I watched Nosferatu (2024) and I thought it was interesting enough to write about on my blog. tl;dr I thought it took the source material in an interesting new direction. Anyone have thoughts on the movie?
i enjoyed it. it managed to be scary mostly through oppressive tension in the framing, staging, and sound design. Willem Dafoe stole the show, unsurprisingly. Ellen spent most of the movie having things happen to her rather than having any agency, though i suppose it was about the same for Thomas. the idea that Ellen's lustful thoughts awakened Orlok is kinda yikes, especially given that the only resolution was for her to sacrifice herself. on the other hand, all the men in this movie were powerless to stop him, and only she had the courage to do what was required. I'm sleepy and probably not making much sense.
(01-22-2025, 01:27 AM)gorzek Wrote: i enjoyed it. it managed to be scary mostly through oppressive tension in the framing, staging, and sound design…
Willem Dafoe was a delight in a role that would be almost extraneous in a straightforward remake of the 1922 movie. Most of the vital information his character conveys to everyone else is simply found in a convenient book in that version of the story. But what he provides as a character is an almost psychoanalytic answer to Ellen's profound shame about being possessed by the spirit of Nosferatu. He asserts basically that her sexual curiosity that brought her into contact with Nosferatu was normal, and that her understanding of and courage toward the vampire is exemplary (his speech about how Ellen could have been "a great priestess" in ancient times). He also serves the function of objecting to the restraints and hysteria treatment forced upon Ellen, which he objects to not so much on an empirical basis as we would expect if he were a forward-thinking modern man, but instead out of a Romantic-era ideal of accepting the limits of contemporary science and embracing the supernatural. As for Ellen, she is frustratingly held back from taking any real action for much of the film, but I was pleasantly surprised by the big "I told you so" moment she gets in the second act, and I thought her cunning subterfuge in the final gave her more depth as a character. There were a few moments where I had the awkward feeling of being unsure whether I was supposed to feel titillated and disturbed when I was really only disturbed, but, uh, that may have more to do with how I experience horror than with directorial choices
I loved it. Want to hear my weird ramble about it? (EDIT: ramble, not rant, rant is the wrong word)
Okay so Dracula as a story is obviously a subconscious (or intentional, whatever) fear of The Other (i.e. Slavic cultures, "inferior" cultures) taking the wives of Western "civilized" men. Vampirism in general is a very sexually charged myth and is relatable to other sexually charged myths like succubus and incubus. But Dracula/Nosferatu in particular taps into this cuckolding fear that Western "civilized" men have about colonized or "inferior" cultures.
Obviously there's that scene in the movie where Ellen freaks out in front of Thomas and then says something like "You could never please me like he does". And I immediately said aloud "Whoa" in the theater, because that is straight on 100% cuckoldry right there. Sex was always a part of Dracula retellings but this cuckolding reference was like - right there. Clear as day.
But also recall the scene when Thomas first enters Transylvania and how out of place he is with the locals. They are all laughing and dancing and make fun of him. He is a "civilized" man but he is inept in the ways of the locals. Non-European/POC cultures are always treated and depicted as having sexual prowess compared to the chaste Christian Westerners. You see this in the subtlest of ways in any kind of romance (i.e. the "black best friend" who tells his white guy, the protagonist, some "friendly black advice" on how to get the girl).
The original Nosferatu unfortunately clearly referenced anti-Semitic tropes, in particular with Orlock's elongated nose and ears. The plague Orlock brings to Germany is unique to the Nosferatu retelling of Dracula, but it's awkward because it was a reference to Jews bringing a "plague" upon Germany.
The 2024 version reframes some of this to a more feminist approach. Ellen clearly has not had her needs met in such a chaste Christian society, hence she wished early on to find a true soulmate - even if her soulmate was as gruesome as Orlock. But that's exactly the fear Western "civilized" men have about other non-Western cultures. You could say it's also a critique on women seeing people for who they are but men focus on appearances and are like "You want HIM?" Willem Dafoe says to Ellen that in "heathen times" she would have been a high priestess, which is ironic for the male characters because at the time Western civilization was seen as "peak" but Dafoe is clearly pointing out that pagan cultures in the past treated women differently, notably with more reverence. Whereas in the modern world, her ability is misunderstood and treated as a curse. This puts a spin on the trope of the Other - implying that if Ellen had lived in Transylvanian culture she would not have had to die. If you recall the scene where Thomas witnesses the Roma find the grave of a vampire, they use a virgin on a white horse to find its grave.
(01-22-2025, 05:22 AM)ScottyMcGee Wrote: I loved it. Want to hear my weird rants about it?
This is all pretty much 100% aligned with my read on the movie. I maybe don't articulate it as well as you do in my blog post because I have little background knowledge of the political implications of the vampire myth in late nineteenth / early twentieth century Europe, but all the elements are very clearly laid out in the movie. The way Ellen's sexuality is overtly pathologized. The explicit sexual rivalry between Thomas and the Count, which Ellen essentially incorporates into a sexual role-play with Thomas late in the movie. Thomas's fascination with the Roma travelers he meets in the village and how Orlok later denigrates them in explicitly racial terms (while obviously threatened by their established anti-vampire rituals). The central motif of the sacrificial virgin which plays out differently across the Professor's medieval text, the midnight ritual that Thomas witnesses in the forest, and finally in Thomas's own home in early-industrial Germany.
I guess the way I'd summarize the feminist message I gleaned from the movie is something like: Ellen has a right to her sexual fantasies, even when they are not sublimated within her relationship with Thomas. And in fact they bring her unique spiritual/supernatural insight within their narrative context.
I suspect there's also a less specifically European / more Freudian component of the vampire myth that the movie is playing with here, something to do with the libidinal id seeking a kind of ambiguous contact/encounter integrating sexual pleasure, contagion, and death (of which there are many examples in the movie, perhaps the most straightforward being Ellen's early description of a dream in which she is blissfully wedded to death in a chapel filled with the stench of rotting corpses).
I would say my one criticism about the movie is that for some reason it wasn't clear to me that Ellen wished for someone like Orlock and that was how they became linked or whatever. But that may have been a simple mishearing on my part. I think because that point was made in the very beginning and my mind was elsewhere, so then halfway through the movie I was like "Wait but why tho..." and then realized by the third act. I thought there was going to be some plot point where the realtor somehow introduced her to Orlock early on or something like that, idk. Like I knew the girl in the beginning was Ellen I just didn't know for a good chunk of the film why she was connected to Orlock.
it was definitely text that Ellen's desires awakened Orlok, at which point they became inextricably linked. as for how a random woman awakened a random vampire a thousand miles away... magic doesn't have to make sense. plus it's a very old idea that if you put particular energies out into the universe, you don't know how they will come back to you, nor can you control it. the ungovernability of desire is a common theme in fiction more generally and this is certainly an exhibition of it. i do agree with the analysis you and lunasspecto did regarding Ellen eventually taking ownership of her situation.
also, connecting sex, contagion, and death is inherently cyclical: we are all born through sex, and we all must die as a result, and in a figurative sense we "infect" the world with ourselves, with our desires, with our weaknesses. what this leads me to is that, while Orlok's awakening is Ellen's "fault," caused by her unrestrained desire, the men around her are no less guilty of letting their own desires run amok. out of all of them, Ellen is the only one willing to close the cycle, so to speak, by voluntarily ending herself and Orlok at the same time.
