Make Vampires Scary Again...
First thoughts on Nosferatu (2024): a vampire film for MAGA times
I still haven’t got around to doing that introduction, so you might be wondering why someone who promises to write about our cultural imaginations on tech is writing a post about a vampire movie.
There’s a story here.
I mean, the short answer is that I want to talk about monsters of all kinds, not just mechanical ones. But especially monsters of the 21st century. So there’s that. But there’s also a better story here.
Back so many years ago, before I described my job as a ‘Researcher on the cultural and social impacts of robotics and AI’, I was teaching literary theory and cultural studies at the School of English at the University of Sheffield. (I was also teaching psychoanalytic theory at the School of Medicine… more on that later. [Oh, please don’t start that shit again.])
I was caffeinating in Starbucks before class one morning, thinking about the research project I was about to commit to. I thought about the preliminary work I had done, the chapter breakdown, the overall plan, and what research I still needed to do. The plan was to write a cultural history of vampires. And then my friend, the brilliant Professor of Cognitive Robotics Tony Prescott, turns up.
I hadn’t seen Tony in a while but, as is his way, he cuts to the chase pretty quickly: ‘Hey. You do culture studies and pop culture stuff. Why are we afraid of robots?’
I can be honest now because it all worked out ok, but I hadn’t really given that question much thought. I had long been interested in technology and computers, but I had never researched the area or even studied sci-fi lit or film in any depth before. But I knew why Tony was asking: the news was full of stories around this time about the perils of ‘Frankenstein Foods’: the genetically modified crops that were being trialled at various sites across the UK and about which a lot of the media - on both the left and right - were whipping up waves of frenzy and fear.
It seemed obvious that people who worked in robotics would want to avoid similar bad press and having their work and research be so negatively perceived by the public.
So having just been in deep thought about vampires, I wondered, Why are we afraid of vampires? and in my mind’s eye, I crossed out the word vampire, substituted the word robot in its place, and just started talking.
Tony listened patiently and then said, ‘We should write a paper.’ And the rest, as they say… (The first paper that I did as a result of this conversation, ‘Freud, Frankenstein and our fear of robots: projection in our cultural perception of technology’ you can find here. Yes, I’m afraid I’ve got a bit of a thing for alliteration.)
So, while I want to write here about all sorts of things related to technology and twenty-first-century monsters, I have some unfinished business with vampires.
To Nosferatu, then. This 2024 version is directed by Robert Eggers and stars Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlock, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and - intriguingly - Willem Dafoe, who (a neat bit of trivia here) not only keeps popping up in Robert Eggers films (The Northman, The Lighthouse) but also played Max Schrek in a fantastic post-modern turn as an actual vampire playing Count Orlock in the in Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a fictional imagining of the filming of the 1922 original. (Definitely going to re-watch that, too.)
And really, Eggers’s 2024 version is remarkably true to the spirit of the 1922 original in many ways. Obviously, it’s a modern movie with many of the innovations that weren’t available in the original (like sound, colour, better cinematography and special effects, and more relaxed censorship laws), but there is a lot about it - the Romantic visuals, hyperbolic language, the themes and the plot - that make it also feel like a very traditional vampire movie. (Just like Eggers’s 2015 The Witch is, in many ways, a very traditional folk-horror film about witches.)
But then, why am I writing about 2024 Nosferatu now? If I want to write about 21st-century monsters - and I do - why am I writing about a film that is a remake of a 20th-century film about a monster that most definitely belongs in the 19th century?
And that’s the great thing. This film reclaims vampires as a bona fide 21st-century monster.
This is a vampire movie where vampires are scary again. A real monster. (Others have noticed this, too.) And we need vampires to be monstrous again, in an age when we need to be afraid of nasty, blood-sucking, life-draining, wealthy aristocrats descending from their castles to pray upon we innocent victims.
In my aborted cultural history of vampires, there was an obvious trajectory. The vampire has long been a figure of mythology for many cultures, of course, but its 19th-century incarnation, particularly as portrayed by Bram Stoker, lept more widely into the popular imagination, and it’s the descendants of that particular vampire that we inherited in the 20th century.
That vampire, Stoker’s Dracula, was such a perfect monster for his age because he was such a perfect receptacle for so many of the fears and anxieties of the 19th century. In a single, horrific figure, you could find the fear of the foreigner, indistinguishable from the locals, stalking our cities; fear of the ancient order infecting our modern world; fear of disease polluting our blood; fear of unspoken sexual desire… I could write a book. Well, I could have, once upon a time.
This version of the vampire survived into the 20th century, but not for long. Dracula Jr. - who shared the name, at least - such as that portrayed by Christopher Lee and the like wasn’t radically different from the 19th-century incarnation. But by the late 20th century, while still a useful container for all our nasty projections (to use the psychoanalytic language in my robotics paper), the vampire started to become something of a idol rather than a monster.
The 21st century, of course, completed the conversion with Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series, first published in 2005 and finding its way to our screens in 2008. The vampires of Twilight, despite half-hearted nods to moral complexity, are the heroes of the story. They glitter in the sunlight. I mean… Come on. These are vampires that would be despised by any true fan of Stoker’s Dracula, yet, for me, they are no less significant or interesting from a cultural perspective. They’re just not ‘monsters’ by any stretch of the imagination.
What Eggers has done with his remake is give us a vampire that is scary again. Count Orlock (certainly not Dracula, but yes, completely Dracula) is a vampire that revives all the old themes which, by virtue of the nightmare times in which we’re living, are all back in fashion again and so completely relevant all of a sudden.
Eggers’s Nosferatu’s relationship to Murnau’s original is like the relationship of Pierre Menard’s Quixote to Cervantes’s original. It is refreshing and new and radical simply by being faithful to the original but experienced in completely different context, in a new age, that demands that we, as viewers, come to the film from a completely different perspective.
(If you’re not familiar with Jorge Luis Borges’s work, you can read it here, get a summary here, and hear a new take here. It’s so good. It helps us understand how and why we keep re-reading great art in new ways, in new contexts, with new generations. It’s a great (and short) work that I’d love to get the chance to talk about more sometime. It used to figure so prominently in my seminars back when I used to teach literature…)
So when we see the well-known themes of Murnau’s Nosferatu (and, by extension of course, Stoker’s Dracula) in Eggers’s version, we are forced to confront contemporary resonances. When we see women being forced to wear a corset to bed, we know we’re looking at a 19th-century society that sought to control and shape women’s bodies in very specific ways to serve a patriarchal agenda. And we are forced to confront the misogyny of our own age and what we see happening to women in the US with the rise of ethno-Christian nationalism.
Likewise, the religious fanaticism of Herr Knock (Murnau’s version of Renfrew) and his mad, slavish dedication to his master are no longer from a safe distance of knowing that is in the past. We hear Knock’s language and can’t help but also hear those evangelicals and fanatics who are increasingly propping up the (far-)right in American politics.
Of course, today, when we see that Orlock has brought a plague that is tearing through Wisburg, we are forced to think of the Covid-19 pandemic of four years ago, perhaps not unlike how Murnau’s audiences in 1922 would have remembered the Spanish flu global pandemic of 1918.
When Hutter (played by Nicholas Hoult, the Harker character in Dracula) hesitates to sign the paperwork that will allow Orlock to move to Wisburg, Orlock tempts him with 'your commission' and drops before Hutter a bag heavy with coin. Ultimately, against his better judgment, Hutter succumbs to his greed. Choosing compliance and meagre financial rewards instead of moral integrity is something else we probably know too much about today.
Our 2024 Nosferatu is made to feel more modern, too, by a much more explicit portrayal of sexuality - not that there is much explicit sex itself, despite what could be permissible in today’s cinema. Let’s say that this version wears its Freud on its sleeve. An undergraduate student in literature could read Dracula or watch Murnau’s film and miss how they show what happens when repressed sexuality is allowed to bubble back to the surface. Nobody could miss that watching Eggers’s version.
This is something that is evident, too, in Eggers’s debut The Witch, which seems to have itself sparked a little psychoanalytic cultural theory revival (and I’m sorry to say it but it can’t be helped: there will most certainly be more on that in these pages later.) Like The Witch, Eggers’s Nosferatu draws direct and very heavy lines between our anxieties death, disease, animals, rationality and sexuality.
Freud would love this film. But it would make even him blush and excitedly point with his cigar declaring, See! See! I told you!
As we reach the film’s climax, Dafoe’s Professor von Franz says, ‘We must know the evil to destroy it’, which is lovely, old-school nineteenth-century horror stuff. Not only Freud but Foucault would love this, too.
In the history and study of monsters, a simple dichotomy is understood (we can quibble how much of it is an ‘oversimplified’ dichotomy): The vampire is the elite as monster, the zombie is the unwashed masses as monster. Descriptions of the capitalist as a vampire sucking the life from the proletariat goes back to Marx himself, while zombies have always been tied to racism, consumerist culture, and the threats that the proletariat, in turn, represent to the elites. Vampires are the 1%; zombies are the other 99%. (This neat phrase is also deployed here.) Many people (for example and for example) have tried variations of an economic-cultural timeline where the rise in vampire literature/films coincides with a greater cultural fear of elites driven by poor economic performance, while the rise of zombie (literature)/films coincides with a rise in a great cultural fear of the mindless crowds in times of prosperity.
If this is true - and I think there are versions of this that are - then we are a culture at a point in history that absolutely needs to see that vampires are horrible, orange-skinned, blood-sucking, tech-bro, fanged, ‘Roman saluting’, transphobic, evil monsters.
These are just some first thoughts. I’ll have to wait for the film to come out on streaming services to really sink my teeth into all of these themes [see what I did there?]. If you have any more thoughts, post in the comments.