This article containers spoilers for Robert Eggers' 2024 film Nosferatu.
“IT SEEMS TO ME that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” East vs. West, Old vs. New; this is the axis on which Bram Stoker’s Dracula turns. His protagonist, Jonathan Harker, gazes from train windows upon Europe in motion; couched within the literal engine of modernity his vantage point affords a view of industrial capitalism’s spread before his very eyes. His gaze reflects Western society’s will to dominate; its social order radiating from native London only dissipates in the shadows of the Carpathian Mountains. To him, the East is an obscure and unintelligible backwater where superstition rules, an Old World bulwark against the advance of modernity. Departing the train and finding himself at the terminus of the New World, Harker immediately struggles to adapt to the Old when his attempt to arrange a coach to Castle Dracula is interrupted by the superstitious anxieties of his rural hosts. Without train or timetable to speed his progress, Harker is lost in the morass of the real, an affront to his abstract role as agent of Capital. His ostensible goal to settle the purchase of a London property for the mysterious Count Dracula pits him against the tension and dissonance created when the West encounters and attempts to assimilate foreign social orders.
Stoker would have been well acquainted with capitalist alienation having grown up in post-famine Ireland, England’s test ground for colonial domination and cultural imperialism. A product of an upper middle class Anglo-Irish background, Stoker had an acute sense of the class tension inherent in 19th century British society. His own family straddled the increasingly blurred social lines between the old aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie; his work stands as a testament to the dissonance created by the dismantling of the old feudal order. Count Dracula, by virtue of his feudal rank, is a vessel for the novel’s central metaphor of a vampiric aristocracy, siphoning the societal lifeblood of capital,their need to consume taking precedence over all other social bonds leaving the world to bear the burden of their indifference. Writing from 1890s London, Stoker was confronted with the Dickensian reality of capitalism, a reality he often sought to escape. This claustrophobic pale of coal smoke and orphaned cockney chimney sweeps drove him to the town of Whitby, a once prosperous Yorkshire port town that had since lost its shipbuilding industry to cities able to produce modern ironclad vessels. Its own lifeblood siphoned off, Whitby is the perfect setting for a clash between old and new, offering Dracula no sustenance having already been sucked dry by industrial capitalism. Meet the new boss, same as the old.
While Dracula is responsible for popularizing vampires in the Western canon, its enduring legacy stems more from the stories it influenced. One such story, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror directed by F. W. Murnau and released in 1922 moves the setting from Whitby to Wisborg, a fictional town in 1830s Germany. Murnau’s protagonist, Thomas Hutter, an estate agent by trade, is set against Count Orlok, a vampire who seeks to bring death and destruction to Wisborg. While slow and more than a little goofy by modern senses, Nosferatu is a prime example of 1920s German Expressionist cinema. Created as a “totally separate, legally distinct” knockoff of Dracula on a slim budget, the film would be pushed into relative obscurity a mere three years after publication. Nevertheless, Nosferatu was critical to the vampire’s transition from printed prose to the silver screen as it created much of the aesthetic and tonal elements now synonymous with the genre. Like his peers, Murnau made use of gothic imagery, stark lighting, and melodramatic tones to distinguish his characters from their monochrome backdrops. In German Expressionist Cinema the romantic is set against the austere and ominous, perfectly capturing the tension and precarity of Weimar Germany. In his book From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film Siegfried Kracauer offered first-hand insight into how the attitudes and ideas of the society that produced the German Expressionists would later lead to the likes of Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazis. As remarked by Siegfried Kracauer From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film:
From the beginnings the German film contained dynamite...Chaos spread in Germany from 1918 to about 1923, and as its consequence the panic-stricken German mind was released from all the conventions that usually limit life. Under such conditions, the unhappy, homeless soul not only drove straightaway toward the fantastic region of horrors, but also moved like a stranger through the world of normal reality . . .That free-wandering soul imagined the madmen, somnambulists, vampires and murderers who were haunting the expressionistic settings of the Caligari film and its like. – Siegfried Kracauer From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film
Kracauer devotes a portion of his post-war analysis to Nosferatu, highlighting Murnau’s use of spectral imagery and stark close-up facial expressions. He also compares the film’s titular character, in his role as spreader of pestilence and “scourge of god,” to the totalitarian autocrats that would emerge in the mid-20th century. For Kracauer, the film is an expression of national consciousness. But to really understand the film we must understand the historical moment that produced it. We must consider class consciousness and the material drivers of drastic political shifts. In this respect Weimar Germany is a rich tapestry.
Following the German Empire’s defeat in World War I, the Weimar government was established to sail the ship of state through choppy economic and political waters. This was a particularly difficult mission as the victorious Entente powers placed sole responsibility for the war on Germany, hamstringing it with forced reparations. Having been thoroughly leached by reparation payments to the capitalist forces that had financed the war, Germany experienced infamous levels of hyperinflation which peaked in 1922, the year Nosferatu was published. In 1925 a German court would ban the film’s distribution, ordering all copies destroyed following a suit from Stoker’s heirs. Apparently the vampiristic plundering of the idle wealthy could not even spare Germany’s fledgling film industry. Regardless, to connect the lessons of Weimar to our present day, we must look beyond 1922.
Enter Robert Eggers.
In his 2024 film simply titled Nosferatu, Eggers offers a fairly faithful adaptation of the 1922 film. Like Murnau, Eggers opts to set his film in Wisborg in the 1830s where, once again, we follow Thomas Hutter. Let’s consider Eggers’ choice of adapting Murnau’s setting over Stoker’s set in the 1890s. By rolling back the clock the perspective on modernity changes. There is no train in Eggers’ work; Hutter rides a horse. Like Nosferatu the spectre of modernism is on the horizon. Our end is near but it has not yet arrived. Here, Eggers brings a sense of economic and political precarity, left simmering in the 1922 film’s background, to the forefront. And now that Stoker’s work has passed into the public domain, Eggers can better incorporate his themes.
Like Stoker, Eggers’ Transylvania is a backwater of superstitious villagers but more viscous and outwardly hostile. Hutter is only tolerated by offering to pay double the nightly rate, showing that even in a pre-modern rural vampiric hellhole, cash is still king. Hutter even witnesses the villagers exhume and stake a corpse —an act depicted as a strange and barbaric backwoods ritual. This is the facade that Eggers presents for deconstruction; the presumption that economic interests can bind society and transcend and supplant all other social relationships is an act of folly.
By adapting a familiar story, Eggers re-centers focus on the social and economic relationship underpinning both Stoker’s work and society at large. For Eggers, Wisborg is a microcosm of a society governed primarily by transactional interests as the core relationships of the film are all mediated through a commercial lens. While Murnau’s Hutter is not given much in the way of a broader motivation, Eggers’ Hutter is driven by an articulated desire for advancement both professionally and in society. He seeks to provide his wife and the family they hope to build greater financial security and social status. Channeling this ambition is Herr Knock, Hutter’s boss who is able to compel him to make his fateful trip to Transylvania despite the fears and apprehensions of his wife, Ellen. Like in the 1922 film, Ellen spends the duration of Hutter’s trip with the family of Hutter’s wealthy shipbuilder friend, Harding, who in this iteration is revealed to have given Hutter a loan to sustain his lifestyle, a fact that seems to weigh on him. In a modern world social interests become subservient to economic interests.
By focusing on the transactional nature of relationships Eggers reveals the cracks in a social order that portrays every individual as an independent rational economic actor seeking to maximize their own utility. Hutter owes Harding and seeks professional advancement from Knock who capitalizes on Hutter’s desperation to ‘sell’ him to Nosferatu in order to satisfy his own occult ambitions. Nosferatu seeks fulfillment of the summoning pact made by Ellen, who tells Hutter she dreams of marrying death and that he will never satisfy her like Nosferatu can. The toxic nature of transactional relationships ties directly into the themes of creeping pestilence carried over from the 1922 film. Nosferatu’s arrival signals death, alienation, and a decaying social order; and much like the Black Death his plague rats arrive via trading vessel, which aimlessly runs aground after its crew perishes under Nosferatu’s influence. For Eggers, even those who sustain a destructive social order are destroyed by it.
What follows is the death and destruction of every interpersonal relationship in the film. Harding and his family are the first to fall prey to Nosferatu. By destroying the Hardings, Nosferatu demonstrates to Ellen that he will destroy her connection to the world around her: no relationship is safe as he seeks to compel her into a violent and self-destructive psycho-sexual relationship.
Eggers’ societal skepticism extends its critique of capitalism to the world of enlightenment rationalism, a tentpole of both Stoker’s work and the liberal political project that it serves. Throughout the film Nosferatu’s influence over Ellen is communicated through a medley of physical and emotional maladies. Dr. Sievers, a rationalist stand-in, offers vain attempts to treat Ellen but is confronted with the limitations of modern medicine, impotent in the face of an existential threat. Admitting that he is in over his head, Siever looks to Von Franz, an exiled former professor who dabbles in the occult. Von Franz employs a more direct wooden stake-based treatment approach, a call back to the perceived barbarism of Transylvania. In subverting the viewer’s initial biases towards the rational, Eggers asks us to confront our biases in the face of the irrational and alienated world the liberal project has created.
Here Eggers fully synthesizes the sense of societal dread and apprehension of the 1922 film while incorporating the class tension of Stoker’s novel. But, where Stoker saw the triumph of liberalism in dispelling the forces of the Old World, liberalism to Eggers seems to present at best a lateral move. Stoker’s New World has proven to contain the same inequities, brutality, systemic exploitation, and internal contradictions of the Old. To Eggers, the answer seems to lie outside enlightened rational frameworks, as our alienation from older societal modes has exacerbated the inherent contradictions and flaws of capitalism. The backwards Transylvanian peasants that Hutter observes staking an exhumed corpse had the answer all along. He wasn’t witnessing brutish depravity but a practical deterrent to an existential threat. In fact, one has to wonder how that village has fared now that the West has entered into a death pact with its oppressor.
Nosferatu demands that we critically examine our current social order and mode of production and how it has deluded social relationships. What demons have we summoned and what would their pact demand of us? For Ellen it meant embracing death, but it was a death she relished every moment of. As we sit on a dying planet in our atomized bubbles surrounded by cheap consumer goods I have to wonder if, like Ellen, we too are delighting in our own destruction. And if so, is there any way to escape this symphony of horror?
