Nosferatu 2024 was a delightful film—as long as you like your Dracula adaptations both as horny and as gory as possible and cloaked in beautiful and atmospheric cinematography. In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last month, the movie-going horror world has been abuzz about this new remake of Murnau’s 1922 silent film. This Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers and starring Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, and Nicholas Hoult, was released on Christmas Day 2024 and caused quite a stir in theaters and online, with many people dressing up for the premier, think pieces aplenty being posted online, and even my favorite clothing brand creating a collaboration line. I saw the film in theaters just before New Years and found it to be a fun and fascinating new twist on the Dracula story.
The new Nosferatu maintains the essential plot beats of the original German Expressionist film while also adding back in some more elements from the original text of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as some new themes and plotlines of its own. The film opens with a young Ellen—the Mina Harker character—praying for companionship and being answered by the spiritual presence of Count Orlok, manifesting as nighttime trances and orgasmic fits. Years later, she has redirected all such desires toward her new husband Thomas Hutter. But as he prepares to leave for a business trip to Transylvania, Ellen is plagued with strange visions and a sense of foreboding. She tells Thomas of a disconcerting dream in which she stands at the altar with Death, but he dismisses her fears and heads off to Count Orlok’s castle. Meanwhile, Ellen’s habit of sleepwalking returns as Orlok taunts and tempts her in her dreams. Orlok makes his way into Germany and the plague descends upon their town, killing many. Ellen’s doctor calls on the occult expertise of his mentor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (this story’s Van Helsing), but Von Franz knows that only Ellen can destroy the vampire and end the plague.
Eggers’s additions turn this Nosferatu into a variation on the ghostly bridegroom folkloric trope. Indeed, the German poem “Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger is both a clear example of this trope and an early influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula—it’s the source from which Stoker cribs the line “Denn die Todten reiten schnell” (“For the dead travel fast”). In the film, Ellen views Count Orlok as death personified when she dreams of standing beside him at the altar while her loved ones drop dead. As terrifying as this prospect is, there is something tempting and joyful about embracing death, a pull Ellen has felt since her early childhood. The film also draws on imagery from the medieval concept of the Danse Macabre—an allegory for the universality of death that gained popularity after the devastation of the Bubonic plague. In artistic depictions of the Danse Macabre, a skeletal personified Death is seen dancing with people from all social classes and walks of life. A pairing that grew particularly popular in Renaissance Germany was Death and the Maiden—depictions of skeletal Death embracing a beautiful, nude young woman, highlighting the contrast between death and life and adding an element of the erotic to the somber momento mori. The association between Count Orlok and the plague (absent from Stoker’s novel) makes the use of this Danse Macabre imagery particularly fitting for the film.
And, of course, as many have already commented on at great length, this film is a particularly sexually charged interpretation of Dracula and the original Nosferatu story. For readers of Stoker’s text, you’ll notice that in Eggers’s Nosferatu, Ellen takes on elements of both Mina and Lucy. She is the Harker character’s wife and develops a special bond with the vampire like Mina, but she also expresses transgressive or excessive (by society’s standards) sexual desires, like Lucy. In Stoker’s text, Lucy expresses the shocking sentiment that she wishes she could have three husbands after being proposed to by Dr. Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. After she is bitten by Dracula, Lucy’s sexuality is brought even more to the forefront and she tries to brazenly seduce Arthur into her vampiric clutches. For Ellen in this film, her transgressive sexual desires manifest at a young age when she inadvertently calls out to Count Orlok, resulting in bouts of sexual pleasure which she seems to both revel in and feel repulsed by. In an attempt to explain her connection with Orlok, Von Franz suggests that Ellen is simply naturally inclined to channel the supernatural because of her “baser” nature. When she marries Thomas, Ellen shifts this excessive desire onto her new husband. Her nighttime trances and spectral encounters with Orlok cease but her large sexual appetite is showcased in a scene where she begs Thomas to stay in bed with her instead of going to work. Then when she begins experiencing vampire trances again, she—like Lucy—becomes sexually aggressive toward her husband in one of the film’s more memorable scenes. She does have her Mina-like moments, though, including at one point speaking Mina’s iconic line: “Unclean, unclean!” In Stoker’s text, Mina clearly means these words in a spiritual sense, despairing that “even the Almighty shuns [her] polluted flesh” after she discovers that she can no longer interact with holy objects like the crucifix or consecrated host. In this Nosferatu, Ellen’s suggestion is more that she is sexually, rather than spiritually, unclean as she expresses shame for her sexual connection with Count Orlok. By the end of the film, however, Ellen has come to embrace her own dark desires as part of her strategy for defeating the vampire.
I could go on, but I don’t want to spoil too much of the film for any of you who have not yet seen it. For those who have, let me know what you think of the new Nosferatu in the comments! And if you loved seeing this adaptation that centers the relationship between the Dracula and Mina figures, but would prefer to see it presented as a battle of wits rather than a battle of passions, I highly recommend also checking out the recently released podcast mini series Dracula: The Danse Macabre. Feel free to share your other favorite Dracula adaptations or reimaginings!
I can hardly wait!