Longing for Light
A Reflection on Nosferatu (2024)
Christians and the Horror Genre
For several of the years I taught English Literature, I included a unit on monstrosity. As many critics have noted, the device of monsters in stories creates a deviation from what is ‘normal’ so that we might reconsider what is normal, if only to reaffirm our commitment to it. Similarly, the horror genre plunges the reader or viewer into a world in which something fundamental and assumed is disrupted, sometimes suddenly but more often slowly and imperceptibly, until some malevolent force or agent has become a significant, entrenched problem. Within the horror genre, the quality of the uncanny abounds; the familiar and homely begin to feel unaccountably unfamiliar and strange, making us feel uneasy in a place we once belonged. The uncanniness of horror settings makes us question our perceptions, which again leads us to reexamine why it is we once called something normal at all.
Christians have a long relationship with the horror genre and monster stories. While a certain stereotype may present us as priggish and fussy around anything but Precious Moments, the most inoffensive and vanilla of art forms. But this is a mischaracterization. Our confession of the Incarnation of Christ admits that the Light entered the darkness. The Christian approach to horror does not celebrate darkness, evil, or vice. It is one way we meditate on our assumption of an orderly cosmos in which a few creatures seem to be capable of deviating from their design and purpose, in which they are capable of dissembling to their destruction. The Christian sensibility around horror amounts to our sober honesty about corruption and evil, even while we profess that God is a good God who is renewing the world. Put another way: it is because of the light of Christ that we can more fully understand the mystery of sin.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the great Christian novels of the 19th Century, and it is a masterpiece of the horror genre. Published in 1897, it reflects on the creeping decadence in the British Empire, both in the body politic and in the Church of England. Modernity was ascendant, leading to the feverish expansion of industrialism and many post-Christian spiritualities against the backdrop of a latitudinarian Church. At the same time, it was a century of catholic renewal. Less than a century earlier, Roman Catholic worship had been made legal again with the Catholic Relief Act (1791); and only sixty years earlier, Catholics had received legal recognition again with the Emancipation Act (1829). Four years after that legislation, the Oxford Movement began as a renewal effort to restore suppressed elements from the Western Catholic tradition to Anglican practice. The movement was met with skepticism, with all sorts of Reformation-era stereotypes arising to cast the Oxford reformers as crypto-papists and Romish sleeper cells.
The anxiety in England by the end of the 19th Century was not restricted to the Church. A century earlier, serious challenges to British imperial rule began with the successful independence movement of the American colonies, which inspired numerous other revolutionary efforts and shook the Empire's omnipresence. By the end of the 1800s, Britain stood at the threshold of what soon became a full-fledged decolonization. And while the brunt of national reorganizations would wait a few decades, the anxiousness of what a waning British Empire would mean for the world and the one-time flagship nation was already in play by the end of the century. In particular, the Terror that arose from the revolution in France that gave rise to decades of strongman politics in the Napoleonic era gave the British a sense that the tables could turn on them quickly and that they might be liable to a sequence of challengers as their strength ebbed.
Bram Stoker successfully harnessed the anxiety of his age when it came to shifting ecclesial and spiritual sensibilities, waning imperial strength and the looming possibility of colonial reprisals, and chauvinistic modernism that invited erratic spiritualities to give it a sense of purpose and meaning. The horror of Dracula invited readers into a world in which the superstitious East slowly and then suddenly became an existential threat to the self-superior West. With that proto-postcolonial anxiety came the depiction of an England that lacked the spiritual resources to meet the assault of an incarnate evil that could penetrate the thin, sallow materialism of modern people. The novel observes the need of the English people to recover a sacramental worldview to meet the rising challenge of these existential threats and draws on the imaginative iconography of the Western Catholic literary tradition to distill and then assert again the fundamentally Christian narrative of life trampling down death by death. If you haven’t read the novel, make it a priority to do so, especially if you are a Christian.
Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922)
The silent film Nosferatu was released in 1922 while Bram Stoker’s wife, Florence Balcomb, was still alive. Notoriously protective of her husband’s work, she refused the filmmaker F.W. Murnau the rights to the novel for adaptation. So, in one of the more humorous instances of threading the needle, Murnau directed a film adaptation that drew heavily from Stoker’s sensibility for the vampire folklore but with all the places and names altered to avoid litigation. So Count Dracula became Count Orlock, Mina became Ellen, and the whole affair took place in Germany rather than England.
Much of what makes the silent film so striking is how it translates the narrative techniques in Stoker’s novel into the visual language of cinematography. The film presents viewers with a creeping and oppressive atmosphere in which the villain is not frenetic but deliberate, not given to randomness but an inexorable approach nearer and nearer. In one of the more memorable scenes, the Nosferatu (vampire) approaches the camera with an air of inevitability, the focus drawing nearer to a pallid, impossibly elongated hand that is determined (it feels) to reach through the screen and grab the viewer. As one views it, one feels the privileged perspective of the ‘viewer on the other side of the screen’ collapse and that they might occupy the same world as the creature while the film plays.
Nosferatu (2024)
In the most recent adaptation of the famous vampire story, director Robert Eggers draws together the narrative details of Stoker’s Dracula with Murnau’s Nosferatu. The places and names all follow the conventions of the previous film. Still, Eggers–an evident student of Literature–attempts to draw from the well of Stoker’s rich, catholic sacramentalism to supercharge his imagery and sense of existential stakes at play. His sensitivity for structures of meaning beyond modern, secular narratives is a recurring quality of his work. As he noted in an interview about his film The Northman (adapting, amazingly, the Danish saga of Amleth):
This sounds super uber-precious, but I think it's hard to do this kind of creative work in a modern secular society because it becomes all about your ego and yourself. And I am envious — this is the horrible part — I'm envious of medieval craftsmen who are doing the work for God. And that becomes a way to ... you get to be creative to celebrate something else. And also, you're censoring yourself because it's not about like me, me, me, me, me, me. So you say, "Oh, I got to rein that back because that's not what this altar piece needs to be." Any worldview where everything around them is full of meaning is exciting to me, because we live in such a tiresome, lame, commercial culture now. (Slashfilm.com)
Eggers engages in parodies of well-known catholic icons of Gospel scenes to render them uncanny and thus unfamiliar enough for reexamination. By mirroring these sacred images in the mode of horror, Eggers makes us yearn for their true forms. Even so, while recourse to catholic sacramentals effectively drives the story and saves the day, even so one observes an attempt to draw on their power without submitting to their authority. Nosferatu is a horrific indictment of post-industrial materialism that depends on and longs for the meaning of sacramentality while at once evading accountability to its demands. In the remainder of this essay, I would like to examine some key points in the film that reveal this yearning to encounter grace while also contending with its daunting otherness.
Note: Spoilers ensue.
Nosferatu was released on Christmas Day, which I assumed was a promotional strategy to get more viewers off of work for the holidays. I quickly realized that there was more to it than that. In the film's opening scene, the demonic vampire Count Orlock woos the virginal Ellen Hutter with allusions to her awakening him from the darkness, revealing her as set apart from the rest of humanity. He woos her consent to their spiritual union and then possesses her in nightmarish, rapacious overpowering of her body. This ensures their connection for the remainder of the film. Eggers slows the scene's progress to dwell on the imagery of their initial encounter at Ellen’s window, which draws clearly from artistic representations of the Annunciation (especially those from the late 19th and early 20th Centuries). In this parody of the Incarnation, the Count establishes his obsession with Ellen’s body, setting in motion a plot that will aim at a consummation of fleshly union.
The obsession with a one-flesh union between Orlock and Ellen motivates the antagonist’s actions. It is the basis both for Orlock’s carefully planned advent in the sleepy German town, heralded by Ellen and Herr Knock’s recurring cries of “He is coming!” It is also the horizon of fulfilled promises to all of Orlock’s servants, again revealed in Knock’s manic identifications of “Providence! Providence!” at every opportunity. Orlock’s spiritual union with Ellen is the pretext of his incarnation. Disturbingly, he becomes both husband and son to the virgin girl, claiming her flesh and requiring it for his own body.
That Orlock emerges as a parody of Christ takes shape later in the film, when the hapless realtor Thomas Hutter enters the hellish inner chambers of Orlock’s castle, his first encounter with the Count situates him at a dinner table set before a roaring fireplace. Invited to sit and eat, Hutter is given bread and wine by the Count. During the meal, Orlock demands that Hutter call him “Lord.” Then, while cutting the bread in the increasingly oppressive presence of the looming Count, Hutter cuts his finger on the bread knife. This incites the Count to feed on Hutter for the first time in the film. After this initial feeding, Hutter and Orlock share a psychic bond by which Hutter begins to lose the distinction between waking and sleeping, and the Count moves freely in and out of Hutter’s mind. In this parody of Holy Communion, Orlock feeds on Thomas’ flesh and blood, so Hutter’s life begins to diminish as he begins to experience life as a living hell.
As Nosferatu reaches its climactic final scene, Ellen Hutter has a final dialogue with the priest-scientist hybrid in the character Dr. Von France. Concluding together that Count Orlock’s defeat rests on her willingness to sacrifice herself–drawing the creature to herself and binding him there until the dawn light destroys him–he bids her farewell by saying, “In pagan times, you might have been a high priestess of Isis.” If there was any doubt about Ellen’s Mariological character, the allusion to the cult of Isis (notoriously, if falsely, assumed to have influenced ancient Christian beliefs about the Virgin Mary), Von France provides the connection. At that very moment, the scene then focuses and lingers on a perfectly framed view of her face, such that her bonnet forms a kind of dark halo around her pale face.
The closing scene of the film moves into the Passion, with Ellen carrying out her plan to destroy the monster at the cost of her own life. It is graphic, violent, and erotic. The union of the maiden and the monster is also their demise. The monster’s words from the beginning are fulfilled: “you do not belong with the living.” Ellen pins the nosferatu to herself until dawn breaks, and the first warm light in the entire film washes over the scene, and the monster (for lack of a better expression) breathes out his spirit in a violent cry. The final staging of the scene is unmistakably a reference to the pietá, the rendering of the Virgin Mary delicately holding the Body of Christ. In Eggers’ version, Ellen lifelessly holds the body of the monster to herself, indicating the consummation of what began at the ‘annunciation.’ These Marian images bookend the film with unsettling parodies. Through the catholic imagination, the plot commences and concludes. Provocatively, it is the way evil arises and the way it is resolved.
Concluding Thoughts
Parody is provocative because it is not immediately clear why we are led to a familiar scene in such an unfamiliar way. Defamiliarization gives us space to ask new questions, making it suddenly seem less wise to move directly toward previously discovered answers. So it is with Nosferatu. It is unclear whether Eggers is paying homage to the power of these iconic moments in catholic spirituality, or whether he is engaging in a work of bathos to chip away at our devotion to them. Given his earlier, stated envy of medieval cathedral-builders and their freedom to work for something other than themselves (if we take the words at face-value), it could be bit of both admiration and satire. Great works of Literature and Cinema are often mixed-modal, blending genre so as to create new, fertile tensions. Eggers adeptly draws on the horror tradition, but unlike so many one-note, splattery instances elsewhere, he seems determined to blend horror with sublimity.Again, it is not always clear whether he wants to redeem horror through the sublime or bring the sublime down to the assumptions and conclusions of horror.
Whether he believes in it or not, Eggers understands the power of the imaginative framework of mythology and religion. In Nosferatu, the director draws heavily on the catholic imagery of Stoker’s Dracula. It constitutes the shape of the plot and drives the action. Unlike Stoker, however, Eggers refuses to make explicit this reliance on catholic sacramentals, relegating any overt religious references to the same plane of folklore and superstition in the film. Here, one might observe how a catholic imagination provides the architecture for stories to take place even when the characters are variously ignorant or dismissive of it. The plot of the film needs the Faith to be true in order to resolve its conflicts, even if it misapprehends the reasons for doing so.
On the pastoral level, I find that technique intensely relatable. In the presence of imperfect understandings of divine revelation, set in a cultural milieu characterized by deconstruction and fashionable unbelief, there is no shortage of examples in and around the parish that reveal how we both depend upon and resist the demands of the truth. So many of the structures of thought and logic by which some attempt to dismantle traditional thinking or exorcise religious devotion from urbane modern life assume the permanence of these entities. Eggers needs something like Stoker’s sacramental worldview to be true to stabilize his bold forays into the erotic and monstrous. Without that stable grounding in real things, horror loses its force because it becomes a mere act of unsettling what is unsettled.
Yet it is possible, as I believe Eggers does, to evade the question of what these stabilizing truths. In the case of Nosferatu, we do not get to see the effect of Ellen’s sacrifice in the same way that parallel sacrifices in Dracula ennoble the surviving characters. Redeemed from evil, the remaining protagonists of Stoker’s novel resolve to celebrate life. In Eggers’ vision, the monster has been halted, and morning has dawned (for the first meaningful time in the film). It hearkens back to perhaps the greatest moment Stoker’s novel, when dawn reveals (for the first time) the humanity still present beneath the monstrosity, allowing it at last to be free. Still, there is no indication in Nosferatu that the gift of a new day and its deliverance from darkness and death will fundamentally change anyone. And so, we are left with the ambivalence of a power we do not understand because of the cost of knowing it beyond the mania of tapping into “Providence!”. Eggers respects and perhaps even longs for the power of the catholic imagination without necessarily assenting to its call on his life. His Nosferatu follows.