‘Nosferatu’ (2024) marries the beautiful and the grotesque

Published Jan. 28, 2025, 8:13 p.m., last updated Feb. 2, 2025, 8:04 a.m.

Spoiler warning: This article contains spoilers for “Nosferatu.”

The blending of vampires and sex doesn’t typically call to mind high art. The recently released Gothic horror film “Nosferatu” puts that assumption to shame.

An artful retelling of a previous 1922 retelling of Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” the 2024 Robert Eggers blockbuster “Nosferatu” shocks and disgusts. The movie follows a man named Thomas, his wife Ellen and the vampire Count Orlock, who unleashes evil, and a plague, onto a German town.

It feels wrong to call “Nosferatu” a vampire movie, or even the character Count Orlock (also called Nosferatu) a vampire. The contemporary associations we have with the supernatural archetype are not gruesome enough for this film. Nosferatu is not an Edward, or even a Dracula. He is a classical, deeply researched, cult-inspiring, grotesque embodiment of evil. “Nosferatu” follows how that evil spreads and infects people regardless of their purity or devoutness.

The movie’s first half was more artistic, and less focused on storytelling, while the second half balanced both. The disorienting dream and castle sequences in the first half were formally interesting, but mainly set the stage without moving the plot forward.

Aesthetics alone land “Nosferatu” into the category of beautiful and respectable art. The cinematography plays with symmetry and black-and-white; metaphor, when the shadow of a hand reaches across the town, spreading the horrific plague; and audio horror via Nosferatu’s voice, which was deep, growling and always sounded like it was coming from behind you.

In terms of action, “Nosferatu” hits its stride in its second half. Audiences get sucked in and succumb to the story of the madness, plague and death, right alongside the characters. 

The plague storyline was well-done, and even scarier than the vampire premise. The shots of rats scurrying around the city, which was just waiting to be infected, were eerily suspenseful. The nonchalant pans over streets littered with mangled corpses made for a horrific payoff.

Even more than aesthetics and plot, the movie is motivated by theme. The duality of obsessive religious worship to Nosferatu and embodied dream sequences about sex and sucking blood feel pertinent to deeper analysis. The film inspires ponderings on the ironic closeness of carnal desires and spiritual submission to a godlike figure. These desires stem from the same wish: to submit to and be dominated by another.

The themes of trauma, family and gender roles also loom large. Ellen’s traumatic connection to Nosferatu from childhood leads her to try to protect other children from the darkness. Thomas also only gets himself entangled with the vampire in the first place in an effort to support their family. 

The themes of psychological trauma and submission to desire come to a head in the weirdest scene of the film: Ellen has sex with her husband and Count Orlock at the same time (ish?). Maybe this is a “you had to be there” type scene — but the movie theater erupted in disgust and confusion, without time to process before the next scene began to flash.

One element that felt cliché to me was the skepticism of Ellen’s two friends in town, Anna and her husband Friedrich. They both insist that Ellen is “just going mad” and that supernatural magic cannot possibly be real. In these types of movies, there are always people who don’t believe in monsters, and those people always end up dead. The same thing happens here.

However, my biggest gripe with the film was that Count Orlock was not done well visually. To me, the title character vampire looked a little blurry and stupid. I see the influence of the 1922 silent film — the nose, the clothes, the silhouette — but the character felt obscured and out of reach in a way that made me less afraid of him. He seemed to have too much life in him, and was not imposing enough to others.

That said, the final shot of the movie was fantastic. Nosferatu has been exposed to sunlight and dies on top of Ellen, whose body he has completely drained of blood. The vampire’s death-like, horribly disfigured naked body lies on top of Ellen’s beautiful, hollow corpse, an image that encapsulates the movie overall. “Nosferatu” corrupts the beautiful through deeply aesthetic horror.

Editor’s Note: This article is a review and includes subjective thoughts, opinions and critiques.

Cate Burtner is the Vol. 267 Opinions Managing Editor and the Vol. 266 Reads Desk Editor. She is also an Arts & Life Staff Writer. She could talk about books all day.

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