The Vampire

Would that a maiden wholly without sin maketh the vampire forget the first crow of the cock.

The vampire is a mass-cultural, modern monster, first and foremost. We hear stories of undead beings feeding on human flesh from deep in the mountainous heart of the Balkans but these are somewhat irrelevant to the creatures on the screen and in the pages of best-sellers. These parochial stories endear us with their late-night-Discovery-Channel kitsch. But we are interested in them only for their relevance to that high-collared, fang-toothed archetype which has come to all of us from some place beyond. Halloween store signage, polemical mudslinging, the deepest dark of night as experienced when one is a toddler and all that lies beyond your ability to see is extremely deadly.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published on the eve of the 20^th century. The world of mass print media was swollen with sensational tales by that point, but this is The Vampire. He comes from a far-off land of castles and fog. He is classy but there can be no denying his devilry. He comes to buy property and steal the souls of genteel women. This vampire owes more to Heathcliff than Transylvanian folklore or occultism. He is fascinating, urbane and dangerous. What about this sort of story sticks? What about it holds an audience? Can one really be so wealthy and powerful and so impolite? Also, it is no small thing that Dracula can reliably use continental cabotage to travel from Romania to England.

This is not the first horror novel. It is predated by both Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto to name just two. It is gothic in the sense that an element of illicit romance is present, there is a dark castle, a monster, and not a few para-Christian elements which have less to do with spirituality than aesthetics. Though the Cross is a threat to Dracula.

It is an important work, and obviously an influential one, which rapidly escaped Stoker’s control. No sooner did the novel make it to the states than Stoker, apparently, clumsily lost it to American public domain by not establishing copyright in time. It is the first best-selling horror novel, and the first best-seller to attain a permanent fixture in the Western, industrialized mind.

Murnau’s Nosferatu was almost lost forever owing to copyright claims which were apparently successful in Europe. Several copies were recovered in strange places … a farmer’s hayloft, a deceased priest’s estate, dusty bins of some kind or other… I don’t truly know, but it is important that fact be acknowledged: it is a dustbin film. It was produced on a lower budget than it had for advertising by an occultist whose production studio immediately went bankrupt after its release, and it is directed by an alleged homosexual. The special effects are bad, I think, even for the time. There are beautiful, raw nature scenes. One impressive shot takes place on a moving boat. There is an eerie shot of the rare Romanian hyena… The lens tint is evocative, but inconsistent. Yes, a dustbin film, filled with successful, if clumsy experiments which would become laws of filmmaking in more well-known and well-watched features.

Importantly, however: there is a very scary vampire. It released to rave reviews in Germany, and enjoyed a bit of a tour over the course of the decade, finally premiering in the United States in 1929 at one cinema for one weekend. It was billed as a “chilling psycho-drama of bloodlust.” It would not appear in America again outside of bootleg tapes until a video release by MoMA in 1991.

The main men behind Nosferatu, Albin Grau, F.W. Murnau and Max Schrek, were all trench war veterans. It introduces differences to the Dracula mass-cultural mythos that are so severe and so bleak that it is a wonder the Stoker estate was able to claim copyright infringement. Firstly, Dracula is no longer a dapper Romanian man, able to look by turns handsome and beastly and able to either charm or terrify. Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is a demon, a descendant of Belial, called several times in the intertitles “the deathbird.” His countenance is alien, perverse. Sickly white skin. Long fingers, long claws. A large, pointed nose. Large, exaggerated ears. And, it must be said, something of an effete stance. Skinny legs, close together. Hands crossed over one another. Shoulders tucked tight to the body. Something humorous about this creature, to be sure. Especially in shots where we catch him spying in a window or lurking at the end of a long hallway. More than anything, this film is a triumph of editing. Jump cut to the deathbird crouched over the body of poor innocent Ellen, who, it must be said, is a “maiden wholly without sin” in this film.

It is, all told, far more compelling than the novel. This is a world where hostile forces from without may bring plagues and kill virgins. It happened by the bushel just a few years before the film’s release. Each man involved, and all those present at the Berlin premier could attest to that fact. This is a fairytale about the irrevocable triumph of evil in the form of a plague-carrying-rat-monster descended directly from Satan, and then its sudden, swift disappearance without any recourse for those innocent victims it left behind. As Yeats wrote just a few years before, “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” This is the fairytale which thrived a short time in Europe, and then survived in dustbins until it was revived by film theorists at the MoMA in 1991.

So begins a modern myth. Between the novel and this film, there are shared attributes. The monster is a foreigner, he uses the sea to travel, he can shapeshift, he lives in a castle, he uses a hapless realtor to gain a foothold in a more civilized European city, he drinks blood, he exerts an immense psychic hold on women, who are his true weakness, the source of his demise. His instinct as a predator outweighs his instinct for survival. This is certainly the sole note of hope in Nosferatu.

After 1922’s Nosferatu there came other films. Bela Lugosi established the look of the vampire in popular culture. Herzog’s remake of Murnau’s film introduced an element of naturalism to the story. His Biedermeier period is earthy and Klaus Kinski’s vampire is more like an animal than a cursed man or a descendant of Satan. There were also more books and films, but the popular ones came much later, and were reimaginings, having little to do with the central folktale, and were much more firmly American. Salem’s Lot by Stephen King depicts an old town off the highway slowly overrun with vampires, Vampire$ by John Steakley follows a group of mercenaries on contract with the Vatican to hunt vampires all over the Midwest, and Anne Price’s Interview With a Vampire is a vampire’s confession after a lifetime of destroying the innocent and trying not to be caught. There is an overt sexual element in the latter two, which is also present in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, and of course, Twilight, which revises the myth and archetype to the point that it becomes unrecognizable.[1] But it is entertaining.

One begins, finally, to sense something which was probably (we cannot let Wikipedia contributors citing secondary sources from the apparently interdisciplinary field of literary criticism determine these things for us) latent in the source material from the beginning.

Some will oppose this line of questioning, this imposition of teleology on a myth. I clearly didn’t read hard enough. Censorship laws existed then, they do not now, not in any meaningful way as related to sex, in any case. This places somewhat hard limitations, metaphysically, on the modern myth. It is hard to imagine Bram Stoker writing a sex scene with Dracula, and impossible for 1922’s Count Orlok, even though the subtext is clearly there. The increasing explicitness of this act is a genuinely new development in the mythology. Dracula is a ravening bloodsucker and a seducer/rapist. You can see it on screen. Erm… did that shapeshifting vampire just rape? Did Mina’s friend Lucy secretly want it?[2] Are vampires … sexy?

Robert Eggers’s take on Nosferatu says no. Vampires are not sexy. They are repulsive and totally evil. The heroine of the film is never tricked by some seemly form into her lusts. She has an element of darkness in her, a connection to “the outside.” She is, importantly, not innocent like the original Ellen Hutter and Mina Harker upon which her character is loosely based. This represents a genuine development in the myth, one which is hauntingly reflective of the times even though the film is in many other ways a rote remake of the original, with some elements of Coppola’s version thrown in.

I have no idea what Eggers is personally trying to express with this film, and I do not think that it matters. I think the existence of a heavily marketed artifact of mass consumption which has achieved some medium level of immediate, word-of-mouth acclaim is significant, whatever its author has to say about it. Something in the culture has found it worthy of a sliver of attention, at a mass scale. No small feat. Such things are indicative of trends and ways of thinking, broadly. Such things indicate a particular orientation of the subconscious of the rabble. In the past, this rabble was afflicted by industry and social dislocation at the advent of the 20^th century, and then later, war, starvation and plague after the first World War. The centrality of a single monstrous being in both cases was compelling to audiences. Now?

Ellen Hutter in Eggers’s vision takes center stage. She is the lead. In the first scene she calls out tearfully in the moonlight for any being to help rid her of her loneliness. Count Orlok heeds the call. The rest proceeds from there in a basically standard way. The realtor goes to Romania to sell a property near his house; this is because Orlok wants to live nearby. Then the shocked and traumatized realtor is intimidated and hypnotized into signing an occult document which signs away his wife. Then he is fed upon in a rather horrifying and basically homosexual manner by the vampire. It is tremendously unpleasant, but at least we can be assured that Eggers’s monster is not redeemable or in love or anything of the kind. He is pure predator. He boards a boat, fills the thing with plague rats, kills the crew and then crashlands at the docks of Wisborg.

All of the foregoing is shot and directed with absolute technical precision. There are some nitpicks about style, I suppose… this is supposed to be Gothic and Romantic but everything is colorless and symmetrical rather than bursting with color and maximal. Romanticism has a clumsiness about it. Eggers temperamentally cannot abide Romanticism, but this makes his adaptation true to the 1922 version, which was flat and mannered and nihilistic. It is just somewhat strange as a 21^st century viewer to see all these Biedermeir houses portrayed like dollhouses, blocked within frame with complete symmetry, and these incredible costumes given the cold-blue treatment. Was there another way? Not really.

Because the death of eros is the subject of this film, intended or not. The horrifying, nihilistic brutalization of eros by the new icon of the vampire: he is tall, his skin is gray and rotting, he has a mustache and a receding hairline. There’s something about his eyes… hypnotic… his eyes are almost entirely black! This monster and Ellen cooperate, yes, they work together, even if Ellen is somewhat resistant, the trope remains, the vampire is sexy even though he’s a walking corpse, and does she … secretly … dare I say? I shall not. I will say: they work together to destroy sex.

We are supposed to sympathize with Ellen for being a sleepwalker and mysteriously libidinal. Shocking! This film would not exist without the popular mythology of the Salem witch trials, the subject, incidentally, of a different and better Eggers film. The alchemical Paracelsian played by DeFoe tells her that in another time she would have been a priestess of Isis. In another time, she would not have been simply a misunderstood mental case, she would have had agency and influence. As if attracting death to this idealized, nowhere Europe, designed and built for its own sake, independent of any mythology of Biedermeier as innocent or idyllic, were not influence enough! To speak briefly on setting: this film might as well take place in the backrooms for all the use its primary setting is, thematically. It only serves to indicate: the people who live here are … close-minded …

But the alchemist is contradicted by the film, because it is clear the material and philosophical conditions of the time are not responsible for Count Orlok’s fatal attraction to Ellen, her own receptivity is the cause. She reveals in the third act that her mother died and she was neglected by her father, who was disturbed by her somnambulism. One time, she sleepwalks completely naked and her fathers castigates her and calls her a sinner. Perhaps a bit judgmental, but does it warrant Ellen’s calling upon “any [!!!] celestial being” to come and save her? No.

Eggers makes it clear Ellen is no victim several times through the movie, and I applaud him this because otherwise this film would have been straightforward and bad and also timid. I don’t even think it is bad. I think it is unfortunately a true reflection of the times. Eggers has been successful in portraying the vampire as pure, destructive, lustful and pestilential. He has also added to the original folktale the archetype of woman as explicit enabler of the monster. Ellen is more Count Orlok’s familiar than Herr Knock.

So we now come, finally, to the end. What kills Count Orlok? A woman. He forces her by word to abrogate her marriage. They sleep/she gets raped/it’s consensual?/Orlok feeds. The sun rises. Orlok is destroyed. So is Ellen. But it was no virginal sacrifice. It was mutually assured destruction by evil appetites. By nocturnal desires, unspeakable to those around us. This is the age of pornography, of school shootings, of mass psychosis and pandemics. Eggers’s revelation fits this world. I wish it did not.

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[1] I would actually argue this iteration is malicious, because in it, the trope of the vampire as DAMNED, totally, utterly, irrevocably, remains, but the main character still wants to be with him eternally. Vampires should be completely evil, even if they might be somewhat sympathetic. Many people have been destroyed psychically by this story.

[2] For the reader curious about the best take in the entire mythos on this subject, I cannot recommend highly enough the previously mentioned work by John Steakley. This question is dealt with in great and sobering detail. Only he, of any author or filmmaker I have ever encountered, has sufficiently dealt with the horror portended by this terrifying development in the vampire mythology. Vampires make people feel as if they want disgusting things. They are the perversion of eros. This is relevant. Unlike much else in the “genre.”