Our monsters are what make us. They erupt from the collective body, breaking the skin at precise historical moments, bleeding society’s deepest fears and insecurities. Gothic literature, with its eerie atmosphere and supernatural spaces, is an iconic genre that—due to its conventions, and the repressive society they stem from—is able to breed these types of symbolic monsters, including the sexually deviant vampire. Literature and film’s treatment of both the vampire and gothic horror tradition over the decades is a cultural benchmark that reveals much about the world that surrounds it. This begs the question—what does the most recent iteration, Robert Eggers’s 2024 film Nosferatu, say about us?

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Nosferatu (2024) is a reimagining of the 1922 silent film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, directed by F.W. Murnau, which itself is based off of Bram Stoker’s 1897 gothic horror novel Dracula. Nosferatu (1922) streamlines the Stoker classic, pivoting from a direct adaptation of Dracula’s themes of sexual repression to one that also comments on the state of 1920’s Germany. In his academic article “Nosferatu (1922),” James R. Russo writes that “If Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a novel of Victorian sexual repression, then, Murnau’s Nosferatu is a film of Weimarian autocratic repression” (32). Eggers’s Nosferatu is one that closes that divide, linking blatant themes of sexuality, shame, and desire with themes of wider societal oppression and female agency that are pertinent to our current political landscape.

Count Orlok is the titular villain of Nosferatu. Based on Dracula, he retains his ties to aristocracy in both Murnau’s and Eggers’s versions. However, Murnau emphasized his less-than-human qualities and procured the iconic Nosferatu image—rat-like, a true film monster, removed from any charisma or seduction that other iterations of Dracula produce. This change can be understood as a visual marker of how Orlok deviates from the Byronic hero trope that is often essential to gothic villainy. In the journal article “Anti-hero Worship: The Emergence of the ‘Byronic Hero’ Archetype in the Nineteenth Century,” Cora Palfy defines the Byronic hero as one who “[…] is characterized as a rebel who stands apart from society and societal expectations, who is deeply jaded, morally superior, and obsessed with lost love” (164). Murnau’s Orlok is none of these, and certainly not the body of “the cleverest and most cunning man” (Stoker) the way the original Dracula is. Eggers follows suit, and takes it a step further, highlighting the undead characteristics of vampires with a commitment that neither Stoker nor Murnau reach. Count Orlok is quite literally a rotting corpse, monstrous in height with flesh that oozes and actively decays. This makes Ellen’s connection to him uncomfortable—it is obvious that there is real sexual chemistry there, but Orlok is disgusting to look at, and any lustful interactions between the two are visually coded as perverse rather than seductive. While not all Byronic heroes are attractive (think Frankenstein’s monster, for example) it is one tactic to easily get readers and viewers to identify positively with the character. To omit this in favor of a more grisly figure means that the narrative or script would need to ensure that Orlok identifies undoubtedly with other characteristics associated with the Byronic hero. Eggers simply doesn’t do this. While Count Orlok stands apart from society, we are given little insight into his motivations other than his bloodlust for Ellen and desire to possess her. There is no tragic backstory or moral superiority in his actions; he is, quite literally, a plague. Orlok explicitly tells Ellen that he is “an appetite, nothing more.” To be characterized as an appetite renders him a very different type of figure than a Byronic one. 

Maybe that is just what a modern-retelling of Nosferatu needs—not a tragic or sexy anti-hero, but something darker, something that holds space for our modern anxieties. Orlok’s rejection of Byronic tropes in favor of being “an appetite” allows his character to function as an embodiment of Ellen’s sexual desire, as well as the shame she harbors over that desire. In a heartbreaking scene, Ellen tells her husband, Thomas Hutter, that she is “unclean” and that Orlok is her shame. Shame is something that stems from societal expectations and can be used to control. Sexual shame, in particular, is curated through the patriarchy. Orlok’s rotting male appearance mirrors the corrosive nature of both these types of sexual shame, ultimately mirroring patriarchal societal ideals. Orlok is further linked narratively to patriarchy because he is also a figure of consumption and control. The plague he brings upon the town of Wisborg in retaliation against Ellen consumes locals vampirically. One shot in the film tracks the shadow of his unnatural hand over the cityscape, visually demonstrating his power. Through his connection to consumption, control, and shame, Orlok becomes not just a figure of personal sexual repression, but of societal oppression as well. 

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Gothic literature manages to explore these taboo themes of sexuality, suppression, and deviation from social norms through liminal spaces. Dreams and the spiritual realm become vital to the pulse of many of these Gothic stories. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, a vampire story centered around two girls that inspired Dracula, a majority of the vampiric action is contained within dream sequences, or scenes that seem to exist outside of the binary of wakefulness and sleep, causing main character Laura to become dispossessed of herself. In Dracula, the two main female characters have similar liminal experiences. The promiscuous Lucy sleepwalks into encounters with Dracula, and proper Mina has a psychic connection to Dracula that aids the others in their search for the vampire. Spirituality seems inherently connected to sexuality in these texts, both unexplainable and uncontrollable forces. However, both Lucy and Mina’s moments of liminality are passive, brought on either by Dracula himself or outside hypnosis. Ellen in the original Nosferatu film, based on the character of Mina, finds herself in a similar vein. She, too, has a psychic connection to Orlok, but it is one that she did not ask for. However, at the end of the film, Ellen makes the conscious decision to sacrifice herself to rid her city of the plague of Nosferatu and Count Orlok—a glimmer of female agency. Eggers takes this a step further for a modern audience. In the 2024 version of Nosferatu, Ellen is a combination of both Lucy and Mina. Ellen is promiscuous, paralleling Lucy, and the scenes of her sleepwalking and convulsing, in which blood-letting is prescribed, is rooted in the Lucy archetype. Blood-letting against her own will can be understood as a forced perversion of the menstrual cycle—as a woman she has “too much blood,” but it cannot be trusted to naturally cycle through; instead, her body must be expunged of blood and subdued by the men around her, rid of spirituality and sexuality. Like Mina, Ellen is also a devoted wife who works to help stop Count Orlok through her psychic connection to him. However, Eggers’s script grants Ellen more agency than either Lucy, Mina, or Ellen in the 1922 version are given. Ellen first willingly invites Count Orlok into her life, searching for companionship and affection as a young teenager. Throughout the film, she explicitly interacts with Orlok with both lust and defiance. When she sacrifices herself at the end of the film, it is a decision she does not take lightly, and in a final moment of power, she holds Orlok’s head in her hands and ensures he stays at her bedside as the sun rises and he begins to burn.

The struggle between Orlok’s embodiment of internal and societal shame and suppression, and Ellen’s personal agency through the liminal, is highlighted throughout Nosferatu. In the film’s cold open, Ellen uses her connection to the spiritual world to reach out for some type of company. When Count Orlok answers her call, she willingly accepts his supernatural possession of her. She exercises sexual agency for the first time through her psychic abilities, and a few seconds of pleasure follow. However, her ecstasy is violently cut short by Count Orlok suffocating her. Society stifles her, stops her from experiencing pleasure, aggressively punishing her first experience of agency—and thus, the struggle between societal shame and internal empowerment begins. 

Later on in the film, attempts to strip agency from Ellen are enacted through a capitalistic, patriarchal tool common to society—property contracts. Orlok deceives Hutter, Ellen’s husband, into signing a contract that annuls their marriage and gives possession of Ellen to Orlok. In an interesting twist that contorts female agency, the contract must be fulfilled by Ellen willingly giving of herself. Orlok attempts to pressure Ellen into submission, so when she calls out to him again towards the end of the movie, it appears that he’s won. But do not be fooled—Ellen does not submit passively; she has a plan in mind. While Orlok beds her and drinks her blood, she distracts him from ever leaving her side that night, ensuring that when the sun rises, he is outside of his coffin. Orlok, like many classic vampires, cannot be out in daylight, and as the sunlight streaks over their entangled forms, Orlok burns and dies. Ellen, dies, too, from blood loss, but her sacrifice of giving herself to and distracting Orlok is a reclamation of her agency and power. While earlier in the film her blood was medically drained against her will (in an attempt to stop her connection to the spiritual and to control her), here Ellen chooses to embrace that spiritual and sexual connection, and knowingly undergoes a ritual that will drain her blood. She finally gets to experience unbridled pleasure—Orlok drinking her blood is shot orgasmically—but is also actively working to kill the figure that brought her shame in the first place. She reckons with her desire, her debilitating internal shame, and with the oppressive flaws of the society around her by confronting Orlok in this way. With the Count dead, Wisborg is cured of the Nosferatu plague, which can be understood as Wisborg being released from the patriarchal ideals that oppressed its people. In a final moment of personal ecstasy and power, Ellen saves Wisborg from itself.

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Nosferatu (2024) plays with the figure of the vampire and other gothic tropes to create a modern story that both honors gothic tradition, and reimagines it. Eggers’s vision of the gothic is one that both employs and subverts classic tropes to hold space for female agency and a condemnation of patriarchal standards within society. In an increasingly conservative political landscape, Eggers’s film seems designed to highlight the flaws of our contemporary society. We are no longer scared of sexuality as a broad concept, and so writing Nosferatu with the framework of other gothic vampire narratives, with Orlok as a Byronic figure of deviance and Ellen as a passive vessel within the spiritual realm, would not feel pertinent to our current cultural moment. However, female bodily autonomy has been attacked in recent years, and the political push towards conservatism uplifts patriarchal ideals that value womens’ bodies as property to be controlled, and condemn sexual agency as something that should be punished if it is not in service of reproduction. The characterization of Orlok as a monstrous figure of shameful desire and oppression, and Ellen’s agency as a female character that conquers the monster through sexuality and becomes a heroine, highlights this struggle in a way that pays homage to the gothic literature of yore while updating its conventions to examine our current moment. While the ending is tragically beautiful, it is an ending that is hopeful that Wisborg can be redeemed. Perhaps Nosferatu, in all its gothic glory, provides hope for our own redemption.