Nosferatu (2024): The Shadow

“How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole.”

                                                                                 - Carl Jung, from Modern Man in Search of a Soul

I don’t think I’m coming up with anything revelatory when I say that vampires are often symbolic of what psychologist Carl Jung referred to as “the shadow.” It’s the part of us that we don’t like to acknowledge, our flaws, failings, shames, as well as our more potentially monstrous qualities. Qualities that are, nevertheless, part of us. Vampires historically represent our darkest desires and the equally dark means by which we satisfy those desires. This is all firmly in “no shit, Sherlock” territory.

And yet, they’re also just as often depicted as romantic figures, doomed to spend an eternity watching their loved ones waste away while they live forever, as if they’re the real victims here. You don’t even need to go as far as the Twilight movies to find this, though they’re probably the most egregious in this regard. And…I don’t like that. I tend to prefer films where our sympathies lie with the victims, not the monster. It’s possible to write a monster who is sympathetic, or has sympathetic elements. Hell, it’s possible to write a vampire like that, but if we’re talking classic vampires, as often as not they’re suave and charming, with fangs. And I like my monsters to be monsters.

Which is one of many things the 2024 remake of Nosferatu does right. It manages to take a well-traveled story and put some interesting spins on it, while still acknowledging its roots in German Expressionism. It’s reverent, but not rigidly so, and takes advantage of an established story to tweak some of the particulars in interesting ways.

It opens on a lonely little girl, who wishes only for a friend. There’s something special about her, she has visions, prophetic dreams. And it is in her dreams that someone comes to visit her, someone who wishes to be her friend.

Someone rotting and hulking, with long sharp fingers, and sharper teeth. And the sharpest of appetites.

The film picks up many, many years later, with the little girl - Ellen Hutter - all grown up and married to Thomas Hutter, a young man with employment at a prestigious real estate firm. He is eager to establish himself, to begin building his household so he and Ellen can begin their family. Mr. Knock, a senior partner at his firm, has a very special assignment for him. They have a very wealthy client, Count Orlok, who wishes to purchase an old, dilapidated property in their city; Thomas is dispatched to Carpathia to meet the client and secure his signature and payment.

Needless to say, it goes much, much worse than expected. If you’ve read Dracula, or seen adaptations of Dracula, you know the characters and the general story beats. Bram Stoker’s estate sued the ever-living fuck out of F.W. Murnau for making the original Nosferatu, which just moved Stoker’s story from England to Germany and changed a bunch of names. Fortunately, some copies of Murnau’s film escaped court-ordered destruction, and it’s gone on to become one of the most influential horror films ever made, inspiring multiple remakes and copies, and even fictional accounts of its making. So if someone is going to make yet another run at this story, it’s going to need to be very good and make some kind of unique contribution to justify its own existence, and luckily this film does exactly that.

First, it does some interesting things with the protagonists. The two most important women in the story - known originally as Mina Murray and Lucy Westenra – are usually portrayed as delicate hothouse flowers, fainting paragons of femininity who exist only to be rescued and defended. Here, they have a fair amount of agency. Anna Harding, wife to Thomas’ friend Friedrich (a prosperous shipbuilder) has two children and another on the way, and doesn’t want to see her husband and father of her children going off doing weird, dangerous shit. She isn’t shrewish or hectoring, just assertive as someone in her position would be. And Ellen Hutter is much more central to the story than Mina Murray usually is. She appears to have some kind of psychic ability or insight into the spirit world, and it is this ability that draws Orlok to her as a child. It’s not addressed explicitly in the film, but Orlok claiming her as a child and coming to collect her once she reaches adulthood does feel a little like she has been groomed, which makes Orlok even more monstrous in a way not normally seen in versions of this story.

Ellen refuses to be sheltered and defended, and is essential to the monster’s undoing, not just Hutter’s prize for defeating the monster. She is haunted and tormented by what happened to her as a child, and as Orlok’s influence begins to assert itself, she turns feral, in a performance reminiscent of (and apparently directly inspired by) Isabelle Adjani’s absolutely unhinged turn in Possession. It’s striking, and gives the character much more power than she usually gets. The doctor is competent, the Van Helsing character is suitably eccentric, but in a way that isn’t necessarily comic. He’s less a vampire hunter than a renegade scientist occupied with mysticism, and this film’s Renfield isn’t who you’re expecting. Making Harding a shipbuilder adds a little something to the Demeter’s return (its brief moment in the story more interesting than the trailer for the feature-length exploration of its voyage released a couple of years ago), and there’s a return to the idea of the vampire as disease-bringer, as its return heralds the arrival of a plague that punctuates the urgency of the situation throughout the second half of the film. Nobody is dramatically different, everyone plays the same roles, but who they are is just different enough to feel fresh.

And this film’s Count Orlok is one of the most impressive takes on a vampire I’ve seen to date. Ironically, part of what makes him feel so different from prior depictions is a return to the earliest ideas for the character. He’s a Carpathian nobleman, with an appearance roughly similar to that of Vlad Tepes and the assured arrogance of the nobility. He is someone who does not countenance being refused and will exercise his considerable power to take whatever he wants. He’s a decaying figure in decaying royal finery, with a voice that fills space and a raw appetite for blood that disregards gender and charm. This vampire does not seduce. He feeds. There is nothing romantic about this vampire. He is a monster in totality, and even shrouded in darkness, his evil radiates from the screen. There are some hints that he has been drawn or summoned here through the use of old, dark magic, and it serves to emphasize that he is something utterly outside of humanity.

And this film has a lot of darkness in it. It’s not shot in black and white, but it might as well be for as desaturated as everything is. There’s a blue tint to things that suggests cold, contrasted with the warm tones of home and hearth (and the cleansing, purgative power of fire) and the bright red of blood. This is a world with very little color, and even less as Orlok’s influence spreads, shown in one striking sequence as the shadow of a clawed hand stretching across the city. It’s one of many nods to Murnau’s original expressionist use of shadow, incorporated throughout. It’s a less-stylized film than Murnau’s original, but it definitely knows its roots.

There have been so many tellings and retellings and remakes and reboots of the classic Dracula story (not to mention all of the other vampire films out there), but this one more than any other I’ve seen engages with the idea of shadow, both cinematically and in the Jungian sense. This vampire is just on this side of humanoid, human enough that that’s how we read him, but horrible enough to evoke a sense of repulsion and horror; it’s underscored at the climax in a way that manages to engage with more romantic ideas of the vampire, simultaneously acknowledging and subverting them, ending the film with a deeply powerful image that takes the beautiful, the primal, and the grotesque and burns them into your brain. This vampire, more than most, is our shadow.

IMDB entry