How gross is Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu? Absolutely disgusting

For decades, the standard vampire has been various variants of dangerously sexy. This one is just ugly.
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features

The title character by Robert Eggers Nosferatuplayed by Bill Skarsgard under heavy makeup, is every inch a monster. His skin has the grayish pallor of rotten beef, covered with scabs and open sores. There is only a small amount of hair left on the top of his head, but it is so long that it clings to his skull like shed snakeskin. His pointed nails do not suggest claws, as in FW Murnau’s original 1922 Nosferatu or Werner Herzog’s 1979 retelling, but human nails allowed to grow into the curled. He has the broad shoulders and height characteristic of the handsome vampires played by Christopher Lee in a Hammer horror film or Frank Langella on Broadway, but also the high-domed forehead and curved 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 hideous than his true form, revealed in drawings and in the film’s “feeding” scenes: a crooked, emaciated wolf-rodent with stick-like legs, dry-humping his victims, while slurping blood straight from their hearts.

And yet his voice. It strives to negate the objectively grotesque appearance and make him seductive despite all this obvious loathing. Nosferatu has a flowery “Transylvanian” accent recognizable from many film adaptations of Dracula, starting with the 1931 Tod Browning hit that earned a horror star from Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi, and Eggers’ theatrical sound mix gets the deep, rumbling words, he speaks to, to seem problem. from within the viewer’s mind. Anyone who meets or even hears about Nosferatu knows that he does not entice in the sexualized, what a dream boat meaning, but as a mesmerizing beast whose commands are hard to resist even when the intended victim knows they are in the presence of pure evil. Unfortunately, the primary object of Eggers’ vampire’s attention, Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter, is a victim of a foretold fate (a scenario that recurs in all of Eggers’ films, which strive to push away modern, secular mindsets and immerse viewers in the original, irrational fear). Ellen goes into a shuddering, convulsive rapture as 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 that deeply physically repulsive. For decades, the standard vampire has been various variations of dangerously sexy, including everything from Christopher Lee’s tall, dark and handsome Drac; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ misunderstood anti-hero in TVs Dracula; Anne Rice’s Lestat; Kathryn Bigelow’s Bad Rural Outlaws Near Darkness; Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen; and a large part of the returning cast of HBO’s True blood. They can seem disgusting when they feed, like in Guillermo del Toro Blade IIwhere they open their faces to reveal jagged maws but are otherwise bragging 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 the 1927 Broadway production and imported to the screen. Brad Weisman’s horror investigation Lost in the Dark says Lugosi had “undeniable charisma” and describes his Dracula as “a sweet, smooth European nobleman who cuts into his enemies’ girlfriends.” The charisma seems more undeniable 96 years later, but in fairness that is probably due to subsequent, more edgy interpretations and ahem, countless parodies of Lugosi’s Dracula, i.a Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.

The gradual beautiful-ization of Dracula and other vampire characters has been associated with the concept of assimilation, not only of Eastern European Jews in England (and later the United States), but foreigners in general. Rob Silverman-Ascher, write for cheersconsiders the Lugosi version of Dracula an important marker in the long journey of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews and other people who had been designated as other and/or alien. “It is not far-fetched to suggest that Count Dracula offers himself as a privileged focus for any inquiry into the possibilities of liberation within Western civilization,” writes Silverman-Ascher, noting that the vampire over time shifted from a cruel Jewish caricature of just another white guy with a complicated political history. When we started taking advantage of white privilege, so did the vampire.”

Continuing this idea, horror scholar Robin Wood points out that the vampire hunter character in such stories—often called Van Helsing, but called Professor Albin Eberhard von Franz in Eggers’ film—is often himself a “foreigner” because “the good and noble British (and the Americans) can’t handle Dracula.” Just as Eggers’ film mixes old and new vampire interpretations, maintaining Dracula’s sinister persuasiveness while reinstating the morbid qualities of an ambassador of the plague, his story fuses the Germanic identity of the past. Nosferatus with the Englishness of so many recent ones by setting the film in Germany and yet casting mainly British actors and having 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, Egger’s version of Nosferatu presents a vampire who is both a terrifying, 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, terrifying Other, so vile that you feel as if you can smell his putrid stench. It’s at once an eerily old and timelessly relatable interpretation, replete 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 see people and situations from an earlier century, without the superimposition of modern consciousness and the condescension that often accompanies it. In the end, Eggers’ film is everywhere at once, every flavor of the genre, and hopefully the new uber-text of vampire movies.