Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu (2024) is all appetite. From Count Orlok’s (Bill Skarsgård) castle—lush and fertile with decay—to the ornate yet sterile interiors of Wisborg, Germany, sexual desire illuminates each of the dim, macabre scenes characteristic of Eggers’s cinematography. The original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) subtly wove eroticism and sexuality into the encounters between the vampire and his victims. Eggers opts for a blunt reinterpretation of both sex and the vampire.
Lily Rose-Depp stars as Ellen Hutter, a newly married woman plagued by erotic nightmares and accompanying convulsions. These visions predict the arrival of Orlok, the vampiric presence she claims is a manifestation of her shame and sexual appetite. Ellen’s near-orgasmic spasms herald the arrival of this demonic sexual presence. Ellen is possessed by sexuality: her hips thrust into the air as men tie her down, she tears her bodice from her chest as her eyes roll back into her head, and she tells her husband Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) that he will never satisfy her as Orlok does.
Thomas’s encounters with Orlok are more rooted in sexual violence than sexual possession. Thomas is pressured to drink from a cup poured by Orlok, and he wakes the morning after, naked on the stone floor. Shredded, mottled wounds near his nipple are the only evidence of an encounter with Orlok he doesn’t remember. In a scene starkly different from the 1922 source material, Orlok rises from his coffin—completely nude—to chase Thomas, delivering Skarsgård’s vampiric full frontal. The chase culminates in a forced encounter on Orlok’s lavishly decaying bed, Thomas squirming beneath the pressure of the vampire’s sharp-toothed mouth on his chest. Eggers discards the clothed vampire in favor of a hulking wall of pale flesh, reminiscent more of Edward Cullen than the original Orlok.
Sexual unions reverberate throughout the original film, but Eggers amplifies this element to its maximum. Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) displays uncontrollable lust for his wife, defiles her corpse at the climax of the film, and dies between her splayed legs. Thomas attempts to prove his sexual superiority by shoving his wife against the wall in one of her trance-like fits. Eggers transforms Orlok’s bedside bloodsucking of Ellen, featured so prominently in the original film, into morbid coitus on a pseudo-marital bed. Ellen calls out to Orlok with a voice no previous adaptation afforded her and converts the violence inflicted upon her into a scene of agency for the victim-turned-heroine. Ellen willingly submits herself to Orlok, trapping him with her irresistible blood and irresistible sexuality. In a wedding veil and hair woven with pale violet flowers, Ellen does what no male character can do: destroy the beast.
These changes may seem excessive, indulgent, or pandering to the drooling vampire fanbase spawned by Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, but the sexuality that bleeds from Nosferatu is intentional and poignant. Eggers amplifies sexual deviancy, appetite, shame, violence, and agency of the original film for a contemporary audience that might need those concepts outlined in block letters. Although lacking in surgical precision and subtlety, Nosferatu is nevertheless a well-crafted work of art and a blockbuster treat.
