The title character of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, played by Bill Skarsgard under heavy makeup, is every inch a monster. His skin has the greyish pallor of spoiled beef, dotted with scabs and open wounds. There’s only a little bit of hair left on top of his head, but it’s so long that it clings to his skull like shedded snakeskin. His pointy nails don’t suggest talons, as in F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 Nosferatu or Werner Herzog’s 1979 retelling, but human nails that were allowed to grow to the point of curling. He has the broad shoulders and height characteristic of the dashing vampires played by Christopher Lee in a Hammer horror movie or Frank Langella on Broadway, but also the high-domed forehead and arched nose we associate with the iconic character in Murnau’s film. Nosferatu presents this identity to the non-vampire world, and it is only marginally less vile than his true form, revealed in drawings and in the film’s “feeding” scenes: a mangy, emaciated wolf-rodent with stick-like legs, dry-humping his victims while slurping blood directly from their hearts.
And yet his voice. It strains to negate the objectively grotesque appearance and make him beguiling in spite of all this obvious repugnance. Nosferatu has a flowery “Transylvanian” accent recognizable from many film adaptations of Dracula, starting with the 1931 Tod Browning hit that made a horror star of Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi, and Eggers’s theatrical sound mix makes the deep, rumbling words he speaks seem to issue from inside the viewer’s mind. Everyone who meets or even hears about Nosferatu knows he’s enticing not in the sexualized, what-a–dreamboat sense, but as a mesmerizer beast whose commands are hard to resist even when the intended victim knows they’re in the presence of pure evil. Unfortunately, the primary object of Eggers’s vampire’s attention, Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter, is a victim of a destiny foretold (a scenario that recurs throughout all of Eggers’s films, which strive to push modern, secular mindsets away and immerse viewers in primordial, irrational fears). Ellen goes into a shuddering, spasmodic rapture when the creature reaches out to her; she is described as someone who “has always been conducive to these cosmic forces” and “has had these spells since childhood.”
Most modern bloodsuckers are not this profoundly physically disgusting. The default vampire has, for decades, been various flavors of dangerously sexy, encompassing everything from Christopher Lee’s tall, dark and handsome Drac; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ misunderstood antihero in TV’s Dracula; Anne Rice’s Lestat; the badass rural outlaws of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark; Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen; and much of the recurring cast of HBO’s True Blood. They might appear vile when they feed, as in Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II, where they open up their faces to reveal serrated maws, but otherwise they are swaggering goth punks and hunks. The notion of an attractive-or-at-least-presentable vampire originated with Lugosi, whose version of the Count was perfected in 1927 Broadway production and imported to the screen. Brad Weisman’s horror survey Lost in the Dark says Lugosi had “undeniable charisma” and describes his Dracula as “a suave, slick European noble, cutting in on the girlfriends of his enemies.” The charisma seems more deniable 96 years later, but in fairness, this is probably due to subsequent, edgier interpretations and the, ahem, countless parodies of Lugosi’s Dracula, including Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.
The incremental handsome-ization of Dracula and other vampire characters has been linked to the concept of assimilation, not just of Eastern European Jews in England (and later, the United States) but foreigners generally. Rob Silverman-Ascher, writing for heyalma, views the Lugosi version of Dracula as a major marker in the long journey of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews and other people who had been designated as Others and/or foreigners. “It is not far-fetched to claim that Count Dracula offers himself as a privileged focus for any inquires into the possibilities of liberation within Western civilization,” writers Silverman-Ascher, noting that, over time, “the vampire shifted from a cruel Jewish caricature to just another white guy with a complicated political history. As we began to benefit from white privilege, so did the vampire.”
Furthering that idea, horror scholar Robin Wood points out that the vampire hunter character in such stories — often named Van Helsing, but called Professor Albin Eberhard von Franz in Eggers’ film — is often a “foreigner” himself, because “the good and noble British (and the American) cannot cope with Dracula.” Just as Eggers’ movie merges old and new vampire interpretations, maintaining Dracula’s uncanny persuasiveness while reinstating the sickening qualities of an ambassador of plague, his story merges the Germanic identity of previous Nosferatus with the Englishness of so many newer ones by setting the movie in Germany yet casting mainly UK actors and letting them speak in their own accents. Both approaches to the story treat any country East of Germany as capital-“G” Grimm, an unknowable but compelling mystery, like the concepts of evil, or death.
After all that, Eggers’s version of Nosferatu presents a vampire who is both a scary, pathetic, inexplicably irresistible ex who can’t let go of an old love, marinating in romantic obsession, melodramatic self-pity, and despair; and an unknowable, fearsome Other, so disgusting you feel as if you can smell his rotting stench. It’s simultaneously a eerily ancient and timelessly relatably interpretation, thick with Jungian and Freudian allusions, yet maintaining the kind of plausible deniability that allows viewers to believe that the characters would never describe their experiences that way — and that we are seeing people and situations from an earlier century, without the superimposition of modern consciousness and the condescension that often accompanies it. In the end, Eggers’s movie is everywhere at once, every flavor of the genre, and, hopefully, the new uber-text of vampire cinema.
