Nosferatu (2024)

Who’s the Monster is a game we play in my I Was a Teenage Monster class. We use it to explore books and movies that represent dynamic relationships between so-called humans and so-called monsters. We apply the concept of the constitutive outside via Judith Butler. It describes the way humanism works, and it also describes the way homophobia works. The homophobe constructs their identity in relation to what they cast away: They are not-gay, and they need a vilified concept of gayness to fortify their own sense of straight and normal. Their identity is hateful, and they are obsessed with what and whom they deny. Humanists make a similar maneuver in deciding what is and isn’t human in order to privilege the presiding subject. In monster theory, the human is that fragile, guarded not-monster ever on the lookout for evil others.

In Robert Eggers’ telling, we learn right away that Ellen Hutter has a defining relationship with the vampyr, who tells her she is not human. This is her fundamental understanding of herself in the world. We see her try to communicate the source of what others call her melancholy spirit to her husband, who tells her not to say those things out loud. It gets a laugh in the theater. She suffers nightly from what others call trances or fits, and in daylight hours she attempts to put off her dark thoughts, while others walk eggshells around her, but also appear to barely put up with her expressive excess and willful self-possession. Meanwhile we are led to understand that she is actually possessed by the vampyr.

The thing is, Ellen is way more compelling, and ultimately more formidable, than Nosferatu. And she is as much a monster as Count Orlok is. Further, she possesses the vampyr as much as the vampyr possesses her. Nosferatu is not a projection or manifestation of her troubled soul or anything like that. Nosferatu is her Other. And there’s a lot more of her than there is of the vampyr, and not just because of Nosferatu’s advanced state of decay. Our first image of Nosferatu is a shadow carried by a curtain in Ellen’s bedroom. In her presence he is no more than a lace-thin wraith, until she summons the vampyr to hold him down in the light at the end of the film. We hesitate to gender Nosferatu (as we do with any non-human monster), except that Nosferatu is explicitly masculinized throughout the film—from the booming basso profundo voice to the brushy mustache to the dangling dongferatu, and of course the aggressive toxic masculinity of his imperial, domineering behavior. Monsters do tend to exhibit a gendering effect in proximity to humans—another constitutive outside.

This could all be quite the setup for Ellen’s feminist triumph if she wasn’t stuck in this particular story world. Instead, she’s essentially fucked to death as a martyr, which truly fucking sucks.

And here’s the other thing with stories, especially ones that have floated around for over 100 years. They belong to us all, and we have equal responsibility (and agency) for shaping them. If we don’t like something about a version we come across, we are free to re-render that detail in our own tellings. Robert Eggers gives us a compelling take on Nosferatu, even if Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu is overcooked and underwhelming, which disallows us from feeling empathy for the vampyr, as Max Schreck and Klaus Kinski compel us to do. Lily-Rose Depp gives us a powerful Ellen Hutter who’s done wrong by the filmic world she seems to be trapped in. But we are free to imagine her escape, through death or revision or both. We remember Greta Schröder and Isabelle Adjani as Ellen (or Lucy) killing the vampire, and their ghosts visit Ellen’s reappearance in 2024. Depp’s performance, even among the limitations of this telling, fills out this character, takes her for a walk on that cemetery beach, and flexes so hard she blurs. We’re here for that—and we’re her for that—in all our powerful monstrosity and humanity. 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.

—J †Johnson