Nosferatu as MAHA Fable
“I have seen things in this world that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother's womb. We are not so enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science,” says Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe) a third of the way through Robert Eggers’s much-hyped reimagining of Nosferatu. The good professor swoops into the movie as a last resort, the mentor of Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), who seeks a second opinion about the onset of the sleepwalking, writhing, and night terrors plaguing the good Victorian lady Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp).
As he’s done for most of his career, Dafoe boosts an already impressive project with his supporting turn. But his role in Nosferatu is neither hammy diversion like his recent work in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice or a showcase of the quiet everyman power he brought to The Florida Project. The film’s title notwithstanding, Professor von Franz is the bloody beating heart of Nosferatu—the trailblazing genius cast out of the medical establishment for his fervent belief in the unorthodox. He’s the RFK, Jr. of this horrorshow, complete with the craggy voice and suped-up antics. And, whether Eggers intended it or not, the result is the definitive cinematic send-off of the Biden regime and its demands of conformity disguised as unity.
Though film critics and scholars have defined the last half decade as the age of elevated horror thanks to the rise of indie studios like A24 and Neon, their probing of the genre’s recent offerings seems quite disinterested in thematic undercurrents more complex than the avalanche of white liberal -isms finally on the wane after a decade of prominence. The work of Jordan Peele or a film like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance earns its keep because of endlessly Tweetable—but glaringly obvious—commentary on race and gender. Nevermind that such films lend themselves to far more nuance and even outright toy with their target demos’ political certainties. For better or worse, they serve the role of movies that allow the armchair intelligentsia to genre slum. It’s why Eggers’s Nosferatu was the Christmas season’s hot ticket for would-be hipster influencers and has already spawned its own plague of memes.
Thanks to its low-culture origins and penchant for attracting filmmakers on the fringe, horror remains the only genre willing to call out the hollowness of the posturing that has defined legacy institutions over the past five years. As we wrote last summer, it treats American religion with seriousness while interrogating how unchecked bureaucrats and self-serving dogma have taken a spiritual toll on the nation—an omnipresent theme in elevated horror entries from Longlegs to MaXXXine. However, the most unexamined trend in recent horror is its utter distrust of the medical establishment that positions the confluence of expertise and political power as the ultimate threat to individual autonomy.
In the fall of 2021 as the Biden Administration employed OSHA as a blunt instrument for mandatory vaccinations by threatening Americans’ livelihood for noncompliance, audiences flocked to reopened multiplexes to see M. Night Shyamalan's Big Pharma takedown, Old, and James Wan’s body horror opus, Malignant—another film with eerily sane scientists governed by an immutable evil. Horror rooted in the fear of a medical boogeyman has continued unabated over the ensuing years in everything from breakout franchise Smile and Ti West’s Spanish Flu-obsessed Pearl to The Substance with its experimental injections that hold dominion over their users’ DNA.
Yet, Eggers’s take on Nosferatu is the only horror film to posit that America’s spiritual and physical health are inexorably intertwined. For the true villain of Nosferatu is not Bill Skarsgård’s sinewy behemoth of a Count Orlok, but the petty bureaucrats in the legal and medical fields whose self-interest and quest for reputation allow him to impose his rule over the fictional German city of Wisborg. As literary critic Stephen Arata famously discussed, the Irish Bram Stoker tapped into British ambivalence about the faltering Empire and its version of manhood. Likewise, F.W. Murnau’s original Nosferatu (1922)—an unauthorized Stoker adaptation that became the paragon of German Expressionism—used the Count to reflect the nation’s post-WWI concerns over both the Nazis’ and Jewish population’s influence on the country’s identity.
The Anglican and German takes on Dracula (and the slew of adaptations to follow) position the non-bloodsuckers as hapless, inferior victims who must unite to stop the encroachment of the ultimate man on their way of life. But, in Eggers’s take, Orlok’s colonial ideations are the end result of his central characters’ striving. Ellen’s husband, Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), just wants to stay in the good graces of his real estate baron boss, Knock (Simon McBurney), whose status anxiety is so all-encompassing he jumps at the chance to become the Count’s Renfieldish minion. Thomas’s aristocratic best friend, Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), is a foppish vampire skeptic—the trust-the-science type who racks up COVID boosters as a leisure activity. In fact, the only reason Orlok made the trek to this city in the first place is that Ellen summoned him in her dreams as a teenager–likely because the city’s proto-soyboy offerings could not live up to her notions of romantic grandeur.
In a metropolis full of men who want Enlightenment without the sacrifice innate to religious belief almost as much as they seek to punish those who dare upset their status quo, the persona non grata von Franz proves the ultimate savior. He’s wise enough to stay a perpetual student. Brave enough to wear his ostracization as a badge while remaining an unapologetic childless cat man. He’s never secure enough in his knowledge to claim he has all the answers. More importantly, he forces his colleagues to take responsibility for their role in the plague they unleashed on their homeland by proxy. It’s a lesson Nosferatu’s most vocal fans would do well to heed if only they would divest themselves of their own gaseous light.
Nosferatu is now playing in theaters.