear word in it, for instance. An old Satanic Panic book I flipped through as a child convinced me that the world was a series of tripwires to demonic possession, even seemingly innocent things like my beloved superhero comics. I felt Ellen’s shame and vulnerability, as I am sure many other Christians have when trying to reconcile sinful nature with God’s eternal nurture. We are hot-blooded creatures boiling in all directions, and brooding on how disgusting my soul is seems pointless to me now when I could be showing love to others instead. After I left the theatre, I could not stop thinking about Ellen’s choice to be devoured by evil so others could be saved. Anyone can see that she does not deserve it; a desperate cry of a child in the dark hardly warrants damnation. Horror stories like Nosferatu remind me of the Satanic Panic of the 80s, or even parts of the Old Testament; the earth swallows people whole, a wrong breath leads to an eternal curse, and God seems to do nothing but cast people into flame. Even The Exorcist (1973) at least has the power of Christ to compel the demon from the girl. 

Nosferatu is a delight for anyone who enjoys gothic extremes of darkness and light, likes Robert Eggers’ previous works such as The Lighthouse (2019), or just wants a good old-fashioned spooky period piece. And yes, Willem Dafoe really does act alongside 2,000 trained rats, which is reason enough to see any film. Those rats deserve to have their hard work acknowledged. 

Also, one character bites off a live pigeon’s head. I thought that was worth mentioning.

Fears of getting older are generally the furthest anxieties from a college student’s mind. Most of us are in our early twenties, our physical prime; why would we worry about aging when there are papers, tuition, housing costs, relationships, and disasters previous generations have left for us looming nearby? We believe we are lucky if we survive long enough to get older, to find rest. But there is no rest in old age.

In contemplating the theme of Disturbia, I realized what terrifies me most about modern living is how old we can get. To explain that, allow me to summarize my favorite horror movie. The Fly (1986) is Canadian director David Cronenberg’s remake of the 1958 original, a typical B-movie for the era featuring a scientist whose hubris curses him with an enormous insect head. An easy and obvious concept for a horror movie; giant bugs have haunted the collective subconscious even before Kafka’s Gregor Samsa woke up with more legs than usual. Cronenberg’s movie begins how one would expect it to: with a scientist named Seth Brundle, played by Jeff Goldblum, telling a journalist named Veronica Quaife about his newly invented teleportation machines. The two fall in love, but a bout of jealousy over Veronica’s ex-boyfriend leads to Seth drunkenly deciding to become his teleporter’s first human subject. Naturally, Seth does not notice the housefly inside the machine whose DNA is about to be blended with his. This is where the film diverges from its predecessor: Seth does not emerge from the teleporter a monster—not yet.

Seth is invigorated the next day, both by his machine’s success and his unusual physical stamina. His strength begins to border on superhuman, and he is convinced that the teleporter has somehow improved his body. Seth attempts to convince Veronica to teleport so she can keep up with him, but she is concerned about his increasing irritability and the strange hairs on his back. He pushes her away, seeking cheap thrills in bar fights and promiscuous encounters, completely distant from the humble and awkward academic he was before. Only when his teeth and nails begin to fall out does he realize something may be wrong.

Bits of Seth continue to peel away. His skin bloats and fuses into a tumorous mass. He can only eat by vomiting mucus onto his food to dissolve it. In the late stages of his transformation, Veronica finds out that Seth has impregnated her. Seth tries forcing Veronica to fuse with him in the teleporter, thinking that her DNA combined with his and the baby’s will bring him back. “We’ll be the ultimate family. A family of three joined together in one body. More human than I am alone,” he cries as his jaw tears away in Veronica’s hand. The insectoid face, still thinly veiled in flesh, finally emerges from the crumpling shell of his head, with all drive to preserve himself caving into mute despair.

If all this sounds terrifying, it is far worse watching it happen in real life. Two summers ago, I worked as a COVID-19 screener in a seniors’ home. Every day at my desk, I tried to ignore the acid stench of hospital-grade cleaning products. I knew they were used to disguise smells far worse. Warbling cries of “Help!” echoed down the halls, sharp and lonely, like whale calls in deep ocean fathoms. Some residents looked dead already, slumped in front of the TV they had been wheeled to with hollow faces and sunken eyes permanently shut. They never moved. The worst ones, however, were those who still clung to scant shreds of lucidity. Every evening, I helped one of the residents with the iPad he used to video call his wife (relatives who had not received the COVID-19 vaccine were not allowed to visit at the time). I found out that he was the widower of my grandmother’s sister. He seemed fine at first, if a little grumpy. Then he would forget things he just heard. He grew paranoid; once, he refused to leave my desk, begging me to let him out of the building. He had no idea why he was there. He asked to see my grandmother’s sister once, thinking she was still alive. He tried to escape, his motorized wheelchair making it only inches from the gate until he was caught. I wonder how far he would have gone.

So much of life is spent preparing for getting old. We study to get jobs that will support our retirements, we marry to grow old together, and we have children to care for us. We also have children to preserve ourselves, molding younger versions of ourselves to live how we would have wished to. Seth Brundle thought his child would save him, yet our children are just as mortal as us. Veronica has a dream of giving birth to a massive, writhing maggot. We spend so much time waiting to get older and wiser, only to watch ourselves fall apart when that time comes. How will you end? Possibly covered in bedsores, your veins bursting from your paper skin, your urine at your side in a bag, your voice a faint housefly’s whine in your throat.

I try to remember my spirit when I think about this. I believe in its immortality. Yet I cannot forget my body. I cannot avoid the day when, as Seth puts it, “the dream is over and the insect is awake.”