“I am an appetite, nothing more.” —Count Orlok
Much ink (and other various fluid) has been spilled over the meaning of Dave Eggers’ retread on F.W. Murnau’s retread of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but almost everyone has focused on sex. People are fascinated by the film’s treatment of gender, or fixated on what the producers seem to want to say about sexual assault and the nature of consent. All that is present, and yet it seems to me a distraction from what Dracula, Nosferatu, Blade, indeed all vampire stories are about: death.
Herr Knock (this version’s Renfield, Simon McBurney) in the first act of the film describes the vampire as a creature of two poles: desire and putrefaction. Though he comes in the guise of a bridegroom, this version of the bloodsucker does more damage than his predecessor. Whereas Dracula rolls into London and drains a few people, Orlok sweeps into Wisburg borne on a drift of plague rats. Death is loose in the streets, indiscriminate and unstoppable. Faced with pandemic-scale mortality, the moral centers of the film Dr. Von Franz (this tale’s Von Helsing, played by Willem Defoe) and the humble Thomas Hutter (aka Jonathan Harker, portrayed this time around by Nicholas Hoult) determine that the only course of action is to sacrifice a young woman to the bloodthirst of the eternal predator.
However, the decision is not theirs to make. Orlok himself (Bill Skarsgård) decrees that the woman he has chosen, Ellen Hutter (not Mina Harker, Lily-Rose Depp) must submit to him of her own free will. She must do this because she wants to; the pressure of the plague-ridden city and the threat against those she loves most is certainly applied but assumed to be secondary to desire, the monster’s main pole. Here we have arrived at his nature: that of appetite. He wants her, so he must have her. She must, in fact, want him in return.
So much of the figure of the vampire is made up of xenophobia. It is easy to dismiss the claims of Stoker or his heirs that he was plagiarized after his authorship of Dracula, because nearly all of what he wrote was taken from Romanian folklore, and built into a framework liberally borrowed from Wilkie Collin’s 1859 gothic novel, The Woman in White. Stoker’s use of a folklore not widely known in England at the time allowed him to do two things: seem original, and use racism to his advantage.
The classic construction of the vampire archetype is that he is a monster, possessed of wealth and often a title, holds lands and a castle, and is allowed to prey upon people he sees as subjects. These are the trappings of wealth and class, and the predation of the rich upon the poor enters easily into a Victorian Brit’s mind. They’re highly stratified by class, and class is conferred by birth. However, the vampire is also from a distant land. He speaks another language and carries with him a disconcerting history. This means that his ways are necessarily strange, his customs will almost certainly bring discomfort, and most importantly: he does not belong.
In Dracula and in Nosferatu, there is a sense of ethnonationalism in play: Dracula is not British, so he is invading London. Orlok is not German, so he is invading Wisburg. In the 2024 film, the emphasis on the foreigner bringing plague cannot be separated from five years of rhetoric following a global pandemic that blamed foreign contagion for the spread of a deadly disease. Following the election of 2024, an American audience cannot be said to be immune to the idea of ethnonationalism underpinning a narrative that draws its life from the fear of the Other; the foreigner who comes to prey upon the bodies of young women. Our own leaders have said it, plainly and without shame.
While the camera lingers on the sexual nature of this invasion, the hideous embrace between death and the maiden is not consummated in the usual way. While we do see Herr and Frau Hutter do their rutting on a sofa, it cannot be said that Orlok and Ellen ever get it on in the expected way. Instead, he brings a foreignness to that process as well, nursing on fresh blood from the breast of first the Herr and then the Frau. Orlok’s title makes it hard for Thomas to object, but his foreignness, his representation of death is what makes him irresistible to Ellen. She knows what she’s in for, and it isn’t anything she’s already had.
The terrible thinness of Count Orlok is based on the appearance of a preserved body nicknamed Ötzi the Ice Man found in the Alps. This makeup and prosthetic look is meant to evoke a long-mummified corpse, utterly devoid of moisture, seeking to suck wet life out of a living body. His flyblown flesh exposes muscle and bone, even as he mounts his bride. His thinness is echoed in the body of Depp, a frighteningly thin woman whose cheekbones cut the air in profile and whose wracked paroxysms of possession and fright only serve to accentuate the sinew and gristle of her fatless form. When at last she is nude beneath him, when at last his fangs penetrate, one has to wonder where she was keeping all that blood. She, too, has become foreign. She crosses over to be with him: no longer wife, no longer woman, and no longer German. Vampire by marriage, she leaves behind all that was living for a honeymoon six feet deep.
Desire and putrefaction are the two horses that pull the carriage of the dead. What we love will kill us, and when we come to the grave we are rotting already. They are the two driving forces of this most recent retelling of Nosferatu, but one of them is the clear winner.
