Nosferatu

Two centuries of darkness

A century later, Robert Eggers has crafted a beautiful reimagining of the classic F. W. Murnau Gothic film, Nosferatu (1922). Eggers previously directed critically successful movies like The Northman (2022) & The Witch (2015), & has now got to this passion project, a dream of his teenage years, a Gothic tract for our times & an attempt to capture an alternative metaphysical vision—Romanticism, especially in its German form.

Murnau’s Nosferatu was largely ignored or considered second rate at the time, but its reputation grew in the post-WWII world, especially in the art house circles of the 1960’s-70’s, & then it was remade by Werner Herzog in 1979. In his 21st-c. adaptation, Eggers, born in 1983, offers a warning to respectable modernity: The desire for a re-enchantment—the widespread search for meaning, whether in the Orthodox East or by gulping down Ayahuasca in the Yucatan—the longing for something more powerful, more real than the scientism, consumerism, & conformity of the meritocratic corporate model can lead to horror.

Further, Eggers draws on both the Weimar film & the Victorian novel, thus reminding us that this desire for meaning is not new—it’s the famous crisis of Western civilization. Nevertheless, his attempt to marry Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Murnau’s Nosferatu itself creates certain difficulties. At the heart of Stoker’s novel is a conflict between heroic people & an anti-Christ figure that can only be defeated through a self-sacrifice guided by religious submission to Christ via the sacraments. Murnau’s Nosferatu, contrariwise, substitutes occultism for religion, & offers not a saving but an abandonment of Victorian civilization after WWI, through a psychology of sacrifice which may preserve Romantic Wagnerian redemption. Eggers is famous for anchoring his films in the worldview of his source material rather than the fashionable ideologies of 21st c. Progressives, but in this case, he was faced with the choice forced on him by his sources, & decided for the occultism of Murnau.

Vampire stories

We’ve had two centuries of vampire art that we should review first. The vampire from the beginning was a confrontation of Enlightenment & its discontents, who first took form as the revenge of the pre-modern “darkness” dismissed by our scientific forebears.

The first detailed account of vampires in Western Europe appears in the writings of Antoine Augustin Calumet, a sober 18th c. French Catholic Biblical scholar (who oddly enough, was quite popular with 19^th c. American Presbyterians!), who picked up & commented on official reports from Habsburg bureaucrats & army officers who observed & reported the strange & horrific folkways in the more distant & rural regions of the Austrian empire. These stories from his 1746 Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and on Vampires or Revenants of Hungary, Moravia, et al. would soon seed the Romantic imagination.

The Ur-text for modern vampire lore, however, is surely John Polidori’s novella, The Vampyre (1819), which grew out of the same August 1816 (The Year Without A Summer) storytelling competition at the Villa Diodati by lake Geneva at which Mary Shelley first conceived Frankenstein. Polidori was Byron’s physician, yet under his spell. Moreover, The Vampyre was Byron’s story at that contest, then taken up to be elaborated by Polidori & published. & Byron is clearly the inspiration for the fictional Lord Ruthven, the titular vampire—the very name Lord Ruthven had previously been used by another writer to evoke a relationship with Byron.

Polidori kept his reputation as a Romantic by dying before 30, mired in gambling debts, but his tale achieved its afterlife in the 19^th century through novels & stage adaptations, especially by Planche &, then most spectacularly, Heinrich Marschner (1795-1861), whose powerful early Romantic opera, Der Vampyr (1828), I highly recommend. Set in the highlands of Scotland, the Marschner opera accumulated many of the elements that Bram Stoker would use in his retelling in his vastly superior 1897 epistolary novel, Dracula. Interestingly, as Polidori was Byron’s shadow, so was Stoker to the great Victorian actor who employed him, Henry Irving, so his Dracula takes many a cue from the demanding thespian. Throughout, the Vampire is a creature of evil, deception, seduction, & destruction. & of course, the demos could rejoice in each tale as the demonic aristocrat conjured up only to be eventually laid low.

Cinematic prophecies of doom

For Nosferatu, Murnau removed the story to a fictional North German mercantile city, Wisborg, in the year 1838. His producer, Alban Grau, also artistic director, worked with Murnau to compress the tale for the low-budget adaptation. Murnau & Grau were a match, being both involved in Weimar occult circles—their production company, Prana Film, was named after the Hindu “life-force.” Occult themes featured in several of Murnau’s films, less so as his career moved to Hollywood—his most famous film, Sunrise (1927), seems a world away from Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horrors). Murnau is a figure almost unthinkable in today’s cultural & political world, a homosexual with aristocratic tastes, trained in philology & art, a WWI combat veteran of the Eastern front & member of the Air Corps, playwright, skeptic & occultist. He & Grau collaborated because they both had an interest in vampire lore. Grau, who claimed to have met a Serbian private during the war who had staked his own father’s corpse through the heart after an exhumation for vampirism, referred to the war itself as a “cosmic vampire.” The aftermath was worse: The Spanish Flu soon killed more people than the war—coupled with revolutions, food shortages, & social breakdown in Germany, the madness of the times inspired these artists. Indeed, Murnau & Grau planned Nosfeatu as the culmination of a trilogy of horror films reflecting the unfolding disaster. Nor did the connection to society stop there: Retrospectively, Siegfried Krakauer linked the themes of experimental German films of the Weimar period to the horrors of the Nazi regime in his seminal post-WWII study of German cinema.

Murnau’s conception erases the Christian metaphysics of soul, good & evil, & redemption. Instead, the only character to understand the real danger of Nosferatu is Murnau’s replacement of Stoker’s Dr. Van Helsing, Professor Bulwer, a Rosicrucian (in reference to the Victorian novelist, Bulwer-Lytton, himself a practitioner of the occult & novelist of the same). The evil Count Orlock’s first victim is the youthful Hutter, the very picture of vitality, with its foolish disregard for reality. Hutter voyages to Transylvania & Nosferatu fleeing marital responsibility; he can’t understand his wife—he yearns for a grand Romantic adventure.

In Eggers’ movie, instead, the driving concern is money & respectability, yet Romanticism endures: Eggers shoots a cinematic version of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above Sea of Fog (whereas Herzog used Wagner in his 1979 remake of Nosferatu). Just after this liminal moment in the mountains, Eggers brings Hutter to a village in rural Transylvania, at the edge of Count Orlock’s domain. & the re-enchantment begins—a midnight ritual slaying of a vampire, straight out of Calumet’s writings.

In Murnau, we get metaphors for the motives of the business & military classes of Germany. Hutter’s journey is at the behest of his employer, the bizarre Knock, who, under the occult sway of Nosferatu, arranges that the vampire arrive in Wisborg, bringing with him the plague & the destruction of the complacent German city. Hutter comes to realize his horror slowly in Count Orlock’s castle & finally makes his escape, weakened, sick in body & mind with the poisonous bite of the vampire. He sojourns briefly among Catholic nuns & returns home just in time to see his wife in thrall to the Vampire. The senseless destructiveness of the Great War shows in Hutter’s youthful foolishness—the naïve attitude that led so many healthy young men to their deaths. The rat-like appearance & the plague references recall the ubiquitous rats of the trenches & battlefields of the war, with their injury to corpses & the diseases they bore—& the shadowy hand in Murnau’s cinematography destroys like the 1919-20 Spanish Influenza.

Murnau’s film oscillates between psychology & metaphysics, & we are never really sure which insight is dominant. This instability is reflected in the weakness of the vampire. In Stoker’s novel, Dracula is a real being: Murnau’s is limited to the night watches, if he exists at all. Stoker’s Dracula has a host of loyal servants: Nosferatu is forced to load his wagon himself. The element they share is the compelling power of a beautiful woman, Mina Harker in the novel, Ellen Hutter in the film.

Ellen Hutter becomes the object of desire for Nosferatu, because she as a woman represents life, the ability to give birth. Yet as a metaphysical pair, man & woman, are unusually lopsided—male vitalism seems vain; female awareness of suffering is triumphant: While Hutter seeks out his wife, she has been in thrall to death, but she lures death into death, she keeps the vampire feeding on her blood long enough for the sun to rise & dissolve him at the cost of her own life. Thus, the city is saved.

Eggers takes a different path. Both Ellen & Knock become subject to the power of Nosferatu by seeking out something more real than the materialistic Biedermeier world they inhabit in a (presumably) de-mythologized Protestant, commercial, & scientific milieu. The new Nosferatu accordingly opens with Ellen’s prayer for possessions, who indiscriminately calls on angels & beings to come to her, & we soon discover that Knock practices black magic in a desire to be joined to something greater & more powerful than himself, eventually to become a John the Baptist figure to Count Orlock’s anti-Christ. Ellen is periodically possessed, seemingly sexually ravished from afar by the demon Nosferatu—the idea of death, beautiful & powerful, is omnipresent in her imagination. Romantic attachment to her husband comparatively brings her only temporary relief. Her recurring dream is described:

It was our wedding, yet not in chapel walls. The scent of the lilacs was strong in the rain... & when I reached the altar, you weren't there... Standing before me, all in black, was Death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced, & when we turned round, everyone was dead. Father. & everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible, it overwhelmed the lilacs. But I had never been so happy as that moment, as I held hands with Death.

Powers beyond science

In Eggers’ Nosferatu, Hutter is concerned with obtaining the financial & physical security of the lovely Biedermeier interiors we see in The Hutters’ good friends the Hardings’ house. Hutter is financially indebted to them. Hutter & Harding smoke cigars & talk—one is reminded of Kierkegaard’s critique of this very Northern European world of cigars, marriage, sex, children, & financial security. It is the most poignant & beautiful depiction of the shallowness of a certain respectability which is ultimately impotent to face the mythic, primordial, evil, non-material forces released by the arrival of the monster in a storm-tossed ship whose entire crew has been destroyed by the vampire.

With Hutter away, Ellen’s night-walking & possessions return, along with her extreme sexual behavior, an eventual torment, burden, & embarrassment to the Hardings. Her dear friend Anna Harding can no longer help her, but trusts with a naïve faith that sees God as a mere protector from evil, the very Santa Claus of therapeutic moral deism. The husband Friedrich turns increasingly to modern science for an explanation & cure. (Coppola’s insights into the raw sexual potential of the tale is emphasized rather than the smoldering suave sexuality of Bela Lugosi, though there are hints of that as well in the use of the voice of Nosferatu in the sound track.) Once the demon is unleashed, he, like the spirits in A Christmas Carol, will appear over three successive nights, destroying everything until Ellen yields herself willingly to him. At first, Ellen resists & destruction is visited on the family & friends that she has loved; her desire to spare her husband & find a way to end the plague convince her to act.

Hutter, after a brief, incomplete recovery within an Orthodox nunnery, returns home. He wishes to fight to save his wife & destroy the monster. He understands that the evil is real, but is unable to do anything to defeat it. Finally, Dr. Sievers, the representative of modern science, is forced to find his disgraced former teacher Albin Eberhart von Franz (played brilliantly by Willem Dafoe), now a recluse, a madman, to use his arcane knowledge in occult combat with the vampire. “Angels & demons” are summoned in a line that recalls Hamlet’s, “angels & ministers of grace defend us.” Eberhart admits he has been limited to intellectually exploring this topic, not dealing directly with such a creature, yet he also claims to have seen things that would have caused Isaac Newton to return to his mother’s womb.

Eggers must know that Newton was deeply involved in the occult & alchemy, so he’s probably suggesting a certain shallowness on the part of his characters! Anyway, I was reminded of this pair of couplets on Newton:

Nature, & Nature's laws lay hid in night.
God said, Let Newton be! & all was light.
Alexander Pope: ‘Epitaph: Intended for Sir Isaac Newton’ (1730)

It did not last: the Devil howling ‘Ho!
Let Einstein be!’ restored the status quo.
Sir John Collings Squire: ‘In continuation of Pope on Newton’ (1926)

Thus, the horror comes. Eberhart says:

We are not so enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the Devil as Jacob wrestled the Angel in Penuel, & I tell you that if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists!

Eberhart & Ellen collaborate to distract Hutter & Sievers long enough for her to lure the monster to its doom. Finally, the metaphysical battle takes the form of copulation, the vampire & Ellen consummate & complete themselves by uniting in death, yielding to destruction but allowing for new life. A metaphysical form of resurrection was made possible through sacrifice that recalls the poet Klopstock or Mahler’s amplification & transformation of it in his 2^nd Symphony. Thus, I bring the cycle of references to German Romanticism to completion. Did I mention the story seems to hinge on Christmastide? A Christmas tree is present that is worthy of E. T. A. Hoffman.

Eggers’ climax is a contest between a Romantic form of occult insight & the power of death, in an aesthetic framework that involves seeing things that materialist science cannot. Count Orlock in his decaying castle states he longs to move to & act in the modern city. The desire for fresh life & power is unleashed on a modern population ill-equipped to face down evil. By using all the tools of German Romantic art, Eggers lets these old & modern powers do combat. He has Eberhart say that by allowing the evil within to live & then acknowledging it to be evil, we can slay it ourselves & obtain true salvation. The means of salvation is self-knowledge, through the occult or in the Romantic sensibility, though only at great cost. Hutter’s Romanticism & materialistic desire start him on an adventure into the exotic East of lost pre-modern wisdom, but he ultimately fails to acquire whatever wisdom life offers. It is instead his wife Ellen who succeeds—she taps into her suffering, which borders on madness, to conceive & complete an act of self-sacrifice, without which apparently one cannot combat evil.

Here, we have come a long way from Stoker’s novel, in which Christian heroes are required to overcome their weaknesses & act in the face of evil, hunting it, destroying it with the aid of science & the church fused together, that they may protect their womenfolk. Thus armed, they pursue the Vampire to his ancestral home & fight his minions on his own turf. (Only Coppola took this cinematically perfect ending for his 1992 adaptation.) Eggers tries to achieve this with occultism, leaving the film to dwell on the hideous union of beauty & the beast, not for redemption, but for destruction. Ultimately, this is a vision of despair, perhaps Eggers’ own, perhaps his understanding of German Romanticism.