By Joe Gibson
Watching Nosferatu 2024 produced intense reactions of shock,
disgust, and especially suspense. Because I do not have the film in front of me
to revisit annotated, I cannot state any conclusion with a degree of accuracy
that reaches my satisfaction; essentially, I will commend the film for its
tone, mood, expressionism and all technical aspects while approaching its story
considerations with a bit more trepidation. Again, I am not the final say, this
is not my final say on the matter, and I could be wrong to varying extents
about everything I am going to say…but I will say it.
First I should explain the differences between Nosferatu and
the traditional Dracula character and how that influenced my expectations going
in. I intensely dislike whenever a film tries to graft on romantic pursuit of
Mina to Lord Dracula’s aims, because it isn’t in the novel and is made at the very
least improbable by the meticulous details of Bram Stoker’s tale (hinting at other motivations). Coppola’s
film is the most apt demonstration of my ire: if everything Dracula does is
about Mina and her previous life, why does Dracula collect his three wives, feed
them with abducted children, and go after Lucy first?
It is possible to answer those questions, but it represents
changing and warping the original intent (to the point where you might as well
rename the vampire too). Dracula’s goal is some vague world domination, and, for
whatever reason, he chooses to go about this first by corrupting two Victorian
women (this would make a lot more sense to someone with neurosyphilis, which we
will get to), but Nosferatu – Nosferatu (that is to say Count Orlok, though the
original film and new remake both use the terms interchangeably) has always been
different than that.
If you rewatch the original Nosferatu, as I did to prepare
for the new one, you will see far less evidence of grand aspirations or
complicated designs. Orlok is looking to move and reacts to the appearance of
Ellen’s visage. There are no three wives, and there is no feeding operation for
them wherein he regularly abducts infants; there is just Orlok and Ellen. This
lends itself exceedingly well to the romantic reinterpretation as everything in
the film leads to the union of predator and prey.
But the imagery of the plague ultimately won out as its
presiding subtext. Nosferatu brings the plague upon the German town of Wisborg
(as I understand it, the bubonic plague was something more tangible around that
time that may have even been very recent at the time). Since the focus was the
plague, rats were prominent and even Orlok is ratlike in his face and posture.
Dracula too represents the slow march of an illness, but it
is venereal disease. He is a disgusting character but sexual, his bite and
embrace corrupt, the novel spends much of its time analyzing the sexualities of
Mina and Lucy, many of Bram Stoker’s influences and contemporaries suffered
from syphilis because syphilis was a very prolific and timely thing to comment
on from the 18th century onward, the insanity of Renfield resembles
neurosyphilis, much of what we understand as general insanity is just
neurosyphilis as we know with studies into the General Paralysis of the Insane,
and Bram Stoker is speculated to have himself died of syphilis!
Sorry, that was quite a lot. Basically, syphilitic imagery is
inextricable from Dracula, yet was extracted for Nosferatu to favor the plague,
and that is really important for how we approach the fixation on the leading
lady (my current thoughts are that while either one can be intimate or looming
large, Dracula is more readily a sexual vehicle due to his literary DNA). So
imagine my surprise when Robert Egger’s new Nosferatu focused more on syphilis than
the plague. (There are many ways it brings in other stuff from the novel and
warps it such as Willem Dafoe’s twisted Van Helsing type and Harding’s scene in
the sepulchre mimicking Arthur and Lucy, but those serve the tone without the
detriment I see to the story in transfixing back on syphilis.)
Syphilis comes in stages: a chancre upon the tongue or other
areas of infection, a rash across the body and then the gummatous lesions.
However, the most important motif would be sexual regret because that is how it
transmits. The art and poetry focus on the moment surrounding the sexual
encounter where the lovely woman decayed into a corpse, thus also dooming the protagonist
to the same fate. I shall share here a poem and art piece to prove this point.
Here is Charles Baudelaire’s The Metamorphoses of the Vampire (
Then the woman with the strawberry mouth,
Squirming like a snake upon the coals,
Kneading her breasts against the iron of her corset,
Let flow these words scented with musk:
— "I have wet lips, and I know the art
Of losing old conscience in the depths of a bed.
I dry all tears on my triumphing breasts
And I make old men laugh with the laughter of children.
For those who see me naked, without any covering,
I am the moon and the sun and the sky and the stars!
I am so dexterous in voluptuous love, my dear, my wise one,
When I strangle a man in my dreadful arms,
Or abandon my breast to his biting,
So shy and lascivious, so frail and vigorous,
That on these cushions that swoon with passion
The powerless angels damn their souls for me!"
When she had sucked the pith from my bones
And, drooping, I turned towards her
To give her the kiss of love, I saw only
An old leather bottle with sticky sides and full of pus!
I shut both eyes in cold dismay
And when I opened them both to clear reality,
By my side, instead of that powerful puppet
Which seemed to have taken some lease of blood,
There shook vaguely the remains of a skeleton,
Which itself gave the cry of a weathercock
Or of a sign-board, at the end of a rod of iron,
Which the wind swings in winter nights.
Consider the very framing for Nosferatu’s existence in this
new movie: that Ellen’s yearning and lustful encounter brought a corpse to bed
with her that infects her and damns her soul. Some syphilitic imagery is more
overt than others: Dracula is a bit more veiled than Baudelaire, but, in this
franchise, having sexual intercourse with a decaying corpse that slumps into
leathery puppet with skeleton legs as Ellen concludes this film is necessarily
syphilitic. Even so, this hits the finer details of this poem such as biting
the breast rather than neck or wrist, Knock, the old man that laughs like a child
and literally seeing the syphilitic carrier naked multiple times with Orlok’s
full frontal. (I chose this poem primarily because it is the one easiest for me
to call to mind due to learning about it and syphilis in my WSU Honors Blood class taught by Professors Justin Rhees and Cynthia Jones. I am not insinuating that the film intended to borrow from
this, but we should not rule it out either since it was notable enough to warrant exploration in that class.)
From that lens, the nudity, shocking though it may be is by
no means surprisingly except insofar as this is meant to still be about the
plague, and this guides me into my burgeoning issue with the script (pending
confirmation that I did not miss something to tie it together). Because the
plague isn’t the plague but explicitly tied to Nosferatu’s magic syphilis, I
asked myself a question I could not answer on the ride home from viewing this:
how does one become a vampire?
In the original film, that would be wholly irrelevant; Orlok’s
bites do not transform, and there is no evidence of other vampires in the
region or the world (outside of the book’s diegetic exposition that might as
well just be about the same vampire we are watching). In the Werner Herzog film
as I understand it, the bites do transform the human, but this new film is
erring far closer to the original where vampirized Hutter is really not a
prospect. However, there is another vampire that is unearthed and staked, so
Nosferatu is creating more.
At several points in the film, Willem Dafoe’s mad doctor
explains that this is not really the plague but Nosferatu’s doing, and he also
connects the plague affliction Harding succumbs to with the death from bites of
Harding’s family as being the same thing that needs the fire to cleanse it. (If
I misconstrued this, please clarify what I missed.) This seems to mean one of
two things: either when Nosferatu’s shadow hand went over the city, he mass
infected everyone or at least as many people in the city to the same degree as
biting them (in which case Willem Dafoe needs to burn the entire town down to
remain internally consistent) or while Harding was in a deep sleep so as to not
stop Nosferatu from killing his children, Orlok gave him the same sex dreams he
was giving Ellen so as to progress his infection (because I do not remember him
biting Harding and sex visions are the only other way we see him work his
curse). Neither option is preferable for the storytelling suffice it to say.
Perhaps it is possible that none of these victims were on track to become vampires, but I fail to see why Nosferatu would have singled out that one person from his native land to do anything differently with them. And furthermore, if he did roughly the same thing as in Wisborg to make that vampire (we have no evidence otherwise), why isn’t everyone else there infected? (For what it is worth, much of these townsfolk are implicitly Roma travelers that may not have been there long enough for infection, and the film accounts for how they knew of the disconnected vampire involving some ritual wherein a virgin on horseback could lead them to it, but this also shows us a different method for vampire dispatch where staking works completely including a possible different role for Ellen that Hutter knows about so, pending further analysis, that answer might also weaken the film's integrity.)
Another question that comes to mind is how the nuns treated
Hutter’s symptoms of Nosferatu’s infection to the point where the doctors and
Hutter comment on his better condition than the rest. The nuns implied they
could have healed him completely if he had stayed longer, which gives this
magic system an opposing dichotomy of powers, but the earnest prayers of German
characters do nothing, and even Willem Dafoe the Van Helsing type does not use
wafer or Holy water to cleanse the boxes of Earth but fire (even though Holy
water had some effect on Ellen during her trances). Again, it is possible I
missed something, but, for the stakes to hold, this needed more explanation,
and if that explanation was cut just so we could stare at Bill Skarsgard’s prosthetic
penis, then I have no words for that except what I have already said.
I have no evidence for this supposition, but the sense that I
got watching this movie is that after failing to cast him as Orlok or Knock,
Eggers just hastily wrote a part for Willem Dafoe to be Willem Dafoe because he
sort of takes the role of the expositional book from the original but more
strangely paced and confusing. First I should say that I like the idea of
bringing a Van Helsing into this story but then warping that warm familiar
presence to better serve this expressionist horror tone. (For instance, as I
mentioned, Harding’s last scene in the tomb mirrors Arthur discovering and
staking Lucy, but whereas we would expect Harding to have to put his vampirized
wife to rest and step into a hero role, he seems to commit necrophilia and then
die.) Second I will say they did not apply that consistently.
Dafoe seems unstable through his introduction, then composed
in his pseudo-medical scenes, ultimately leading us to the new climax set piece
of Knock’s impalement, where Dafoe reveals he was lucidly manipulating Hutter on a duck
hunt because he wanted Ellen to kill Nosferatu and Hutter to kill Knock. Dafoe
cackles madly and sets the house on fire but then reappears during the final
scene to be a source of authority and comfort for Hutter, even cast in the new day’s
bright light to communicate him as truly a good guy. That is not consistent characterization, plotting or theme work; it
is just a Willem Dafoe Greatest Hits track where he gets to portray vignettes
of the kind of range he can act out across his best roles.
This is running a bit longer than I wanted so I will wrap this up with a little bit on Ellen and Hutter. Again, this is not a review but a reaction, so I have no issue vaguely stating the progression, likability and strength of Nicholas Hoult’s acting is Oscar worthy and leaving it at that. I get the sense that for the film to work as intended, Lily Rose Depp’s performance had to be at least as strong, and it would have been except for the marital sex scene where she switches between Ellen and vaguely Nosferatu controlled that makes me unable to tell what the subtleties in her performance are supposed to mean (even the film lacks the faith in her expression because it gives us the clichéd “slows down and back is turned to prime us for a jumpscare” rather than letting it speak for itself). Of course, her performance being that way is contingent upon this being a syphilis story that does not clarify the scope of Orlok’s vampiric powers, so those are the major stumbling blocks I have with accepting this story even if otherwise the craft was exceptional and the film made me feel everything it wanted me to feel.
To read Doug Gibson's thoughts on the film, follow this link: https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2024/12/nosferatu-2024-is-near-classic-great.html
