Nosferatu: A Symphony of (Misplaced) Syphilis: A Reaction To 2024's Horror Remake

 

 

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 18^th 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 (https://fleursdumal.org/poem/186)

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

Renfield: An Analysis (1897, 1931, 2023)

By Joe Gibson

The following essay is an excerpt from a cross-disciplinary research paper comparing the redemption of Renfield from the trajectory of the original book Dracula to the 1931 film to Renfield’s own 2023 film with the history and efficacy of blood transfusion itself. The scientific and historical connections to blood transfusion were ill thought out and obligatory, so here are the cult film analysis sections that should stand up to scrutiny a little more. We here at Plan9Crunch have analyzed Dracula 1931 a fair bit already (links at the bottom of this post) and will likely find new things to talk about in the future, but I hope you enjoy these research paper excerpts.

On page 72 of the Barnes and Noble edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker, it reads, pertaining to Renfield’s fly indulgence, “...he argued quietly that it was very good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and gave life to him.” 

At several points of Renfield 2023 but notably the denouement, Dracula’s whole blood is administered to heal substantive damage and even death with no negative side effects. Indeed, “the blood is the life” in Renfield, as he stated it was in Dracula 1897. In most adaptations and the original story itself, Renfield was deluded; Dracula’s blood would only corrupt the user into something unrecognizable (see the personality changes of Mina, Renfield, and Olgaren in Dracula, Dracula 1931 and The Last Voyage of the Demeter 2023 respectively). This redemption of Dracula’s blood necessarily translates to redemption of Renfield (and his psychology) and not Dracula (because Renfield highlights Dracula’s abusive tendencies).

The history of R.M. Renfield (via bullet points since the admittedly profuse publications featuring this character either do little to change him or are too obscure to be relevant to Renfield 2023’s character study). Broadly, the loose inspiration for [Renfield] starts in antiquity regarded positively, then the concept itself [Renfield] emerges regarded less positively as the modern era approaches and each gets refined to such a degree to show efficacy.

Renfield’s development is grounded in the context of warping and stretching Christian symbolism and scenarios; quite clearly in the original novel, the way that Bram Stoker intended Renfield was an allusion to John the Baptist. On page 106, Renfield speaks in bride-maid and bride parables similar to Jesus, compounding the idea that Renfield and John the Baptizer both espoused similar philosophies to their lords and then deferred to them (Renfield commits himself to Dracula on page 107). Renfield’s famous line on page 148, “...the blood is the life” works as a direct quotation of Deuteronomy 12:23 (Renfield being the vehicle for most of the novel’s religious imagery). Most tantalizing, John the Baptist is understood to have eaten locusts. (He may not have, but the symbolism and imagery need not correspond to reality in literary use. Similarly, some scholars doubt that Jesus sweating blood was originally part of the Gospel of Luke, but that is obviously a strong image still on the table to use in literature.) Renfield dies from trauma to the head and neck, just like John, but this is warped because the Herod figure (if anyone fits Herod’s role in Renfield’s life, it would be Dr. Jack Seward for his notable observation of Renfield and hasty woman-motivated decision making) does not cause the death; Dracula, the dark Lord, does (Stoker, 1897, 2011). There is stark reversal more so than similarity with the Baptizer.

The audience of Bram Stoker’s Dracula understands Renfield not as a person but as an enigmatic mystical contradiction. Dr. Seward observes Renfield scientifically, where one could read neurosyphilis greatly into the latter’s behavior, but the hints of great strength (for a 59 year old man), prophetic forewarning and religious allegory communicate Renfield as a mystical character. Renfield never gets his own point of view sections to explain himself (and the audience never learns who he was before Dracula), locking his character behind two different veils of interpretation.

By the time of Tod Browning’s Dracula, Renfield had changed somewhat, consolidating Harker’s castle scenes into his own tragic subplot. Harker loses much of his development, Mina’s moments of reflection at her infection reduce, and the suitors of Lucy are all but eliminated to make room for Renfield, a sane man, falling victim to Dracula at the castle, Renfield, an insane man, onboard the Demeter, Renfield interacting with the comic relief orderly and nurse at Seward’s sanitorium, and Renfield surviving until the final confrontation with Dracula where he leads Harker and Van Helsing to Dracula’s resting place (Browning, 1931). The novel is an ensemble, and so is the film, but, whereas Harker, Mina, Seward, and Van Helsing are the major players by amount of journal entries, it is Renfield, Dracula and Van Helsing that enjoy increased relevance and focus for the movie adaptation. That is important for the horror and terror since, in all versions, Renfield is the most clear picture of what Dracula can do to a person, but, now, Renfield was a sane person before, which means Dracula can turn anyone into Renfield, a far scarier thought than one Renfield existing somewhere in isolation. There is still a layer of separation between the viewer and Renfield: the tragic delusion. Renfield is wrong and insane, and the audience, like Seward before them, observes Renfield live and die in delusion.

Seemingly, the biggest reframing Renfield 2023 does is posit “What if Renfield is not only the point of view character but also undeniably correct in his delusion?” That is why Dracula’s Whole Blood carries infallible life giving properties: because Renfield has always believed it does. (Likewise, rather than ambiguous mad strength, eating bugs genuinely gives Renfield and any of Dracula’s other familiars super strength and reflexes.) However, if Renfield is now correct and has the opportunity for growth and change as an audience insert character, the pendulum has swung to necessitate a vehicle or mechanism to explore how the average audience member can become Renfield through Dracula’s interference (and how Renfield’s foil Teddy Lobo can become a Dracula familiar). The answer to that problem is very simply an abusive codependent relationship. This is pretty blatantly the point of the film, especially since Renfield sums himself up as a codependent during the climax, but there are more specific examples as well.

The opening, midpoint and denouement of the 2023 film take place in character Mark’s Dependent Relationship Anonymous Addiction Group (DRAAG) within the gym sector of a church, where Renfield explicitly (and the film implicitly though Dracula’s dialogue during pinch point confrontations with Renfield) identifies the relationship between servant and master as similar to the codependent relationship of Caitlyn and her narcissist boyfriend. Beyond the obvious, Caitlyn also, despite herself, finds herself defending ska music as one of her partner’s interests, just as this film indicates Renfield’s life obsession was given to him by Dracula as Renfield is capable of letting go of his bugs after he makes a breakthrough. Most interestingly, a use of double entendre occurs when Teddy Lobo replaces Renfield as Dracula’s familiar; because Dracula is aiming for world domination and Lobo’s gang, led by his mother, has lofty ambitions, the pact between them comes with the romantic image said by Teddy that Dracua should meet his mother (McKay, 2023).

Much of the audience distance from Renfield in the earlier referenced works came from comparison to more sane characters (or a saner Renfield in a cold open), so much of the audience sympathy for Renfield in this film comes from comparison to other characters. Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield only does the Dwight Frye laugh when preparing to kill abusers and drug dealers, and Teddy Lobo serves as a shadow to Renfield (being the weaker element to a criminal enterprise) especially after supplanting him as Dracula’s familiar because of the contrast of “Drug Use and Bug Use.” While Renfield abandons the bugs as part of his new life early into the story and treats “bug use” as part of the curse that puts someone under Dracula’s spell, he consumes the largest amount possible in the climax and puts up the most credible attack against Dracula possible (meaning no correlation between the bugs consumed and being under Dracula’s thrall). Renfield consumes the bugs for strength, and he is ultimately correct, so he can consume that for strength independent of Dracula, but Teddy Lobo, established to be in the cocaine trade, also uses cocaine and takes his bugs via snorting, making him more vulnerable to Dracula’s influence because he is treating it as a hit not the disgusting source of strength it is (McKay, 2023).

As the last vestiges of syphilitic imagery in the 2023 film, the seductive Dracula also takes form as a decaying corpse clinging to Renfield when the title henchman tries to escape Dracula’s destructive influence. There is some symbolism in Renfield that a fair analysis must ignore, because if Dracula’s Whole Blood were syphilitic in this film, it would not have those life-giving qualities (the syphilis subtext is only here because this is a Dracula story). Along those same lines, the narrative of Renfield’s backstory only hazily corresponds to the 1931 film; Renfield was not present to attend high society with Dracula or assist him in procuring any of his successful victims after the boat. The name of the DRAAG leader, Mark, is most likely unimportant on a larger scale, while being a notable Christian name.

The recent data that Whole Blood can efficiently combat preventable deaths raises an interesting implication in that the preventable deaths and collateral damage of the story (Renfield himself, the gang’s foot soldiers, Rebecca’s sister, and the other DRAAG participants) are the ones healed by Dracula’s blood. Dracula’s blood does not save the leaders of any given faction (Dracula himself, Teddy’s mother, the police captain and Rebecca are figureheads whose deaths would necessarily be conclusive, but the film never uses the blood to heal any of them, just the unnecessary preventable ones).

The final image of Renfield is that pitcher of Dracula’s blood on a table in the church next to a bowl of some bread product (likely muffins), and the caricatured nature of that imagery masks it somewhat, but that is a holy sacrament, perhaps a picnic version but a holy sacrament nonetheless. Does this entail some commentary on or against organized religion? Perhaps; if someone at a later date can delve into that interpretation, it may be helpful for overall analysis on the film; but there is another simple implication. Because the film is dealing directly in the redemption of Renfield and his ideology, and Renfield has always been a symbol of warped religious devotion, this sacrament is most simply the ritual necessary to redeem R. M. Renfield in this movie. In that sense, Renfield finally gets to rise above John the Baptist. Renfield first partakes of the bread of DRAAG by attending and opening up to it, then dies opposing Dracula, but gets to live again from the miraculous blood of Dracula, becoming an admittedly haphazard Christ figure. Both were necessary for the redemption of Renfield (but the purpose of this essay is obviously to focus on the blood).

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2016/09/dracula-85-years-later-vampire-is-still.html

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2015/02/tod-brownings-dracula-defense-of-often.html

https://planninecrunch.blogspot.com/2021/06/dracula-was-count-resigned-to-his.html