How disgusting is Nosferatu by Robert Eggers? Absolutely disgusting

The standard vampire has been dangerously sexy in various variations for decades. This is just disgusting.
Photo: Aidan Monaghan/Focus Features

The title character by Robert Eggers Nosferatuplayed by Bill Skarsgard under heavy makeup, is a monster through and through. His skin has the grayish pallor of rotten beef, covered in crusts and open sores. There is only a small piece of hair left on his head, but it is so long that it clings to his skull like shed snakeskin. His pointed nails are not reminiscent of claws like in FW Murnau’s original from 1922 Nosferatu or Werner Herzog’s retelling from 1979, but human nails that were allowed to grow until they curled up. He has the broad shoulders and height characteristic of the dashing vampires that Christopher Lee plays in a Hammer horror film or Frank Langella on Broadway, but also the high arched forehead and arched nose that we associate with the iconic character in Associate Murnau’s film. Nosferatu presents this identity to the non-vampire world, and it is only slightly less hideous than his true form revealed in drawings and in the film’s “feeding” scenes: a mangy, emaciated wolf rodent with stalk-like legs, dry- he fucks his victims and slurps blood straight from their hearts.

And yet his voice. It attempts to negate the objectively grotesque appearance and make it beguiling despite all its obvious hideousness. Nosferatu has a flowery “Transylvanian” accent recognizable from many Dracula adaptations, starting with the 1931 Tod Browning hit that made Hungarian immigrant Bela Lugosi a horror star, and Eggers’ theatrical sound mix leaves the deep, rumbling words that he speaks ring out in the viewer’s head. Anyone who meets or even hears of Nosferatu knows that he is enticing, not in the sexualized, What a dream ship sense, but as a mesmerizing beast whose commands are difficult to resist, even when the intended victim knows they are in the presence of pure evil. Unfortunately, the main object of Eggers’ vampire attention, Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter, is a victim of a foretold fate (a scenario repeated in all of Eggers’ films, which seek to displace modern, secular ways of thinking and the audience into original, irrational fears). Ellen falls into a shuddering, convulsive ecstasy as the creature reaches for her; She is described as someone who was “always conducive to these cosmic forces” and “had these spells since childhood.”

Most modern bloodsuckers aren’t that physically hideous. The standard vampire has been dangerously sexy in various iterations for decades, encompassing everything from Christopher Lee’s tall, dark and handsome Drac; Jonathan Rhys-Meyers’ misunderstood anti-hero on television Dracula; Anne Rice’s Lestat; Kathryn Bigelow’s tough rural outlaws Almost dark; Robert Pattinson’s Edward Cullen; and much of HBO’s recurring cast True blood. They could appear hideous when eating, like Guillermo del Toro Blade IIwhere they open their faces to reveal jagged maws, but otherwise they’re swaggering goth punks and hunks. The idea of ​​an attractive, or at least presentable, vampire came from Lugosi, whose version of the Count was perfected and transferred to the screen in a 1927 Broadway production. Brad Weisman’s Horror Survey Lost in the dark says Lugosi had “undeniable charisma” and describes his Dracula as “a polite, slick European nobleman who preys on his enemies’ girlfriends.” The charisma seems more deniable 96 years later, but to be fair it is probably due to later, edgier interpretations and the, um, countless parodies of Lugosi’s Dracula, including Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein.

The increasing embellishment of Dracula and other vampire characters became associated with the concept of assimilation, not only of Eastern European Jews in England (and later the United States), but of foreigners in general. Rob Silverman-Ascher, writer for heyalmaconsiders the Lugosi version of Dracula to be an important milestone in the long journey of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews and other people labeled Other and/or foreigners. “It is not a stretch to suggest that Count Dracula presents himself as a privileged focal point for all investigations into the possibilities of liberation within Western civilization,” writes Silverman-Ascher, noting that “the vampire evolves over time cruel Jews.” Cartoon of another white man with a complicated political past. When we began to benefit from white privilege, the vampires benefited too.”

To develop this idea further, horror researcher 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 a “foreigner” himself because “the good and Noble.” The British (and the Americans) can’t cope with Dracula.” Just as Eggers’ film combines old and new vampire interpretations, maintaining Dracula’s uncanny persuasiveness while at the same time the hideous ones Restores the qualities of a messenger of the plague, his story merges with the Germanic identity of his predecessors NosferatuIt’s similar to the Englishness of so many recent films, in that the film is set in Germany but casts mostly British actors and has them speak in their own accents. Both approaches to the story treat each country east of Germany as a capital “G” Grimm, an unknowable but compelling mystery, like the concepts of evil or death.

After all that, Eggers’ version of Nosferatu presents a vampire who is simultaneously a creepy, pathetic and inexplicably irresistible ex, unable to let go of an old love and marinating in romantic obsession, melodramatic self-pity and despair; and an unknowable, frightening Other so disgusting that you feel like you can smell its rotting stench. It’s at once an eerily ancient and timelessly relatable interpretation, full of Jungian and Freudian allusions, while still maintaining the kind of plausible deniability that makes the viewer believe that the characters would never describe their experiences in this way – and that we people and situations See the earlier century from a different perspective, without the overlay of modern consciousness and the condescension that often comes with it. Ultimately, Eggers’ film is everywhere at once, in all facets of the genre and hopefully the new supertext of vampire cinema.