I Watched Nosferatu So You Don't Have To

[kimberlysteele]

Johnny Depp's daughter is like this for a huge chunk of the movie. No wonder it was popular.

I am a busy, busy lady and though I have always enjoyed movies, I rarely have time to watch them like the good old days. Horror has always been my favorite genre, especially well-done psychological horror where one is required to read between the lines and copious gore isn’t necessary to induce chills. I do not believe I can be frightened by a horror movie — like Michael Keaton’s eponymous character in Beetlejuice, the Exorcist gets funnier every time I watch it. I love the Amityville story but it’s nowhere near scary. Hereditary was fascinating as a study in the mass invocation of the demon Paimon as he relates to the Covid 19 scare. Was it scary though? Not to me. My main takeaway after watching that film for the first time was that it was unfortunate the director decided to write a love letter to that particular entity, but whatever. I always loved The Ring, both the original Japanese Ringu version and the one with Naomi Watts. Neither were scary. Insidious, the yarn about the comatose kid who wanders the lower astral plane because his father has been stalked by the Hag since forever ago, is a ton of fun. Scary it is not — the demon/devil guy who is part of the lower astral dream sequence (they keep calling the lower astral plane The Further which always makes me giggle for no apparent reason) looks like the lovechild of the pointy haired boss from Dilbert and a lost member of the Insane Clown Posse. He is goofy and fun, not scary, at least not to me.

Despite my voracious appetite for horror films, it still took me two solid years to get around to watching Nosferatu, a remake of the 1922 classic film of the same name, which in itself was the film version of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula. This newish version was directed by Robert Eggers, whose breakout film was The VVitch (the Witch) which was a genuinely good original story by Eggers about a 1630s family who is cast out by their Quaker/Shaker brethren into the wilderness for being too radically, rabidly Christian. The dysfunctional, patriarchal family falls apart and succumbs to demonic influence out in the deep woods while they struggle to survive. A young girl named Thomasin (played by a not-yet-emaciated or plastic-surgeried Anya Taylor Joy) is the fascinating centerpiece of a complex and ultimately understated story.

The protagonist of 2024’s Nosferatu is a young lady named Ellen in 1830s Germany. Right out of the gate, Ellen is dramatically victimized when she wanders the bleak halls of her family’s mansion at night and stupidly conjures a demon lover out of loneliness and boredom, much like the urban legends of the teen girl who conjures the Candyman by saying “Candyman, candyman, candyman” while holding a candle in front of a bathroom mirror at a sleepover. The demon dude wastes no time hopping aboard that virgin train, and we are subjected to Ellen’s hentai-whimpering while she is deflowered by an invisible man.

Time passes and Ellen is a happily married newlywed. There is trouble in paradise, however, because she has night terrors and premonitions that are the consequence of having picked up that horny demon incubus-astral attachment from her younger years. Ellen, to abuse a more modern vernacular, can’t get no satisfaction, so when her new hubby tries to extricate himself from the bedchamber to go to a job interview, she tries to cajole, badger, and worry him into another round and makes him a bit late.

He gets the job anyways, and that is because it is rigged.

Can you rape a willing victim?

The New Yorker’s film reviewer Richard Brody sees Ellen as a victim and in its annoyingly paywalled review (of which I somehow got a sneak preview and am suddenly denied access, as if I could be bothered to care about or subscribe to the New Yorker) Ellen is depicted as a sweet young thing who is repeatedly raked over the coals by evilly evil vampire Orlok, according to Richard Brody:

“In Eggers’s telling of her past, Ellen, a lonely girl desperate for affection and attention, is supernaturally visited and physically raped by Orlok, with the result that she bears both his curse and his connection to the beyond.”

Despite her gothy darkness, Ellen is a Mary Sue who can never truly do anything wrong in Nosferatu. She’s less of a milksop than Bella of Twilight, but the tubercular vibe isn’t far off. Pale, wan, prone to crying fits and existential melancholy, we are supposed to be drawn in and enchanted by the girl who fell under the spell of the ghostly villain. Yet whenever we see Ellen being visited by her incubus, she appears to be having the time of her damn life, and that is because we are supposed to be titillated by her beatific innocence being corrupted.

Ellen is seen as cursed for the entire movie, but it is she who invited the curse, and until the absolute end of the movie, she keeps on inviting it in. The old lore about a vampire not being able to step over the threshold unless you invite him was meant to inform us that evil cannot truly get to you if you refuse to polarize with it, and modernites have utterly missed that memo as is proven by Nosferatu. Ellen is Persephonized as an eternally pure angel who could not possibly be held accountable for rolling out the red carpet for her incubus night after night, and this reluctance to shed the heavy victimization mantle is a signal that our culture still is tragicomically hung up on the Victorian era binary of virgin-whore.

Oh, holey plot

Eggers did a much better job realistically portraying the brutality and horror of 1630s pilgrim life in the Witch than he did with the stifling, Victorian repression of 1830s Germany in Nosferatu. For one, could we just set the story in England, considering that everyone in the movie has a British accent? When Count Orlok travels to Germany via boat from landlocked Transylvania/Bohemia, that would certainly make a great deal more sense if he was trying to get to the British Isles.

The scenes where Ellen’s husband Thomas runs off to the Carpathian mountains to get Orlok to ink a real estate deal are entertaining. Orlok’s environment features beautiful cinematography and lovely, artistic milieus that are often worthy of printing and framing.

The cringe does not happen until we hear Orlok, who is played by the typecast, always-relegated-as-a-monster-since-IT actor Bill Skarsgård, who for the life of him cannot speak in anything except bastardized, Harry Potter Latin and mangled, heavily-accented faux Russian-English. Dear gods, it’s so laughably bad. He’s supposed to be a reanimated corpse, yet he has had the mojo to groom his handlebar mustache and shave off his beard. His shoulders and arm muscles look as if he has spent time a gym. Presumably there were 24 hour gyms in 1830s Carpathia, or maybe he has a workout room in his castle basement?

Pornstache Nosferatu, ready to get some

Ellen is not scared of him — in fact, she can hardly wait for his arrival, at one point donning her damn wedding dress to be with him as she eagerly pants and pretends to protest her fate. She wants that gray-fleshed, hunchbacked creature with every fiber of her being, but because she’s a manic horndog, she also has a consistent appetite for her husband. 

Ellen’s long-suffering cuck husband, Thomas, ends up being drained/raped by Orlok while at the castle, and unlike his wife, he does not seem to enjoy it.

Portrait of a lady and her simp

He manages to escape by jumping out of a window into a river, somehow managing not to break his neck or both legs. He is carried downriver and rescued by a bunch of nuns.

Meanwhile, Orlok bails on his castle, having secured the land deal, and starts his pilgrimage for Ellen’s hometown, Wisburg, Germany. Like I said earlier, he does the illogical thing and takes a boat instead of just retracing the same route Thomas took to arrive at his castle. Orlok’s ship is full of fresh-from-the-coffin plague rats that infect the unfortunate sailors and eventually the village with blood-borne Yersinia pestis.

Ellen manifests increasing psychosis, including sexual psychosis where she tears at her own bodice and generally goes crazy for Orlok’s etheric vampire dick. In order to keep her “safe”, her husband has her shack up with their friends Friedrich and Anna, who is pregnant, and their two young girls. Ellen sleepwalks and generally turns the household into a godforsaken possession depot. Doctors are called in, including Ellen’s own doctor Wilhelm Sievers and his eccentric occultist-alchemist buddy, Albin von Franz (played by Willem Dafoe), who takes on the role of Van Helsing from other Dracula remakes.

As Thomas arrives home, having barely been healed by the nuns, the plague ship has arrived. Rats run around spreading bubonic malaise in Wisburg like a scene from the Decameron.

The superficial stuff

I think I have given enough spoilers at this point, so please indulge me as I complain about the superficial aspects of this film. The camera angles were annoyingly Hollywood, and the close ups and perfectly symmetrical, central frames of a single character were very narcissistic and self-conscious. Maybe this worked for The Witch but it falls flat in a vampire film. The whole film feels claustrophobic, despite being set outdoors for half the movie.

The costumes and wigs of this film were butt ugly. Not once do any of the female characters wear a pretty dress! I get it that Anna, Ellen’s friend, is a pregnant mom-to-be, but can we please dress her in something that does not look like it could be found in the 1800s equivalent of Target, if there was such a thing?

Look at the crinkling and straining of the material around the shoulders and the lack of ornament. Also note the ghastly wig and the not-found-in-nature hairline.

The costumes of Nosferatu 2024 are so basic, they look like something I might be able to manage to sew from a Butterick or Vogue pattern, and trust me, I do not sew very well at all. The material chosen for the women’s gowns is consistently drab and ugly and the designs were frumpy and amateur. Compare this random photo of an 1830s dress:

Note the attention to detail around the bodice, the gathered bodice, the dropped, corseted waist, the pragmatic yet cute pattern, the pretty sleeves, and the lace detail at the shoulders. Now that second dress I could not sew if my life depended upon it.

The wigs on the characters are hideous. They were so bad, I could think of almost nothing else when Ellen or Anna appeared in one. It is patently obvious that none of these women (or men) have ever had long hair. They don’t know how to carry it. Even Willem Dafoe’s hair looked fake as hell — his was a wig that would have made more sense on a barrister in British Parliament. Also, in this age of lace fronts, why does the hair in this film look so fake?

The film is also dismal and dreary. The reviewer I mentioned before used the term lugubrious to describe it and I’ve got to say he hit the nail on the head. Compare the 1990s Francis Ford Coppola version of Dracula with Winona Ryder as Mina and Gary Oldman as the vampire: at least that film, though campy and cheesy, had some joy in it. There are opportunities to be lush, voluptuous, and sumptuous in any given period film that Nosferatu missed entirely with its basic-ass Walmart discount costumes, its obvious, squirting sexuality, and chintzy, suburban, human-as-framed-doll portrait shots.

Nepo babies

Lily Rose Depp, the actress who plays Ellen, is the daughter of actor Johnny Depp and model Vanessa Paradis. I dimly remember reading something back in the day where claims were made that Johnny Depp and Vanessa Paradis were sensibly raising their kids outside of Hollywood and that when Paradis divorced Depp, she took the kids and stayed in her home country of France. I don’t pay attention or care about Johnny Depp or his family, but upon seeing that his daughter clearly did not escape Hollywood, I was disappointed. Lily Rose Depp is an obvious product/victim of the System, and she is being foisted upon us as the new It Girl. No thanks, I’ll pass. I know how those people are created and manufactured for public digestion. Gross.

This thing had nepotism written all over it. The screenwriting and the acting was awful. We are given no reason as to why the vamp seeks Ellen except that she randomly called him on the psychic telephone. When Dafoe’s character likens her to an Egyptian priestess late in the film, I’m like “Why?” Depp’s Ellen is the common bar slut of paranormal heroines, allegedly chosen and special because she’s somewhat attractive without discernible makeup. Why does Ellen love Thomas? She’s supposedly very into him but we never get a scene about how they met or why they fell in love. She cuckolds Thomas from the first to the last frame of this film — she was not a virgin when they’re married and we find this out quite bluntly in one scene — and she is not lovable. She’s a mope who spends three out of four nights on average being obsessed by her etheric rapist/annoying psycho vampire ex-boyfriend.

Overacting is the name of the game when you have no real plot to go off of and you are supposed to wring your hands and cry the entire movie for . . . reasons. Anna, the young wife/matron character played by Emma Courin, is a bad actress. Not for one second do we believe that she is a mom (even if she is one in real life), nor do be believe she is Christian (even if she is a Christian, which I have no idea), nor do we believe she is anything except desperate for her big break in Hollywood. Her death scene by rats is ridiculous in its melodramatic fakery.

Anyway, I am grateful for this film. This piece of crap movie that made more than expected at the box office because of Lily Rose Depp showing her small, natural, 24 year old breasts for long stints of the film and being “raped” by an ugly, pornstached, hunchback dude was the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I am finally getting a DVD player and I am finally quitting every movie made after the year 2000 unless I can find that rare unicorn of a modern film that is worth my time to watch.

The real star of this film was my future DVD-R.