ON CHRISTMAS DAY OF LAST YEAR, Robert Eggers released his long-anticipated Nosferatu: a claustrophobic, gothic nightmare that points a lens—equal parts adoring and critical—at the long, gnarled history of Dracula adaptations over the past century. F. W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu (1922) was an attempt to adapt Bram Stoker’s 1898 novel, Dracula, while skirting copyright. Stoker’s widow and literary executor, Florence Balcombe, sued the film’s production company out of existence and attempted to have all copies of the film destroyed. In order to fund the lawsuit, Balcombe licensed a stage adaptation by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924 (which was revised and condensed by John Balderston in 1927 for American audiences) that would come to define the public understanding of the titular Count. And so two different lineages for the cinematic vampire were born—one that draws from Murnau’s interpretation of Stoker’s novel and one that filters the novel through Deane and Balderston’s gloss.
The play was the basis for Tod Browning’s 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi (who performed the vampiric role on Broadway) and all its imitators. Even Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation—Bram Stoker’s Dracula—which followed the plot of the novel more closely than any previous version—still deviates significantly to follow the play. While Murnau’s Nosferatu takes numerous liberties with the plot of Stoker’s novel, it preserves a critical characterization that was lost in the stage play: Count Dracula (rendered in Murnau’s film as Count Orlock) is old, ugly, and definitively not seductive. Eggers’s film reconciles this fractured, contentious adaptation history into a discomfiting palimpsest.
Stoker’s Count is interested in sex, though only as a means of control and revenge. He crows to Van Helsing and company that “your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine—my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed.” In Deane and Balderston’s telling, Dracula takes on the role of an alluring rake—one who flirts rapaciously with affianced women and waxes romantic on gothic ruins—which opened the possibility for the vampire to be a Byronic hero. In the original novel, when one of his brides says that Dracula “cannot love,” it is perfectly in line with the Count’s disinterest in even the outer semblance of romance. Yet when the same line is uttered in Coppola’s adaptation, it is clearly counterfactual. Dracula spends a huge amount of the film’s runtime seducing and agonizing over Mina. She, in turn, sees this romantic, lovelorn Count as freedom from the patriarchal status quo.
Thus, Nosferatu—Murnau’s version, Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake, and Eggers’s treatment—is Dracula’s shadow, a tale where vampires remain monstrous and there is no seductive veneer to the threat of physical violence or sexual assault. For Murnau and Herzog, Orlock is akin to a beast, possessed of ratlike teeth and always skulking. Actors Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski imbue him with a stillness and quiet—an ambush predator waiting for the right moment to strike. But Eggers’s version goes a step further than its predecessors. Bill Skarsgård plays Orlock as a distinctly human monster. His teeth are largely unseen save for flashes of a mouthful of small, sharp points without the exaggerated incisors. Rather than creeping around the edges of the frame, he demands obeisance in a manner befitting a fifteenth-century Wallachian warlord, with undertones of sexual power-play—all delivered in a tar-pit basso underscored by a necrotic wheeze, mixed deafeningly loud and filling every silence. One gets the feeling that this Orlock does not stay out of frame because he is quietly lurking but because the camera itself cannot bear to look at him directly. He has the arresting inevitability of a fiend from a half-remembered dream, offering a beast’s violence but all the more frightening for being driven by a human intellect, capable of cruelty.
Lily Rose-Depp’s Ellen Hutter (Nosferatu’s answer to the original novel’s Mina and Lucy) is figured as a psychic whose emanations of ostracized loneliness woke Orlock from slumber. She is subjected to the relentless humiliations of the patriarchal gaze of her doctors, told that her sexual and emotional desires—made desperate and pitiable by touch hunger—are signs of hysteria and sin. When Skarsgård’s Orlock finally confronts her, he has the gall to say that it was her carnality that ensnared him—that the plague and death he brings are her fault. He underscores this with the instantly iconic line “I am an appetite. Nothing more.” Obsessed with an occult rule that Ellen must willingly give herself over to him, Orlock ensures her cooperation by saying he will murder everyone she loves unless she submits. Eggers’s point is clear: When violent, naked coercion constitutes consent and the end remains the same, is there any difference between a seduction and a threat?
Orlock’s justifications rhyme queasily with the modern rape apologist claiming his victim was asking for it; he is simply an appetite answering an external desire. Eggers’s film emphasizes that this is the perspective of a monster. Ellen repeatedly proclaims both her desire and her blamelessness; her loneliness may have attracted Orlock’s attention, but she is not complicit. It is only through her willingness to seduce Orlock, keep him occupied in her embrace, and die doing so that he is destroyed by the rising sun. In Stoker’s novel, Mina is used as bait for Dracula and praised for her courage. She survives; Ellen does not. Feminine desire is not the cause of male suffering in Nosferatu, it is the sacrificial cure for it.
The seductive Dracula has led to more romantic iterations and expectations through the decades—Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt, Stephenie Meyer’s Edward Cullen, Larian Studios’s Astarion. And, in the hundred years since the stage play, there has been ample room for all these interpretations to exist. After all, we need monsters that are capable of redemption alongside those who are unrepentant. But his Nosferatu is a welcome reminder that the seductive nature of the vampire is tantamount to an anglerfish’s lantern—drawing us in and blinding us to the teeth in the dark.
Tyler Dean holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Irvine, and is a professor of literature at a number of Southern California colleges. He teaches courses on vampires, Victorian novels, and the Gothic.
