The Night Side of Nature: On Robert Eggers’s “Nosferatu”
Robert Eggers | Nosferatu | December 2024 | 132 minutes
During Germany’s Vormärz period, a resurgence of interest in the occult and supernatural merged with medical practice. One of the most famous case studies was of Friedrike Hauffe, known as the Seeress of Prevorst, who suffered from an array of symptoms including fevers, cramps, and uncontrollable altered states. She was recorded as having colorful and graphic dreams that often came true, and wouldn’t sit in the choir loft of a church as she feared being directly above graves. Unable to be cured, she was put under the care of Justinius Kerner, a town physician who became a central figure in the study of visionary somnambulism through his book on her case, Die Seherin von Prevorst (The Seeress of Prevorst). Published in 1829, this volume represents one of the earliest clinical studies of paranormal phenomena:
She had many frightful symptoms, and fell into a magnetic trance every evening at seven o’clock. This used to begin with crossing her arms, and prayer. Then she would stretch them out; and, when she afterwards laid them on the bed, began to talk, her eyes being shut, and her face lighted up. … Should we compare her to a human being, we should rather say that she was in the state of one who, hovering between life and death, belonged rather to the world he was about to visit, than the one he was going to leave.
Through the treatment sessions, Kerner and his wife served as protective intermediaries between Hauffe’s inner world and external threats. Kerner’s documentation of her paranormal abilities reflected his interest in Romantic mysticism, which sought to counter Enlightenment rationalism by exploring what was later termed the “night side of nature”—a shadow realm only accessible through dreams and altered states. This concept would later influence Carl Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious; he gave several lectures on the Seeress, drawn to her as a case study of someone with a “remarkable ‘psychic personality.’”
Robert Eggers’s remake of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu draws direct inspiration from this historical understanding of somnambulism as a bridge between mundane and spiritual realms. “The impetus for bothering to do this again stemmed from making the female protagonist the central protagonist,” Eggers said in an interview. “And what sort of inspired this was that Murnau calls Ellen a somnambulist, and sleepwalkers even in the nineteenth century were thought to be, even by some medical professionals, tuned into another realm.” Just as Kerner recognized in Friedrike Hauffe a capacity to access the night side of nature, Eggers saw in the somnambulism of Ellen Hutter (Lily Rose-Depp) a similar potential for exploring supernatural consciousness: both women were misunderstood by conventional medicine, with Ellen being called hysteric and melancholic by the doctors, just as Hauffe’s symptoms baffled traditional practitioners. Eggers expands upon Ellen’s supernatural sensitivity without giving her the language to understand what is happening to her—even her devoted husband doesn’t at first understand her episodes. “Tragically, the one ‘person’ who can understand this side of her is the demon lover, the vampire,” Eggers said.
Every retelling of Dracula transforms the core elements established in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, in which a vampire moves from an ancient Eastern European castle to a modern Western city, targeting a woman—ostensibly to drink her blood, but always with an implicit sexual threat—and spreading plague-like corruption before being destroyed. In Eggers’s Nosferatu, this frame becomes: Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) must travel to Transylvania to finalize the sale of a property in his city of Wisborg. There, he stays at the castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), realizes the creature is after his wife, and returns home to find the vampire has already brought a “blood plague” to the city. While Thomas is away, Ellen’s childhood “fits” return, and she spends each night terrorized by the spirit of Nosferatu. Here, Eggers draws upon the historical superstitions of early Baltic and Slavic folklore, which said vampires could attack victims through dream visitation.
Although blood-drinking creatures have come to dominate modern vampire mythology, they bear little resemblance to their more ghostly predecessors. The earliest vampire accounts are of demons who separate their spirits from their bodies during sleep, traveling in astral form to drain the life force from their victims while terrorizing them with recurring nightmares. This conception of vampirism was closely tied to regional beliefs about the soul’s ability to wander during sleep—a phenomenon that paralleled early accounts of somnambulism. In The Seeress of Prevorst, Kerner frequently describes the somnambulism of his patients, and the visitations they received in these altered states:
There appeared by her bedside a cloudy form, habited like a knight, so thin, that she fancied she could see through it, and said to her—“Go with me; thou canst loosen my bonds.” On this occasion, as on all others, the voice of the spirit was not like the voice of a man, but the words seemed to be breathed forth. She answered—“I will not go with thee;” and, overcome with terror, she sprang into the bed where her sister and the maid lay, crying—“Do you not see something?” They said they did not; and she said no more for fear of alarming them. … The spectre appeared to her for seven days, at all hours of the day and night—both when she was in the somnambulic state, and when she was awake. … He wished to make a mark on her hand, but she would not give it him; and he did not leave her till her protecting spirit, her grandmother, stept in between him and her.
In Eggers’s opening scene, Ellen prays that a spirit will come to her and provide comfort. This awakens Nosferatu, whose astral form tells her she is “not for the living” and has her swear to be with him “ever eternally.” This agreement forms a psychic bond between the two of them—in which he rapes her each night. She is only freed from him when she marries Thomas, a contract which supersedes the vampire’s psychic connection (the importance of contracts is a plot point new to Eggers’s version). With this adaptation, then, Eggers is synthesizing two different historical threads: nineteenth century visionary somnambulism and early vampire folklore.
The film’s architecture draws upon fairy tales. It relies on repetitions of three—a number common in fairy tales—in both Thomas’s three nights, and three bites, at Orlok’s castle and the vampire’s subsequent three nocturnal visits to Ellen. It is also preoccupied with binding contracts and bargains. The supernatural legalism of Orlok’s agreements recalls the rigid rules governing fairy tale creatures like Rumpelstiltskin or Ursula, and gives new motivation to his need for Thomas to come to him in Transylvania: he must trick Thomas into signing away his wife, securing a contract that renews his psychic pact with Ellen. And then, naturally, Nosferatu directs Thomas to arrive at his castle at midnight. When Thomas asks Orlok about the peasants’ superstitions, he dismisses their belief in “morbid fairy tales,” an ironic nod towards the film’s embrace of the genre’s conventions.
Stoker’s narrative framework has proven remarkably durable across more than eighty film adaptations. Murnau’s Nosferatu was itself an unauthorized adaptation—to the extent that Stoker’s widow successfully sued to have all copies destroyed (a few prints survived). The two defining Nosferatu movies—Murnau’s and Herzog’s—carve out a macabre role for the leading lady to play, one that leads to her death. Murnau positions Ellen as a kind of saint whose sacrifice of her pure heart alone could vanquish the vampire. Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre presents the connection between Ellen (this time Lucy) and the vampire as a recognition of shared otherness: “For me, the absence of love is the most abject pain,” Nosferatu tells her. She eventually sacrifices herself to free him of his torment.
Stoker’s novel, though, was fundamentally a parable about modernization and social progress. In the original Dracula, the forces of modernity work together to defeat an ancient evil and save the woman he preys on, exemplified in Van Helsing’s declaration:
Well, you know what we have to contend against, but we too, are not without strength. We have on our side power of combination, a power denied to the vampire kind, we have sources of science, we are free to act and think, and the hours of the day and the night are ours equally. In fact, so far as our powers extend, they are unfettered, and we are free to use them. We have self devotion in a cause and an end to achieve which is not a selfish one. These things are much.
The vampire hunters defeat Dracula through a combination of modern technology, scientific method, and Christian faith—everything from typewriters, telegrams, train timetables, crucifixes, and communion wafers are deployed to take down the vampire. The novel celebrates rationalism, Van Helsing representing a synthesis of modern medicine with traditional knowledge, while Mina's secretarial skills and the team’s methodical investigation exemplify enlightenment values. Even the sexual undertones of Dracula serve this narrative—the Count’s attempts to corrupt pure English womanhood are ultimately thwarted by these men and women working together. Dracula represents a threat to progress, and his defeat affirms the superiority of modernity. Eggers’s Ellen, however, belongs to a tradition where salvation comes through embracing forces that reason cannot comprehend.
The film establishes its divide between reason and the occult through its cinematography. The first wide shots are of the German and Transylvanian countrysides during Thomas’s journey to Orlok’s castle—first the open fields outside Wisborg, then the Carpathian Mountains. This shift signals both a physical distancing from Germany and a temporal journey backward into a realm far, far away where fairy tales are still taken seriously. It is a visual representation of Novalis’s description of the time of the fairy tale as one of “general anarchy, lawlessness, freedom, the natural state of nature, the time before the world.” Count Orlok himself understands this dichotomy, telling Thomas he “can’t wait to move to a city of your modern mind.” And the film’s Van Helsing figure, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, an outcast in the city due to his obsession with “alchemy, mystic philosophy, the occult,” articulates this explicitly when he declares:
We have not been so enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science! I have wrestled with the devil as Jacob wrestled with the Angel, and I tell you that if we are to tame darkness we must first face that it exists!
Thus, it is the Old World peasants and nuns of Transylvania who are best equipped to resist Orlock’s evil—they save Thomas’s life by banishing the vampire’s plague from his body once he escapes the castle, enabling him to return to Germany. Compared to Stoker’s belief in the positive influence of the Enlightenment and traditional Christian faith, Eggers’s narrative is a darker meditation on modernity’s spiritual blindness, suggesting that true horror lies in our inability to recognize and confront the persistence of ancient evils.
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Eggers’s filmography is fundamentally preoccupied with the dynamics of power and submission, repeatedly staging confrontations between human will and forces that demand capitulation. The Witch chronicles a family’s futile resistance against diabolic power, culminating in its protagonist’s, Thomasin, embrace of the devil as a path to freedom, while The Lighthouse depicts two men gradually surrendering their sanity to cosmic entities. The Northman follows a warrior-prince who believes himself to be exercising agency through revenge, but is actually submitting to a fate woven by the Norns. In Nosferatu, our characters confront an inhuman force they never get an upper hand on. Across all four films, Eggers suggests that we can do nothing but willingly submit to greater power. His characters only find resolution when they surrender to their fate, though this surrender often comes at the cost of their humanity or their lives.
There’s one thing I’ve been avoiding: the question of Ellen’s attraction to Nosferatu, and to what degree she’s tempted to be with him in Eggers’s remake. In staging Nosferatu’s possession sequences, Eggers draws an explicit parallel between vampiric haunting and sexual assault, creating scenes that make visceral his obsession with Ellen. Working with butoh choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, Eggers and Lily Rose-Depp crafted a physical language for Ellen’s fits that emphasizes the violation of her body—her convulsive shaking and clutching at her throat suggests resistance and draws inspiration from the documented “hysteric attitudes” of Jean-Martin Charcot’s patients at the Salpêtrière Hospital in the Belle Epoque. Butoh is a postwar Japanese dance form, born from the trauma of nuclear devastation, that explores the body’s relationship to unknowable horrors. The butoh principle of “emptying oneself to let something else in,” as Eggers puts it, takes on a horrific dimension as Ellen writhes against Orlok feasting on her body each night. Unlike Francis Ford Coppola’s romantically charged interpretation of Dracula’s fixation on Mina in Bram Stoker’s Dracula—he believes she is his long dead love reincarnated—Eggers frames these encounters as violations. Ellen initially invites Orlok’s attention, perhaps even finds some dark attraction in it, but this quickly transforms into a nightmare from which she cannot escape.
“In a post-Edward Cullen world, vampires are not scary,” Eggers said. “And so in order to endeavor to make vampires scary again, I went back to the folklore which was written by and about people who actually believed vampires existed.” Where Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire introduced the concept of the tortured immortal, Buffy made vampires brooding love interests, and Twilight transformed them into supernaturally attractive and devoted teenagers, Eggers leaned into the early Baltic and Slavic depictions of vampires who were, again in Eggers’s words, “nasty, rotting, maggot-ridden corpses.” Bill Skarsgård’s Orlok is a stark departure from the seductive vampires of modern media: he’s grotesquely hunched, with skin that shows the decay of centuries. As Eggers notes, “Bill’s vampire is very much a dead human.” It reminds audiences that vampires were originally conceived as unholy corpses that refused to stay dead. Orlok is not darkly glamorous, and he invites no ambiguous attraction on the part of the viewer.
Unlike the clean, almost surgical vampire bites most media depicts, Orlok’s feeding is savage and animalistic: he straddles a person’s limp body and gulps blood out of their chest. His attack leaves torn and raised flesh rather than neat puncture marks. This brutality is matched by Thomas’s raw terror as he recognizes the inhuman power of the Count and remains in tears throughout their encounters—a far cry from the composed negotiations typical of Dracula adaptations.
One interpretation of Eggers’s focus on Ellen may be: she is paying for her original sin of calling upon and sleeping with a dark spirit. Yet just as The Witch suggests Thomasin’s ultimate embrace of the devil represents a last-ditch attempt at liberation from Protestant repression, Ellen’s tragic end in Nosferatu can be read as a critique of the nineteenth-century’s dismissal of women and the supernatural. Where Thomasin is able to channel her connection to darkness into a new life—if nonetheless a dubious liberation, seeing as she makes a pact with the devil—Ellen’s mystical abilities are pathologized and suppressed. When her fits return while Thomas is away, men cloud her with ether and tie her to the bed. They pathologize her as “melancholic,” treating her with bedrest and tighter corsets. Ellen asks a friend if she’s ever thought there was “something too awful to comprehend” in the world, and she laughs her off as a Romantic. The “rational” city people actively prevent her from learning how to fight the vampire.
Still, Thomas and von Franz are the first two in the movie to believe her, but by the time von Franz is called on (the first doctor believes, much like in the case of Friedrike Hauffe, that she is beyond his help) and Thomas returns home, it is too late. Von Franz asks for her story when they first meet and she confesses that she called upon the demon herself. “Does evil come from within us, or from beyond?” she asks. He does not answer; it is clearly both. Much like Justinius Kerner, von Franz acts as her protective intermediary for one night, but he is powerless to unchain Nosferatu from her. When Thomas is back home from Transylvania, Ellen once again wants to confide in him about the dreams she has had all her life. In a departure from his initial dismissal of her “childhood memories,” he says, “Nothing you can say will shake me, for there is a devil in this world and I have seen him.” Ellen gets her moments of recognition, but it doesn’t save her, because by this point Orlok has already made it to the city.
The film’s conclusion is more fatalistic than previous vampire narratives. Where earlier versions of Nosferatu end with Ellen’s sacrificial victory over the vampire, Eggers pushes the horror to its extreme: Orlok drinks directly from her heart, and as dawn breaks, we see his face clearly for the first time, coughing up blood. Ellen’s decision to give herself to the vampire is stripped of traditional heroic implications; it is the inevitable conclusion of a dark fairy tale, the fulfillment of a bargain that was always going to be paid. “In heathen times you may have been a great Priestess of Isis, but in this strange and modern world you are of greater worth. You are our salvation,” von Franz tells her by way of goodbye.
Ellen’s sacrifice brings little redemption, and facing darkness offers no protection against it. The ending of Nosferatu seems to turn on its head what the Italian essayist and poet Christina Campo wrote after dedicating years of her life to the study of fairy tales: “the inexorable, inexhaustible moral of the fairy tale is victory over the law of necessity.” In our latest update of Stoker’s novel—that story of courage, faith, and modern ingenuity—the moral has become: the law of necessity over victory. Ellen’s link to Orlok is no more than an inexorable pull toward oblivion, a fairy tale for an age that no longer believes in happy endings.