While the realm of horror cinema continuously stands as a place of dramatic transformation, reflecting society’s deepest fears in its multifaceted narratives and portrayals, only a few have emerged as terrifyingly timeless as bloodthirsty vampires. This eerie vision was brought to life by F.W. Murnau in Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, the chilling 1922 silent film that first introduced Count Orlok in all his vampiric glory on the silver screen. But as time went on, the focus on his tale began to shift to other bloodsucker myths, such as the adaptations of Bram Stoker’s original novel Dracula.
A century later, Nosferatu arose from its deep slumber through the reimagination of the classic tale. The haunting heart of the film is in the casting of Bill Skarsgård and Lily-Rose Depp as the terrifying Count Orlok and the ingenious Ellen Hutter, respectively. Guided by the hands of Robert Eggers, a filmmaker renowned for his contributions to period and atmospheric horror, the 2024 adaptation promises its audience a sensual yet mortifying return to the genre’s petrifying origins and sinister desires.
A nonpareil of horror
Much like Eggers’ past works, Nosferatu drapes itself in an atmosphere of unrelenting dread, pulling the audience deeper into the shadows through the combination of spellbinding cinematography, score, and set design. Steeped in the morbid and the macabre, the film did not shy away from visualizing the grotesque and uncanny.
Immediately from the opening sequence, as Lily-Rose Depp’s hypnotizing performance of Ellen exudes its captivating magic, a feeling of a larger presence looms beyond sight. In her desperate pleas to the starless night, the viewers are forced to bear witness to her torturous unraveling. But, as if an answer to her anguished prayer, an encroaching figure called upon her in response—the gnarled voice could only signify the foreboding presence of Count Orlok’s return. The film’s prelude effortlessly sets the scene for the horrors to come.
The cure to one’s affliction
Under the moon’s veracious light, Count Orlok stood as a mass of raw flesh and desire, nothing more but a manifestation of primitive appetite. Now faced with the true visage of her phantom torturer, Ellen’s purity poetically contrasted Orlok’s putrid nature: Eggers illustrates horror through the uncontrollable and the Count as a personification of ‘the id’—a center for primal pleasure and instant gratification. He acts as a creature of insatiable lust, violating the sanctity of humanity and befouling all that his shadow grazes. Count Orlok’s intricate relationship with Ellen, in all its gory glory, represents psychosexual control and inhibited liberty, and Nosferatu quietly falls into the trap of puritan beliefs surrounding the female body.
In a classic narrative of light against darkness, the contrast of characters is conveyed through visual imagery. Ellen is draped in light-flowing garments softly illuminated by candles and moonlight. Meanwhile, Orlok towered in layers of heavy clothing, shrouded by the mystique of the shadows. The innocent yet tortured maiden is depicted as a helpless victim who struggles to find her identity in the face of lurking evil. For many viewers, Ellen represents a simple woman seeking empowerment and freedom against prolonged mental and emotional abuse. This element of female autonomy ultimately made the film’s culmination all the more tragic. In Ellen’s final act of defiance and first display of true free will, she allowed darkness to consume her entirely.
With Ellen becoming an eventual sacrifice for the Count, the film seemingly reduces her character to her sexual status. Like other motion pictures, Nosferatu perpetuates the idea of virginity as the highest form of purity—the only “true weapon” against evil. Even in her dwindling moments, Ellen’s decisions were not guided by personal interests but rather by the welfare of others. Her choice may have been depicted as an act of liberty, but Ellen was forced into an impossible dilemma: to conform to Orlok’s orders or condemn the living to a lifetime of suffering. As the film closes with the striking image of death and the maiden in a warm embrace, audiences are first left to marvel at Ellen’s brave act of heroism. However, as the Count lies atop the innocent maiden, the despair of injustice weighs down their hearts as Ellen becomes yet another female victim in horror fiction.
Hand in hand with death
Despite the doubts of many, Eggers managed to uniquely revive the gothic tale through a psychosexual-based relationship between Orlok and Ellen. While the sexual content may have overshadowed the concept of completely banishing evil, the film still gave Ellen the satisfaction of securing Orlok’s destruction in an implication that darkness cannot survive without a light to leech on. Their intertwined fate revealed a paradoxical message of how surrendering to darkness may sometimes bring light.
Nosferatu’s ending, however, did not provide Ellen justice, only using her gradual loss of autonomy as its central piece. Orlok withered along lilac flowers while she happily married death—a seemingly romantic end to the rat-infested plague. This portrayal only adds to the long-standing tradition of women in horror sacrificing themselves for the people’s salvation. The roulette of sexual shame and repression depicted in Ellen’s character could have been handled as an instrumental plot twist rather than an underwhelming and repetitive characterization of women’s eternal doom.
Nosferatu may not cater to everyone’s appetite, especially to those who seek fast-paced gothic storytelling. Some viewers may grow torn between the admiration for its aesthetics and the frustration with its predictability. While it has its share of blood-curdling sequences, intensified by the eerily realistic portrayal of Victorian body horror, the film refuses to be limited solely to visual terror by burrowing itself into the psychological and unknown.
Count Orlok’s presence transcends that of a mere predator; he becomes a force of destruction who embodies the physical decay of the body and psychological erosion of the mind. His looming figure is a metaphor for despair, like how Murnau’s 1922 film mirrored post-World War I anxieties. Yet, in Eggers’ adaptation, Orlok’s terror shifts to a modern context. His insatiable hunger and dominance over the weak reflect contemporary fears of unchecked power and the inescapable grasp of mortality. From Murnau’s vision of death and disease to Egger’s transformation of existential dread, Nosferatu remains a reflection of humanity’s plagues through time. What was once a creature of silent film now speaks to an audience on the inescapable truth of the human condition: fear.
Nosferatu does not just resurrect a classic horror tale; it reinvents itself as an allegory for the fragility of human will against the supernatural. In these spaces, whether of quiet resignation or frantic dread, Nosferatu cements itself as a true technical and cinematic masterpiece, proving that some horrors, like Count Orlok himself, are timeless.
