NOSFERATU
a modern fable and review
*major spoilers for nosferatu (2024) below*
Walk with me.
You’ve just gotten married to the love of your life but times are tough— she’s unemployed, you’re toiling away at a job you don’t quite like but absolutely cannot give up, and no one you know owns a house except for your wife’s bestie and her rich husband. He got in on the ground floor of bitcoin, apparently, and last year he gave you a loan so you could get your real estate license. Your wife sees visions in her sleep and there used to be a rumor that she was a witch possessed by the devil himself. But y’all grew up in Georgia. Being accused of witchcraft just means you’re a baddie with a robust sex life.
The visions kinda creep you out though. But she told you those are in her past.
Your boss tells you that hey, that promotion you wanted? The one that comes with great healthcare and a private corner office and triple your current paycheck? It’s yours… just as soon as you get a reclusive tech giant looking to buy a massive property in Atlanta to sing on the dotted line. Why can’t you just send all the required paperwork via Docusign? Well, that would be too easy of course. Besides, any man who makes his money in computers knows enough not to trust them. He’s completely offline. The company has taken the liberty of buying you an economy class ticket to San Francisco. You’re on your own from there.
Your girl really doesn’t want you to go. California is another world for someone who’s never left the South and anything that isn’t LA is already suspicious. Mountains in California? Snow? It doesn’t add up. She has a bad feeling about it. “But,” you tell her, a little exasperated, “we can’t live in a 1 bedroom garden style walk up forever. This is the key to our future.”
“I don’t need money,” she replies. “I just need you.”
Ha! Anyway.
At her bestie’s big ass house, her rich husband toasts to your success. He says he’ll take you out on his new boat when you return and when you promise to pay him back for the loan (again) he waves you off. Everything’s finally looking up for you kid. Your girl will get over it.
You hop on the flight.
There are no actual directions to said reclusive tech giant’s residence save for some scribbled ramblings and the vague idea that he lives in an old castle. No matter. You take a train, then a car, then, “oh how novel”, a horse, until you reach the outskirts of a town you can’t quite pronounce, cast in the shadow of a looming mountain. The locals all look like they got lost on their way to Burning Man, all of them with that same unfriendly gleam in their eye, the kind that says we know who you are and we think you’re a useless cuck. You ignore this and pay extra for a shitty room at the only motel for miles.
At night, you watch them sacrifice a virgin and dig up a dead body buried in the snow. But that was just a dream.
At the tech giant’s castle, you meet the man himself. Kinda. Sorta. He’s dressed in all black and his face is hidden by a hood and what is that smell? West Coast liberals and their addiction to natural deodorants. Nasty. You give him the papers that he needs to sign and try not to look at his dinning room askance. When he hands you back the contract, it’s now written in Wingdings. You don’t think to ask “but wait, what is this? It’s definitely not what I handed you.” Instead, you sign on the dotted line and think to yourself, alright cool, he’s a little weird and a little musty and this castle is literally falling apart and holy shit did that statue just turn to look at me? and are those rats? RATS? i gotta get outta here, i gotta get outta here, igottagetouttahereigottagetouttahere —
Your girl starts having visions again. The tech giant visits her in her dreams. They have a history, the two of them. They used to fuck but the mechanics of this are unclear.
The tech giant has been dead for a thousand years.
When you think about it, Nosferatu is a workplace comedy. The premise of a struggling young buck angling for a promotion, the ill-fated work trip on the company’s dime, the paperwork. Orlock is any client that’s given you the run around, demanded more from you than what they were entitled to, sucked you dry of life and left you to crawl home at 5pm a husk of your former self. Sure, there’s the added complication that this client wants to kill you and steal your wife. But who among us hasn’t done something ill-advised with a coworker?
On a serious note: I’ve seen… a lot of discourse about this movie. Most of it is absolutely insufferable and therefor irrelevant to me. I do wonder, however, how much of it would be different if Eggers had gone a different route and had chosen to make Orlock conventionally attractive. It’s interesting to see how victimhood is framed when the perpetrator of violence is made to look repulsive. Never mind that the movie starts with an impassioned plea and invitation. Never mind that violence is, in some measure, always part of the appeal.
It makes me think of all the other vampire media I love. The predatory manipulation of Damon Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries. The emotional terror wrought by Edward in Twilight. Lestat, in all his ultraviolent glory, in AMC’s adaptation of Interview With the Vampire, where abuse is actually and specifically the cornerstone of the plot. The shape of discourse as it pertains to these vampires and their violence (and how that reads as abuse on screen) is markedly different, almost laughably so. The accounts promoting the uwu-ification of Lestat are the same ones penning essays about how it’s disgusting actually if you liked Nosferatu, and also did you know you’re a sexual predator for vibing with it?
Anyway, this isn’t a groundbreaking take on my part. Visual Ethics: A Tale as Old as Time. Is this the pretty privilege the girls on TikTok are always banging on about? For what it’s worth, to me this was a movie about desire. It’s about the hot, torturous pang of want women coming of age often find themselves lost in, the urge to fan the flames by rubbing against something, grabbing onto something, letting it all consume you. How we learn shame and let that knowledge remold us, casting all our feelings into a new, wanton light. And how we have to reconcile that with our adult experiences, our new loves and new wants, which don’t override our older ones, but rather draw them out into the light. Orlock might as well be the first boy you whisper to on the phone after your parents have gone to bed, the best friend you practice kissing with after soccer practice, your own fingers under your duvet in the dark.
Reconciling these desires isn’t always pretty. Losing friends and family when you come out, getting ridiculed by strangers for liking him, or wanting it like that. Society writing you off as a degenerate, unnatural and unlovable, not fit mixed company. Sometimes the rats descend; plague comes.
I think it’s easy to look at how the story ends (with Ellen’s death) and think that something was fundamentally taken from her. Of course Orlock is the villain— she rejects him and he comes anyway, he targets her friends and family, he is all encompassing from the very start and he doesn’t take no for an answer. But I think that interpretation dangerously erodes Ellen’s agency. She fears Orlock and loathes him, and mourns the loss she suffers at his hands deeply. But the very mechanics of the story demand her willing and ready acceptance. Orlock cannot come to her without her express permission. And we can argue about why she says yes— she wants to protect Thomas, she doesn’t want to lose anyone else— but to me, these reasons do not equate coercion. When the covenant is finally fulfilled, it is she who kisses him. It was always going to end with the girl and her monster.
The girl and herself.
Had to stop myself before I rewrote the entire movie lol.
xx,
april