Nosferatu (Murnau 1922, Herzog 1979, Eggers 2024)

Matt and Katherine Bergevin follow up on their discussion of Dracula and Carmilla to discuss F.W. Murnau's 1922 classic horror film Nosferatu as well as two of the most important remakes by Werner Herzog and Robert Eggers. 

This podcast is tagged as explicit material because we discuss prominent themes from the films including sexuality, sexual assault, and animal abuse. While we do not go into more detail than is necessary, if you don't want to engage with these themes, this might not be for you. 

Transcript

Matt
Nosferatu, does this word not sound like the midnight call of the death bird? Do not utter it or the images of life will fade into pale shadows and ghostly dreams will rise from your heart and feed on your blood. 

Welcome to the Bard Sequence Seminar Podcast. Today it's Nosferatu by Murnau 1922, Herzog 1979 and Eggers 2024.

I'm Matt Park, Director of the Bard Sequence, and today I will be your friendly moderator and panelist, and I'm joined once again by Katherine Bergervin. Katherine, would you mind introducing yourself?

Katherine Bergevin
Sure, Matt. As you guys may know, if you've listened to previous episodes of the podcast, my name is Katherine. I'm a PhD candidate at Columbia University, specializing in 18th century literature, but I have long harbored an interest in all things related to vampires. So I'm very excited for this episode.

Matt
Thank you, Katherine. And this is my first one-on-one podcast.

Katherine 
That's true. 

Matt

I always kind of worry about my ability to carry a podcast with just one other person. I'm not actually that much of a conversationalist. So I've always kind of avoided that, but I feel comfortable that we'll be able to do it with three Nosferatu's here.

 Katherine

I mean, the only context in which we've ever interacted is in conversation, much like this. So I think of you as being an eminent conversationalist. 

Matt
Then I'm doing a really good job of faking it. Excellent. 

Okay, so we're about to get started, but before we do, full disclaimer, we are not here as experts who are going to tell you what Nosferatu is really about. Instead, we are going to talk about these three films and what they are to us and why we value them or not. We will ground our readings in evidence from the films themselves and sometimes from the screenplays, but if we do a decent job, you should be walking away from this with more questions than answers.

We are also not here to summarize these films for you, because whether it is a podcast or an essay, you should not spend your precious time giving your audience a literal summary of something that they need to read and watch for themselves. So, read and watch the things.

And I'm gonna be starting off today with our context. I'm gonna do a little bit of historical background on these three films Typically I try to keep this to five minutes or fewer I will do my best as it is three different films that I'm gonna try and talk about here. I will have by far the most context for Murnau I will have some context for Herzog and then I will have the least amount of context for Eggers, but that also is the most recent film. And then Katherine, I'll invite you to join in on anything you might know about these.

Katherine 
Sounds great.

Matt
so, Murnau's Nosferatu is part of the German Expressionist wave of filmmaking, which was prominent from around 1920 to 1926. But to understand it, I think we first need to go back to Expressionist painting, which takes off at the turn of the 20th century.

Expressionist art refers to the expression of subjective emotions, inner psychological states, and spiritual themes, as opposed to realistic depictions of subjects. Edvard Munch of the Scream fame can be seen as a forerunner of Expressionism, with his focus on the alienation of modern life, as well as depictions of people struggling with anxiety, grief, melancholy, and isolation.

Not all expressionists, however, looked at the dark side of subjective emotional experience, and some, like Vasily Kandinsky, example, focused on spirituality, Franz Mark on the colorful depictions of animal life, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner on the hustle and bustle of urban life.

The turning point for Expressionism really was the First World War. And at the start of the war, at the outbreak of the war, there was actually a lot of initial enthusiasm for the war, especially by some of these young male artists, especially some of the Expressionists and the Italian Futurists. To quote the Futurist Manifesto by Martinelli: "We will glorify war, the world's only hygiene, militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for and scorn for woman. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind. We will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice."

Franz Mark, the Expressionist, similarly enlisted in World War I with a spiritual hope for purification through war's, quote, "blood sacrifice," which he thought would renew the blood of the young men of Europe and give them the strength to remake the world. Unsurprisingly, the war chewed up these young men and either killed them or spat them out broken. Mark became very quickly disillusioned by the war's brutality after joining it, and eventually he was killed by a grenade at Verdun in 1916. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had a mental breakdown after joining the war, which bounced him out of the war and led to a really dark shift in his life and art. He became an alcoholic and eventually committed suicide.

F.W. Murnau, the director of Nosferatu, did serve in the war, but he himself was not pro-war and it did end up killing his longtime friend and lover, Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele, I'm not sure how to pronounce that last name, who was killed on the Eastern Front in 1915. Many scholars argue that Murnau's experience in the war, as well as being a semi-openly gay man in the early 20th century, influenced his exploration of the "Other" in films such as Nosferatu. After the war, as soldiers returned home, they brought with them a deadly variant of the flu, which was called the Spanish flu but did not actually originate in Spain. That was a bit of anti-Spanish propaganda, but in any case, millions around the world died from the pandemic. This had a major influence, obviously, on Nosferatu and the importance of the plague in that film. In the midst of the flu and reeling from the war, German expressionist cinema arose as a movement.

Like Expressionist painting, Expressionist cinema emphasized the artist's inner emotions rather than attempting to replicate reality. German Expressionist films rejected cinematic realism and used visual distortions and hyper-expressive performances to reflect inner conflicts.

Murnau, after making a number of films that are generally in the horror genre about haunted castles, hunchbacks, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, knew that he wanted to make an adaptation of Dracula, but he didn't want to pay the Bram Stoker estate for it, or he couldn't afford it. And so Murnau and his screenwriter, Henrik Galeen, produced the script for Nosferatu, changed the names and condensed the plot, dramatically altering the ending.

The Stoker estate, of course, sued and won, and all copies of the film were ordered to be recalled and destroyed. But copies had already been distributed internationally before this happened, and thankfully they survived, though the score did not. A tiny, tiny fraction of the score survived, and so any Nosferatu that you see today will have a relatively contemporary score that was added on later. Murnau went on to a long and storied career and fled Germany to Hollywood when the Nazis came to power. He remained consistently anti-war and anti-fascist throughout his year, his career. 

Okay, so number two, Herzog, 1979. So it's the 1960s and a young filmmaker, Werner Herzog, is looking for inspiration from other German filmmakers, but there is an entire lost generation.
Every German filmmaker of note either fled the Nazis, joined the Nazis, or ended up in the concentration or death camps for their art. So Herzog had to go back to the Expressionists and Murnau for examples of German artists he could draw from and be proud of. The Expressionist generation of filmmakers were the ones where he was able to find solid ground.

In Nosferatu, we find many of the things that today we associate with Herzog, including themes of unfamiliar landscapes and mysticism. But Nosferatu stands out among Herzog's films, especially his commitment to, quote, "trying to make something that has not been made before," as well as the fact that he never used storyboards and often improvised large parts of his scripts. The fact that he broke with his tradition in making Nosferatu shows how important it was to Herzog to pay tribute to Murnau and to the Expressionists.

We can see some overlap in terms of 1979 when Herzog's Nosferatu is released and comparing that to the Weimar Germany of Murnau. The 1970s was a quote, "decade of nightmares," which featured economic stagflation, a decline in public trust in institutions and a sense of growing nihilism and exhaustion in the West, as well as fears of a declining and collapsing civilization. I think we see this in the end of the film which has a good laugh at the collapse of western civilization. Perhaps we can talk about that bit later on the pod. Herzog further admired Mernau's Nosferatu for condensing a fairy tale out of Bram Stoker's Dracula which Herzog felt was a mediocre novel overstuffed with trivialities. 

Also, in a historical echo, when the estate of Murnau found out about Herzog's adaptation, they threatened to sue him for ripping off Nosferatu without permission. Herzog then dared them to sue him and pointed out the fact that they had themselves been sued by Bram Stoker's estate, and it would be a bit absurd for them to sue him for doing the same thing. The estate of Galeen, the scriptwriter, also threatened to sue him, but he had even a weaker case, and neither of those lawsuits ended up proceeding.

Finally, Eggers 2024, which came after the COVID pandemic, but was not a COVID project. Eggers exclusively makes period pieces and is allergic to anything set in the current day, as well as assumptions that his films are commentaries on current events or contemporary politics. On this claim, I do think we can believe Eggers as he famously saw Nosferatu as a nine-year-old and he was staging his own production of Nosferatu when he was 17 in his high school as well as in a local theater after. He had been planning to remake Nosferatu years before COVID, but it had not materialized as a viable project until it finally did. So it probably is accurate when Eggers says that he's not primarily trying to comment on COVID in the film.

Eggers, like Herzog, is very resistant to analysis of his films. Both claim that they don't create their films through an analytical process or a desire to focus on particular ideas or ideologies. In his own words, Eggers is primarily concerned with the history of film adaptations of Dracula, and he wanted his Nosferatu to be something new. He did not want to retread over the same ground that other Dracula films have already tread on. My favorite fact about Eggers's Nosferatu is that he cites Mel Brooks' Dracula Dead and Loving It as a major inspiration for his take on the vampire because it showed him all of the goofy aspects of vampire movies which he made a point to avoid.

Finally, Eggers tends to be obsessed with historical research and period accuracy in his films, even if it produces some moral paradoxes for contemporary audiences trying to read his Nosferatu, Coming So Soon After COVID, for example, or the Me Too movement. Okay. That was way beyond five minutes, but I'm giving myself the grace period of having done three films. So I'm calling that a win. 

Katherine, any context from you?

Katherine 
Not a huge amount of context. For me, I felt like you did a great job. I did want to ask some follow-up questions to some of the things you mentioned, if you think we have time.

Matt
Yeah, of course.

Katherine
I did have some thoughts in response to what you brought up in your contextualizing summaries. So the thing that really stood out to me is the idea of scorn for women as a defining, I guess, ideological quality of the World War I moment. I think that can inform our reading of the character of Ellen in a really helpful way, because we see that the figure of Nosferatu, who I think is most obviously aligned with the specter of disease, but also with like male violence and the idea of invasion, I think just war in general, is only able to be undone or defeated by this feminine figure. And we can think about how imagery like the Venus flytrap or the figurehead at the front of a ship these other feminine sort of symbols are associated with Ellen and almost describe the way that she's going about defeating Count Orlok over the course of the story.

And I just had one other thing to say about the idea of filmmakers rejecting the idea of analysis or interpretation. I always find this conversation a bit funny when talking about the contemporary moment as someone who studies a time period from hundreds of years ago, because of course there's no assumption on my part that I could ever talk to any of the dead people who I write about in the 1700s. But I had a professor who taught me about the American Puritans. And the point he always made was, one, you everyone we study here is dead, so we can't ask them what they really meant. All we have is their artistic output to go by. And two, we have no reason to assume that if we were to ask them that they would not lie. So I think when Eggers says he doesn't make his movies from a perspective of analysis or commentary on current events. I'm happy to completely ignore his commentary on that level and just go by what we see in the films themselves.

Matt
One of my favorite artists is Francis Bacon. And he's very similar. And so if you read interviews with him, he's just like, I don't analyze. I don't think there's no analytical process that happens. I just depict these human figures in the way that I do. And he depicts them in horrific ways and, you know, meat and all this kind of stuff and screaming popes and things. So I always go back to that when I'm thinking of these artists who say that they don't kind of analyze or think things through. It doesn't compute for me because I have a very analytical brain. that's I do. In an interview, Herzog essentially basically said that he hates anyone who analyzes and he hates critics in particular. And so folks like us who are academics and who literally our job is to look at things and analyze them and figure out, what is the saying and why, there is this kind of artistic resistance to that, which is like, well, that's the work of the critic. My work is that of the artist and I just make the work. I am a conduit for the art and I don't think very much about it. I just kind of have my ideas and themes and I put them on film.

Again, you know, I don't tend to buy it, but I also don't have a brain that works that way. I have to analyze everything. I have to know why I'm doing something. Why am I saying this thing on a podcast? Why am I writing this thing? So it's hard for me to understand someone whose brain works in that way.

Katherine 
I must say that even as I doubt any artists claim that they don't have any kind of ideology or belief system or analytical framework in mind when they create their work, I find that as a member of the audience, as a reader or viewer or listener, I tend to recoil from work in which theoretical apparatus are too self-evident. I think that if theory is really visible within a piece of art, it tends to make it a little bit insufferable and preachy. So I guess I see it as being like an aesthetic problem or question as well. In some ways, it's preferable to me if an artist kind of lets their work speak for itself and doesn't try to over-determine how the audience is supposed to respond to it.

Matt
I tend to agree, and I think another factor is time, which is sometimes you will see a piece of work and it is like the theoretical framework is pretty clear and it might be very much of the moment and in the moment you say, wow, this is great. This is exactly what I've been looking for. But I think that doesn't always necessarily age so well, right, again because times will change and those ideas will go out are fashionists as they always do. And so later on, I think that's a bit of an issue there. 

I tend to agree. I I enjoy these films because they make me feel something. They make me feel emotions. They are frightening or sexy or whatever the thing may be. And that is the primary reason I enjoy them. And then I do have the other kind of analytical side. But if the film can't make me feel something, then no matter how sophisticated it is intellectually, I'm probably not going to be able, it's not something I'm gonna go back to. I'm not gonna rewatch it. It's not gonna be a classic for me. 

Katherine 
I gotta confess, that's kinda how I felt about the Herzog version of Nosferatu. As much as I love the other two, this one for some reason just didn't do it for me. So it might be interesting for us to compare notes about what works about these films for us and what doesn't just as audience members.

Matt
I mean, I think the Herzog is my least favorite of the three, to be sure. I mean, Klaus Kinski is a good Orlok. He's a particular Orlok. He's like sad boy Orlok, And there are definitely scenes where that works, but on the whole, think the film is less affecting. I think it's shot a little bit from more of a remove because it dispenses with the most frightening and the sexiest parts of the other two films. I think it is less impactful for those reasons. Herzog famously doesn't do sex scenes and he doesn't do any kind of sexual plots or romantic plots in his films. And there is that undertone in the original Nosferatu and a very explicit tone in Eggers where there is this kind of raw kind of desire or sexual piece of it, which I think hooks you. And I think that is missing in Herzog. 

Katherine 
I mean, that's fascinating to me to hear. It had never occurred to me to think of Herzog as a filmmaker who eschews sexual or romantic plots because I think of his movies as being so Freudian and so upfront in their Freudian structure. I think it's like We're a Wrath of God where it ends with the Klaus Kinski character announcing that he is going to marry his own daughter and found a new race, which I do want to put a footnote there about Klaus Kinski having been accused of having sexually abused his daughter in real life. So I'm not sure what to do with any claim that there isn't the presence of sexual and romantic plots within Herzog movies, but that's really fascinating as form of disavowal on the part of the filmmaker, or perhaps from critics who've watched him, I don't know if he announced that himself.

Matt
You know, he has, I mean, he said he's really uninterested in those things. And so I think what I would probably say or perhaps revise my statement to is that, you know, there certainly is sex in his films, but it's not sexy, right? And there aren't there aren't love making scenes, there aren't scenes that where there's desire where the audience can, you know, tap into that part of themselves. I think Herzog is just, he's so existential and it's just, it's being and non-being and, you know, in the Freudian, you know, Eros and Thanatos, he's clearly on the side of examining death and, you know, what it means to die and to exist and things like that. So much so that there's no romance, there's no passion, there's no romantic desire or sexual desire, for me at least in the films.

Katherine 
I find myself bouncing off his work, and there are a number of creators from, I guess roughly this moment, maybe a little bit earlier and a little later, who I feel the same way about. I personally find it very difficult to watch any play by Samuel Beckett. Waiting for Godot or Happy Days. I appreciate its artistic value, but I can't stand it. I at one point told my partner I'm never going to see a Beckett play again. Just because something about that alienating quality, which I think is deliberate on the part of the author, it just makes it so hard for me to even tolerate watching these productions. And I think that means Herzog is successful in whatever he set out to do. You know, that I found myself so repulsed by the figure of Orlok in this version and just by the world of the movie itself. And the other filmmaker who makes me feel this way is actually David Lynch, who I think takes notes from Nosferatu in Twin Peaks with the character of Laura Palmer and the sort of villainous ghost of Bob if anyone knows that show. 

Matt
And then I wanted to circle back to Ellen. So I mean, let's just get into it, right? So again, you know, in that period up to the lead up to the first World War, there is a lot of kind of anti-feminist stuff flying around. A lot of these young male artists who see themselves as the vanguard of something new, they feel like one of the problems is that European society has been bogged down with all of these bourgeois customs and that masculinity has been held down by this rising tide of feminism and women's rights and things like that. And so part of the reasons why these guys talk about supporting war is that they see it as a chance to reclaim their masculinity from these feminists who have taken away things like that. Some very obvious echoes of the things that young men are saying today in some circles, right? In this kind of right-wing messaging that blames women and immigrants. And then we could also look at, again, Nosferatu as an immigration story as a, some folks have looked at it as a warning about immigration and what that could bring in terms of disease and things like that. 

But anyway, yeah, these young men, were talking about this war will help us defeat the feminists and things like that as reasons for supporting it. And again there are strong echoes there. I think also a historical warning because again like the the war that these young men started you know in the first world war it did very much chew them up and spit them out and they ended up you know broken by it. And I think that if the Western world continues going in the direction that it's going these days, that's where those same kinds of young men will find themselves one day, right? That the movement that they think is bringing them power, it's not actually going to benefit them. And it's just going to chew them up and spit them out, too, one day. And they're going to end up broken, just like these other young men did in the past. So that's part of what's going on there in terms of the historical context. But let's talk about the figure of Ellen, right? And I'd love to hear your thoughts more in terms of how to read the films.

Katherine 
Well, what came to mind very strongly while you were speaking just now is that Ellen is a figure who sacrifices herself in order to protect and preserve a domestic environment in which her husband will be safe. And I think Nosferatu 1922, certainly the Eggers version as well that we got a couple years ago, are films that really sort of embrace the domestic sphere. 

There's that joke that has kind of been circulating that the Eggers Nosferatu is actually a Christmas movie because they have this big Christmas tree in the background. They're the two little girls who we know are afraid of a monster under their bed, eventually emerging to do them harm. The fear constantly is that the domestic environment is going to be invaded by this very visceral sort of predatory threat. But the solution to it isn't men taking up arms and going outside of the home to do battle with Orlok in his own environment. It's to sort of bring him into that domestic space where he no longer has power because he's, I guess, on territory that Ellen herself is more able to control. And through her, I guess, power within that space, she's able to defeat him and save everyone in the town. 

And if you think about the plague imagery, which I'm sure we're going to get into later, I have lots of thoughts about, especially the 1922 version in relation to narratives about the Black Death, as well as the Spanish Flu, which I think would have been very, very prominent in audiences thinking as they were watching this film in the 1920s. All of these shots we see in the 1922 version of people retreating into the home, closing the windows. The idea is like you must keep the plague out of the domestic environment. And some of the most horrific moments say in the Eggers version, which is more explicit, obviously, and kind of the horrific imagery it shows are when like the rats can permeate the space of the home or the shadow of Orlok is able to permeate the home. And we see, you know, Ellen's friend being bitten by rats on the floor, this really horrific sort of moment.

And there's that really striking moment in the 1922 version where Ellen tells Hutter, I look out my window every day and I see this abandoned house across the street from us. And to me, it's frightening because she knows Orlok is there, but it's also like the specter of the destruction of the domestic space. You know, this could be our home. Our home could become empty and a ruin if, you know, the plague is able to permeate and maybe on a subtextual level of war is able to come here. Because of course, after, you know, the First World War, you know, people would have been very familiar with the specter of abandoned buildings that people had fled from. And the fact that I think they're separated just by a little channel of water, that there could be this very delicate and insecure boundary between the home as a stable safe place and one that's been evacuated and kind of destroyed.

Matt
I hadn't thought of it that much in terms of the home and in terms of the domestic space being invaded. But now that you're bringing it up, I mean, the scene that jumps out to me the most is from the 1922 original, and Ellen essentially looks across at that abandoned house and Orlok is there like in the window just staring like total creeper mode. It's like, whoa. And it's so clear that he's just a predator who's kind of staring and just kind of creeping at her across the way there. And then obviously, you know, the eventual invasion of the house by his shadow and then, you know, by his person. But I hadn't thought of it in terms of kind of the domestic and sealing that off, whether it be from the plague or from the Nosferatu or things like that.

Katherine 
I mean, it's something that jumped out at me too in the 1922 version when Hutter goes to, I guess, the small village in Transylvania, because, you know, my first exposure to Nosferatu was in the Eggers film where, you know, Thomas's character arrives in the Romani village and he's put up in this really uncomfortable dingy inn where he's sleeping in his boots because, you know, the place is sort of dirty and cold. But then I watched the 1922 version and the bedroom he gets in this inn is incredibly cozy. It's this built-in bed that you climb up little steps to get into. It has this plush, lovely, clean comforter and pillows. And you can tell, this is a space that the local people have cultivated as a safe space. 

And, I think the potential for invasion is symbolized by this little book of what it has a great title. Vampires, Terrible Ghosts, Magic, and the Seven Deadly Sins, which is where he first reads about the story of Orlok and then dismisses it. And the way that the space is first invaded is in the form of a nightmare. So, you know, part of what one is trying to preserve by, you know, staying away from Orlok's castle and keeping out the Nosferatu, which we know is a huge deal in the book Dracula as well with hanging the garlic flowers and everything, is to preserve one's mental peace and the sort of dream realm, the idea that one can rest and not be attacked by these nightmarish visions. 

But in terms of the character, of Ellen, think watching the 1922 version for the second time, I wanted to kind of experience it in different ways because it's been preserved. You know, there are super HD versions that have been really cleaned up. There are colorized versions. There are ones that are more grainy and maybe closer to what people would have seen in the 20s and also different musical tracks. I watched one that had a very sort of almost monotonous organ music playing throughout and then another one that had very intrusive strings that were kind of guiding your emotional response to the film much more actively. I think because of the acting style of those early films and the way that the actors tend to assume these like tableau, like statuesque postures in the way of you know, stage actors who would have to convey emotions and ideas to audiences, you know, sitting really far away and stuff like that. 

The figure of Ellen stood out to me a lot more. I noticed a lot of interesting parallels between the depiction of her and Orlok. It first really jumped out at me in the sleepwalking scene where we see her walking with her hands stretched out in front of her.
I can't remember if it's right then that one of the friends runs in to sort of save her from presumably stumbling off the edge of her balcony. But then we cut to the scene of Jonathan sleep or sorry, not Jonathan, Hutter sleeping and that famous shadow of Orlok sort of advancing over top of him. And I realized that if you had hung a light above Ellen as she was walking, her shadow would take on that exact form of the hands reaching forward, you know, in the sleepwalking posture. And then of course, you know, the outline of her head, only she wouldn't have long nails and like elf ears, like the Nosferatu. And it's so interesting. And that's of course a moment where we infer she's sort of psychically or spiritually taking over Orlok's consciousness and preventing him from attacking Hutter, because we see Orlok kind of stops and turns around and leaves. And it's almost like she's puppeting him. Like she is the puppet that is casting the shadow that is Orlok. And there's just this fascinating duality between the two characters where it sometimes feels like she's summoning him, which is obviously a theme the Eggers picks up on, but also where she's kind of invading his being in some way and curtailing the damage he's able to do. I think you can interpret it in multiple ways. 

The other really striking image, again, a sleepwalking scene is when she, this is during the section of the film that's the story of the ship that Orlok travels on and which becomes a plague ship. As we know that these sailors are being devoured by Orlok and that is kind of metaphorized as disease and it's unclear whether at this point it's a literal disease or they're just calling it the plague because they don't really want to articulate the idea that there's a vampire drinking everyone's blood on this ship. We see her standing up against her doorframe in a very rigid, sort of statuesque posture, we see her profile facing towards the right of the screen. And then we cut, I think, to a shot of the ship facing in the same direction. And I think maybe because I watched the movie Master and Commander very recently, I immediately thought, she looks just like the figurehead you would see at the prow of a ship. And I think, I suspect that was probably deliberate in a way. 

And these figureheads were famously often mermaids or sirens who, you know, in folklore are these beautiful creatures who lure men in and then drown them, which connects again to that Venus flytrap image, which was an interesting part of the movie we can talk about too. But when we see it depicted in the sort of scientific setting where there's a professor lecturing about it to his students, he says, isn't this Venus flytrap just like a vampire, the way it captures flies? And I thought, I don't really think so. That's not, obviously you're thinking of vampire differently from how I do. I don't connect those things at all, but it did remind me of the mermaid or the siren that's associated with Ellen. So maybe in the conclusion of the movie, we're seeing a kind of reversal where we think Orlok has been hunting her the whole time, but really she has on some level been much more aware of the situation and has been luring him in so she can finally defeat him. I think that's the reading Eggers runs with. And it doesn't have to be one or the other. It's a sort of battle of wills or spiritual power or however you want to read it between Orlok and Ellen. But I think, especially given a cultural context that was so anti-woman and so anti-feminist, which viewed the space of the domestic sphere like we were talking about as being this sort of setting for, I don't know, social degeneration and weakness, blah, blah.

I this battle of wills between Ellen, the loving housewife who's nice to little cats and is very sweet and beautiful against this invading force of warlock. I don't know, that's just a really strong image for that moment in history. And I think it is now as well, for all the reasons you were pointing out, Matt, about this resurgence we've seen of hyper masculine ideology. rejection of the feminine and the domestic.

Matt
I mean, in the Egers version, it's very clear that there's this discussion around who is summoning who. You know, is it Ellen who summoned Nosferatu? You know, he calls her, I mean, Orlok calls her an enchantress and, you know, she is the one who roused him from the black pit and things like that. And she called him forth and he essentially says, well, this is your fault. You're the one who made me do this, right? Who made me do this to you, which obviously is, you know, the language of an abuser. Right. You you made me do these things to you. Right. And so there is that really very that that discourse is on the surface of that film. 

I had not picked up on it as much in terms of the Murnau. So I think I'm going to have to go back and rewatch that and look at some of those scenes that you were talking about and think about this idea of Ellen as a siren who is kind of interceding and summoning Orlok to her. You know, I hadn't picked up on the idea that she might have stopped him from killing her husband and things like that. So that's definitely a reading which I'm gonna have to go back on and think about some more. 

Katherine 
That's, sorry. I was just, just, that's so interesting to me because clearly as we were watching, we had very different interpretations. Like to me, that seemed like, okay, this is the surface level version of what's going on. She's protecting Hutter from, this evil monster. And, you know, Hutter is depicted as this very guileless, sweet, almost childlike man who does need the protection of a parent slash wife figure in ways that are potentially problematic. But I think in the Eggers too, there's the sense of Ellen being very protective over Thomas and being angry because he's leaving sort of the space in which she can protect him.

Matt
I think, yeah, to me that much was clear. I mean, in every version, he is fairly weak and he is just immediately overpowered by Orlok in every way, shape and form, right? As soon as he walks into that dining hall, it's very clear that Orlok is in control. And even in Herzog with Kinsky being the kind of sad boy version of Orlok, he still is in control and he still is able to overpower and say, you know, listen, come sit here and as he goes in for the blood on the finger and things like that. So, I mean, I think that I definitely caught, I think I read the Murnau more as, know, other than the ending as Ellen being a little bit more of the kind of traditional female horror movie heroine. In which she does end up being the key to the ending. But other than that, she is stalked and terrorized and doesn't have a lot of power in most horror movies, but again, I think I need to go back maybe and maybe think a little bit more about that. 

In terms of the Venus flytrap stuff and then of the leeches in Eggers, which was, I think, a deleted scene, which is not in the standard version where.. is compared to a leech. To me, that was just kind of about rooting the idea of the vampire in the natural world. And so, you know, one of the things that these films sometimes have to do is to just delineate, well, where did this creature come from? Is this a satanic thing? Is this a natural creature, a natural being that follows certain natural laws? And so they go to this idea of fly traps or polyps in the original, and then in the Eggers version leeches. And in the Eggers version, Orlok really does look kind of like a leech when he's on top of people feeding. Pretty hard to watch. Pretty gross.

Katherine 
Question for you actually as our cinema expert about some of these moments in the 1922 where they obviously have a narrative function but even shots of you know when there's this really to me it was very cute scene where the villagers sort of tell Hutter, you can't go in the forest, the werewolf is on the loose. And then we cut to a shot of, I guess like a hyena that's looking complete, an extremely prepossessing and calm hyena that's just kind of sniffing around. 

Matt
Yeah, it's a hyena.

Katherine

Like it doesn't look like it's doing anyone any harm. But then also the scene of the Venus flytrap and the polyps. I wondered if part of this was almost like the filmmakers showing off what they were able to do on screen with the idea of magnification or showing animals that the audience might never have seen before in the form of a hyena, obviously not indigenous to Germany. Was there any component of that maybe along the lines of the way that they manipulate the frame rate to make it look like, say, Orlok's carriage is going really fast or as though doors are opening by themselves and so on?

Matt
Yeah, I mean, I think for me that is part of that idea of blurring the natural and supernatural worlds. I could also connect it again to the idea of domesticity that you were talking about earlier and the role in which animals play in delineating what is properly human versus what is not. And so, I mean, we have every film opens with a domestic cat. Right? 

Katherine 
Yes.

Matt

So the cats are back. We're back in cat land, but there's no anti-cat propaganda in these films. The cat is good. The cat is a pet. The cat is domestic. The cat is a surrogate child. Right? All three screenplays also call for this cat very explicitly. they write throughout the screenplays, there are certain scenes where the cat is called upon to appear and be very cute and playful and things like that. So at home, you have this domestic cat. And then in the wilds of Transylvania, you have the quote unquote werewolf, right? And then the other version, right, In the Eggers version, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, you have the wolves, which are essentially being controlled by Orlok. I think that is part of just a holdover from Bram Stoker and the way that he wrote Dracula. 

But I think in terms of the choice of a hyena as opposed to an actual wolf, which Europeans would have been very familiar with, to me, whenever I see things like that, that just screams colonialism. It screams like European audiences being reminded of the fact that they have African colonies where they've encountered these things called hyenas and these are strange beasts to them. And so putting them on, being able to put that animal on screen is a mark of their civilization's attainment in terms of, we have conquered places and other continents now and look at their wildlife, behold the things that we are able to film. So yeah, mean, again, when I saw that, I immediately was like, I'm pretty sure that's a hyena. And then I did research it and it is in fact a hyena. And so to me, that's really what that is kind of signifying.

Katherine 
I mean, it's interesting because, you know, the werewolf is a creature we associate with deep European folklore. So if you're saying this really ancient menace that is indigenous to the Carpathians is actually an African animal, you know, there's clearly a claim being made about, you know, status of Africa as being I don't know, like a more quote unquote primitive space. But then there's also the suggestion that I guess Europe might be closer to that. I mean, this is me quoting 19th century and early 20th century ways of thinking to be very clear. But with a depiction of like the Romani people or I guess they're not explicitly Romani in the 1922, but the local people in their traditional dress and everything, there is this suggestion that these quote unquote primitive threats are present still in Europe as well.

Matt
Definitely and in the Herzog, I mean in the inn there's just this really big goose which is just like chilling with all of the villagers inside of the inn. So again a less civilized place where the animals mingle with the humans inside of buildings and things like that. So I think that is a bit in there as well. No hyenas though.

Katherine 
Should we talk about the rats? Because if we're talking about animals, and in fact the cat is an interesting connection then, because we know the cat is sort of a symbol for Ellen herself. Especially, I think it's made especially clear in the 2024 Eggers version where, I can't remember what he's called, but the equivalent of the Van Helsing character played by Willem Dafoe comes in and he says, we know he's a cat guy because his house is crawling with cats when the other guys show up to recruit him, but he sees Greta the cat and asks Ellen, is she yours? And she says she is Greta and she has neither master nor mistress, which is this line that people who love and live with cats will appreciate on a very deep level. But it's clearly also a description of herself. You know, she just because she is sort of this domestic figure doesn't mean she has a master or a mistress. But we know, you know, if you're being assailed by a swarm of rats, it's good to have some domestic cats on your side to help with the problem.

But just, I would love to hear your take on the use of rats in general within the film, which for me will lead into a discussion of its references to the Black Death, but I want to give you a chance to jump in before that.

Matt
Yeah, I mean, the famous story is with Herzog, right? And he famously decided that they needed to use like 11,000 rats in the film, which they were going to import from Hungary for use in Denmark, I believe it was they filmed. And so the original town in Denmark where they were supposed to be filming was like, no, you cannot bring thousands of rats here. So they had to move it to another town, which was like, okay, I guess, sure, why not? 

Famously, according to one of the folks who worked on that film, thousands of those rats died as they were traveling from Hungary to Denmark. And then Herzog wanted them all painted because they were all, I think, white rats and he wanted them painted gray. And so according to the person on set, they actually had, in order to get the paint to stick, they had to boil the rats in water before painting them, which caused like thousands more to die. So there's a very major ethical issue there in terms of like animal cruelty and all of these rats dying in the service of this film. And then so they brought them in and then, you know, Herzog has obviously been asked this question many times and he just kind of shrugs it off and, you know, his take is, well, that's what it took to make great art. I had to do this thing in order to make great art and therefore it's justified because I made great art.

Again, as an animal lover, I have a difficult time accepting that and accepting the idea that there needed to be thousands and they needed to be painted and all of these other sorts of things. The other thing he famously said is that they were able to recapture all of them. So they had some kind of contraption where the rats were not able to get out into the town and, you know, become foreign invaders into that particular town. But anyway... 

Katherine 
That sounds like that sounds like something Eric Adams would say. None of the rats got away from Mickey and his crew have been content, whatever dumb story. I lived in New York for a long time, so I whenever I hear discussion of rats, my mind goes there. But it's so interesting that I mean, it's not interesting. It's not surprising at all that Herzog would dismiss, you know, abuse of rats in service of filmmaking, because we know... you know, he made all these movies with Klaus Kinski, who was famously a very violent and volatile person. And it was either during Fitzcarraldo or Aguirre Wrath of God that I think he assaulted an extra on set, like just beat him up. And I think the extra was a local Indigenous man, too, who had joined the production because, you know, it's set in the Amazon. I think it was Fitzcarraldo. 

Matt
I think so, yeah.

Katherine 
So, you know, if someone is willing to tolerate that on their set, you know, against a human being, I wouldn't be surprised if animal welfare was not at the top of their list of concerns.

Matthew 
Yeah, so that's that. I mean, that is something we should bring up. But in terms of thematically, right, like in the Herzog version, the ship, think, is called the Contamina. So they changed. 

Katherine 
is it? Okay, I didn't notice.

Matt

Yeah, they changed the name of the ship. I think each version might have a different name of the ship. I think. I think one of them might go with the Demeter, which is the original Bram Stoker, but in Herzog it's the Contamina. It's a draw, a direct association with contamination and plague and things like that.

But I mean, that is definitely one of the most frightening parts of all of these movies, which is the role that the rats play in spreading the plague and spreading the echoes of the Black Death and things like that. What was your take on the rats?

Katherine 
So for me, the rats just screamed black death. I see this film, 1922 Nosferatu, among other things, as being a film about the black death and the fear of the return of plague. And, you know, that makes sense because the Spanish flu was an incredibly deadly pandemic that was, I don't know the exact years during which the Spanish flu was active, but it would have been on everyone's minds.

I have a bunch of notes about the Black Death. I'm just gonna skim them quickly. So the rats to me scream the Black Death. And part of the reason for this is that people had not understood the origin of the bubonic plague until quite recently in history. So the bacterium that causes it, which is called Yersinia pestis, had been isolated in the mid 1890s. Germ theory in general was very new in this time period. But before that, you know, the Black Death had been something that came in waves. It was unpredictable. It was associated with maybe Satan, with dark magic. Maybe it was a punishment from God. It was incredibly devastating. You know, it could, as we know in the Middle Ages, it killed two thirds of the people in Eurasia, potentially. One half to two thirds are the estimates you usually hear.

And it left villages, towns, whole districts of cities emptied in its wake. And it created conditions where people were incredibly fearful of contact with one another and where they were looking for scapegoats to blame. I think that's something we see play out in the character of Herr Knock in particular in the 1922 version. And in light of sort of growing fashistic climate too of the early 20th century. I was really wondering what you would think, Matt, about Herr Knock potentially as a kind of like anti-Semitic caricature. Because the townspeople's pursuit of him at the end as the one to blame, to the movie calls him a scapegoat even though we know he is he is the guy to blame for the plague coming to town. So just in the realm of the movie, was like, I don't know if he's a scapegoat. I think he actually is the problem in this case. But on a symbolic level, even just the way he's portrayed as this kind of scheming old man who pays his workers really well, I think is tapping into some anti-Semitic stereotypes about sort of the, I don't know, like Jewish employer as this figure who uses money to control the unsuspecting, you know, Gentile locals, but we basically see kind of like a public like lynching or mob hit against him at the end of the movie where the tearing down the scarecrow and, you know, parading it around sort of is the way the film visually substitutes the physical like attack of Herr Knock himself. 

And the reason I bring this up and why it stood out to me so strongly is that minority communities in particular Jews were accused of having caused the Black Death at various points in history when it arrived. And unfortunately, it did give rise to the famous like pogrom killings of the Middle Ages. So in terms of the film's actual portrayal of Herr Knock as someone potentially like holding that kind of status, you know, he is portrayed as a villain and I think the townspeople's actions towards him are shown as sort of heroic. So there was kind of like this wrinkle in the film for me where on the one hand, yes, in the world of the movie itself, you know, without looking at the broader political or historical context, we see like this villainous character who has brought Orlok into the community, get his comeuppance when he's finally caught by the mob, but it did have this echo of the violence and the irrational violence with which people historically had responded to the influx of plague, specifically the Black Death.

Matt
I'm certainly aware of these things, right? I'm certainly aware of the connection to anti-Semitism and that certainly some folks have read the original Nosferatu as possibly anti-Semitic. I don't think Murnau was. I haven't found any evidence for that. Again, he certainly did flee the Nazis and came to America. And that certainly was due to the fact that he was, you know, fairly openly gay. Although I don't think he was open with everyone. I think he was generally well known within the kind of artistic circles, film circles that he was a gay man. And so he certainly knew he would not be at home among the Third Reich.

I haven't seen any evidence of it. If you look at the screenplay, I believe there is one character who is specifically identified as Jewish, and I think that is one of the women, the woman in the village who kind of warns our protagonist not to go on to Orlok's Castle, but otherwise I don't think other characters are mentioned as being Jewish or things like that. Obviously some folks have looked at the way that Orlok is designed in terms of what his face looks like and facial features and things like that and argued that those features might be standing in for stereotypes about Jews. And you know, again, that certainly could be the case. For me as a historian, you know, I'm looking for more evidence of these sorts of things and evidence that there was some kind of explicit desire to make Orlok stand in for these anti-Semitic tropes or Herr Knock or things like that. So I don't read it that way. I understand why some folks do and I understand the historical parallels. I just don't know that the film itself was intended to be as such.

Katherine
Yeah, that makes total sense to me. I wasn't really suggesting that the people who made the film went into it thinking explicitly, you know, we want this to have a racist message or anything like that. So I think there's a way that as a plague narrative, the story can, I guess, retain structures and elements that are very old, like even going back to the Middle Ages or deeper in terms of how we think about pandemics, because like the idea of a scapegoat in a pandemic is something that unfortunately is quite familiar to us in our modern moment when we think of the way that, you know, certain groups, even certain ethnic groups, certain countries were blamed, say, for the spread of COVID. So the figure of the scapegoat feels very pertinent in that sense. And I think it's also interesting in connection to the character of Ellen, because if you think of the origins of the term scapegoat. It was a creature that you would tie up close to your flock of sheep so that it was more convenient for the wolves to come and slaughter that animal versus the ones you actually cared about for commercial reasons or the animals that were properly part of your flock. And Ellen sort of voluntarily becomes a scapegoat at the end of this movie by sacrificing herself.

Matt
I mean, one of the things I find really interesting is actually the scapegoating of the rats. 

Katherine 
interesting.

Matt 

Yeah, so with COVID, we all know, or we have some idea, right, that it started out between a bat and human beings, unless you believe it was designed in a lab and deliberately leaked theory of COVID, which some people do. But anyway, I think most people feel like this came from human contact with a bat, right?
However, people understood from that point, once it made the jump into human beings, that it was spread person to person. And I think the black plague is very similar in which it originated with rats and fleas and things like that. But I think it's pretty similar in terms of as soon as it jumped into the human population, people then spread the plague to other people, right? And so the primary vector of the Black Plague was people, right? Spreading it to each other. You would not have seen that level of death if it was all coming from rats and fleas and things like that. There would have had to have been an absolute army of those things, which I think people would have certainly noticed in order to produce those levels of death. really, think what's happening is that once it makes that jump into humanity, we spread it amongst ourselves. But the rat is the scapegoat there, right? The rat is the thing which needs to be destroyed. And then that leads to these things like rat destruction campaigns and things like that, where people just massively eradicate, you know, everything that has four legs and squeaks around them. And you get that kind of interesting thing when actually, you know, it's people spreading it to other people, which I think is really an interesting kind of thing to think about.

Katherine 
Or the idea of blaming rats when really it's the fleas on the rats and really it's the bacterium inside the fleas. It's like we need something that we can see to hold accountable because the idea, know, germ theory being so new when this movie was made, that it's something invisible, like that you could pass between human beings without even knowing it. I think is very disturbing and maybe even occupies a space somewhat similar to ideas about ghosts in the supernatural. This is also, I think coming out of the Victorian era was a time period when people were very into like seances and there was this sense that, okay, if we can use electricity, if we can use radio waves, maybe the idea of astral projection or hauntings are grounded in some way in a form of science we don't understand. And this is just to say, I think the association between the spectral and disease makes a lot of sense in that cultural context.

Matt
So I'm going to move us on here.  I wanna talk a little bit about IP. So the context of the original Nosferatu raises the specter of intellectual property, something which has come to dominate the movie industry today. What are your thoughts on Dracula and Nosferatu? The work of film adaptation versus fidelity to a text, intellectual property versus artistic freedom? Personally, I am fairly allergic to people who want literal adaptations of IP. And I find the call for such things to generally be window dressing for a lot of right-wing nostalgia for certain texts, which they perceive to be very white or representing their nostalgia for a bygone age of white supremacy or Western civilization. My take is usually that I want good art and not necessarily good IP or the most accurate adaptations of things possible in the form of cinema.

That being said, full disclaimer, I really have no IP myself that I am making money off of. Recently ProQuest let me know that my dissertation has garnered me over $26 in royalties and that's about it in terms of like IP that I own. So I don't really have any reason to feel that, you know, IP is sacrosanct. You know, again, Murnau ripped off Bram Stoker, right? And I love Nosferatu, so I feel okay about it because I love Nosferatu, and I'm glad that all of the copies weren't destroyed. I'm glad that it survived. And I don't feel a whole lot of sympathy in terms or, you know, I'm not outraged by the fact that it was ripped off. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

Katherine 
I'll begin by saying I also am really glad the Nosferatu film exists. That said, I think that the conversation around intellectual property and copyright has changed so much between the early 20th century and the late Victorian era and today that we want to be careful to sort of bound the judgments we're making. Because today when we think of copyright infringement, so much of what comes to mind is a huge mega corporation bringing down the hammer on an artist who's trying to reinterpret something or lawyers arguing over millions and millions of dollars in IP valuation and who should have a claim to it and so on. After Bram Stoker died, his intellectual property would have been you know, the source of income for his wife. And I think she would also have seen herself in a very meaningful sense as being kind of like the executor or keeper of his intellectual and creative legacy. So I think it is important to look at her opposition to the creation of, you know, the 1922 Nosferatu in that light. You know, she was concerned about her, family's income in a very direct way that I think, you know, it is a bit alien to us in this day and age when, you know, film is so controlled by huge corporations and even, you know, literary franchises are, you know, the property of big publishing houses and stuff like that. And I can't be claimed to be an expert on sort of the legal, I guess, the exact legal context that would have applied applied here. 

But, one thing it did make me think of as I was preparing for this episode was actually the J.R.R. estate. And we know that after Tolkien died, his son, Christopher Tolkien, was very protective of how the Tolkien characters and world were used. And I kind of noticed, think, I can even look up when, I think Christopher Tolkien passed away, he passed away in 2020. I wonder if he died of COVID as a sidebar. And it seemed like as he was getting to the end of his life and after he died, there was like this explosion in really schlocky Lord of the Rings franchise content that I think kind of cheapens the original legacy of the material. So, you know, on one level I am sympathetic to protectiveness over an intellectual property in the name of maybe maintaining some artistic integrity. I guess that's sort of my contrarian opinion, although I know it's complicated. And again, if every act of copyright infringement gave us a Nosferatu, that would be a different world versus the Hobbit trilogy or whatever, which was licensed.

Matt
Actually so this is a very Tolkien question for me and I think you're right that when I'm talking about this what I am talking about is these mega corporations and these franchises things like Marvel Comics and things like that which are just being kind of reheated you know again and again and again and you know in the past few years one of my favorite TV shows was the Rings of Power which was...

Katherine 
Oh really? Okay, I'm sorry I called it schlocky. But, go ahead.

Matt
No, that's okay. Which was an adaptation of Tolkien's Silmarillion, amongst other things. And to me, there was this huge backlash towards that and I feel like a lot of that was kind of right wing, like there can't be black hobbits, there can't be black people in Tolkien land and things like that. so there was a lot of kind of dumping on the show in my mind for those sorts of reasons. And folks on the right who feel like they own him and his works. And you got guys like Peter Thiel, who's naming their surveillance company Palantir and things like that. But, I feel like this opens a whole other rabbit hole for us to fall into in terms of Tolkien. So maybe that's a future discussion.

Katherine 
Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating discussion. you know, Tolkien was a problematic figure in terms of his views about race and national. He was so nationalistic, he refused to use French words like cul-de-sac. That's why bag end is called bag end. That's what cul-de-sac means in French. So that said, I, you know, it's an anti war novel. You know, he was disgusted by the Second World War and the First World War. I don't think he would approve of people trying to make Palantir a real thing at all. Anyway, we can put that aside for now.

Matt
Yeah, let's say that maybe this is a morally ambiguous topic and we are in favor of widows being able to receive financial support, but maybe not so much enamored of the big mega corporations that own and distribute IP.

Katherine 
I'd also say that, you know, for someone like Bram Stoker at the end of the 19th century, and you know, for professional men going through much of the 20th century as well, if you had a career as a writer, as an academic, as a scientific researcher, and you were married, often your wife would be doing a lot of the work as well.

So for her, again, you I have to pour over the biographies and so on as well, but you know, I think even though it was in her husband's name, there's a very good chance she was also protecting her own creative legacy. And the idea that while he's passed away, now you have no claim to control over works that you might have participated in creating behind the scenes. That's another dimension of this that I think we should keep in mind.

Matt
So the next one comes from your suggestion that we had a whole podcast on Dracula and Carmilla and we didn't talk a whole lot about blood, which seems like an oversight. So the symbolism of blood abounds in the Dracula novel as well as in each Nosferatu film, but what does it mean? Does it mean something different in each version? Have scientific discoveries changed what it means? Or is there a kind of stable symbolic core that persists despite having more accurate scientific understandings of what blood is these days?

For me, that phrase, the blood is the life or the blood is life, we know that it originates in the Old Testament and in some of the taboos there around eating or drinking blood and things like that. I'm interested to hear what you think.

Katherine 
This question arose for me, actually out of the jokes we were making between ourselves, and I think a couple of minutes into the podcast recording too, about blood types and the idea of giving someone a blood transfusion in the living room with no knowledge of whether your blood types would be compatible, whether it would cause their whole body to go into septic shock and so on and so on. It just seemed so preposterous to us, know, and we kind of encountered it as sort of comical like folly on the part of the characters and the author of the novel. But as I was thinking about it later, I realized, you know, we shouldn't just approach this from almost like a judgmental dismissive perspective. It's a sign that for these characters, because their scientific context was so different, blood represented something else to them than it does to us. You know, they understood it circulates through your body and like you need it to live as part of medicine and everything, but the specifics of that were very different for them. 

And I think one thing it really brings to mind for me is the baby that Mina has at the end of Dracula which they named Quincy after the American who, you know, dies in the quest to defeat Dracula. But we know that because Mina has received blood transfusions from all of the men, there's sort of this sense that they're all the father of the child. Like there's this way that hereditary as blood is very active in the text. And obviously there's this sort of unpleasant kind of racial hygiene, quote unquote, narrative running throughout Dracula, the fear of foreign invasion. But I think when we move into the 1922, like Nosferatu, it feels almost more like a kind of like spiritual life essence. It doesn't quite even feel medical to me anymore in spite of, you know, the plague theme running throughout the text. It's obviously also a stand-in for sexuality and like sexual contact, you know, like Orlok drinking Ellen's blood is sort of a stand-in for him like being able to sleep with her or possess her in a sexual sense.

I had seen in your notes, Matt, that you did talk about blood as something that, you know, we have this visceral reaction to. We know we need it to live, but if we see blood having been spilled, it's a sign that something's gone really wrong. And I guess I had kind of almost like a second wave feminist response to that, which was, that's true in one sense, but then the other context in which, you know, that blood sort of brings up for me as of like menstruation as something that has to happen on a cyclical basis like and if you know blood is not appearing in sort of a timely interval it means something has gone wrong and that reproduction will not be possible so I don't know there's just this really interesting duality to blood both as the sign of like death, like by injury or sickness, but then also as the thing that kind of signifies the potential for the perpetuation of life through reproduction.

Matt
Blood means quite a lot. And it is a powerful thing. In the language of cinema, right, which absolutely would never show menstrual blood up until very, very recently. even...

Katherine 
Until Mad Men, season four or five, yeah. Yeah.

Matt
Yes, yeah, but even very recently too, there's still a great deal of squeamishness. Most shows or movies are not going to go anywhere near it. They're not going to touch it, right? So they're, know, cinema is...

Katherine 
And it'll be something like Carrie, where it's like splatter gore, like the most horrible thing imaginable. You know, the beginning of that movie where a girl gets her period in the shower at the gym. Sorry to interrupt you, but I just thought occurred to me.

Matt
No, you're absolutely, Carrie is a great example of that, right? There is the scene where Carrie has her first period and her mother obviously has not told her about this because her mother is a religious fanatic and so she has no idea what's happening. She's bleeding and she doesn't know why. But again, you the fact that we see blood on camera and she doesn't know what's going on. So to her, it's this powerful, am I dying moment? I see blood, I shouldn't see blood, what's going on? That is the kind of traditional language of the cinema, which is of course the male gaze, right? And to them, that's basically what blood is, right? We know that we have it, we know that it's incredibly potent and powerful, it's what keeps us alive, but in a film, if you see a character cough and there's blood in the handkerchief, you're like, uh-oh, that person's gonna die, right? There is that kind of shorthand in which blood is used as both life and as death, and again, they, you know, historically not particularly interested in dealing with menstruation.

For me, one of the most interesting things about it is actually food and eating, which is that, you know, the way in which we don't see blood in our food if we eat meat is through cooking it, right? And so you cook a piece of meat and the meat is transformed through cooking, which is about culture and civilization. So culture and civilization change this bloody hunk of tissue into a proper meal for a civilized person. Right? And Nosferatu, of course, is not that. He's not civilized. He takes his meals raw. literally drinks the blood, right, which is again what the Bible tells the Israelites they are not to do. And there are all kinds of health reasons for that because if you eat raw meat and drink the blood of animals, you will pretty quickly find yourself ill. You will get, you know, you know, some kind of disease. And so there are practical reasons why we should cook our food probably or cook most things. But for me, it's a it's a really interesting discourse to be had here in terms of meat eating and vegetarianism and transforming meat through culture and through fire. There's something in there about Prometheus and, you know, using fire to turn something into something that is cultured and human. I think that is inherent in the film and in what's happening with Nosferatu and drinking the blood of his victims. 

And there definitely is sexuality too. And it's not only with Ellen. I think the scenes with her husband as well are inherently sexual. Especially in the Eggers where he's like he starts floating up off the bed. Right in one scene as as Orlok is kind of on top of him and feeding on him which is something we typically associate with like orgasm and sexual release this idea that you're like floating. So to me I mean it definitely is all of those things wrapped up into one.

Katherine 
I mean, when I saw the Eggers movie in theaters, I actually, really noticed that scene and I thought it's still quite unusual, maybe less so now that we see a scene of like sexual assault between two men, like depicted pretty explicitly. I think that's what we were seeing. That's what we're seeing in the scenes when Ellen is floating and trembling. But that's also what happens to Thomas when he's in Orlok's castle. And there's that moment later on when, after his friends, wife, and daughters have been killed, when they're all in the carriage together and he is trying to convince his friend that this is a supernatural threat. Your wife didn't just die of the plague. He pulls open his shirt and he says, these horrors are real. And that's a moment where he is kind of disclosing that he has been victimized in this way. And it's clearly something he wasn't, he didn't show right away. There's a certain amount of, at the very least, I don't know, privacy around it. don't want to project like shame, you know, though, you know, he's so disquieted after his encounter with Orlok. I think we can't see that as an assault narrative for sure. 

But one other thing that I'm thinking about in relation to this topic is just depiction of the wounds themselves because we know in you know in the 1922 Nosferatu he has these like snake-like teeth and he feeds on Thom or on Hutter but Hutter thinks it's mosquito bites one next to the other which today I was like two bites next to each other that's bed bugs my friend not just mosquitoes like you you worse things to worry about than you know Count Orlok but fortunately it was just a vampire bite. But then we also see the snake-like teeth retained in the Herzog version. But when we get to Eggers, it's much more animalistic. It's like he is taking a bite out of people and just drinking the blood that flows. This isn't like a proboscis type situation. And it's so animalistic. It's so wolf-like and carnivorous that I think just like the sound effect of him like drinking the blood is really grotesque. It's genuinely very scary. 

I do have to say that in the Herzog movie, scene where Orlok finally feeds on Ellen, I also found myself responding to that very viscerally, like with the sucking noise that you get, which is different from how it is in the Eggers, but I found it so disgusting. Like it just grossed me out. I couldn't wait for the movie to be over after that happened.

Matt
I mean, to me that sounded like breastfeeding, basically. 

Katherine 
Yeah.

Matt

There's this really weird moment where Orlok like lifts up her skirt before he starts feeding on her and he kind of takes a peek and he's like, mmm mmm, no, I don't... no. There's this really weird thing happening there and then he starts feeding on her and my first impression was that it sounds like someone breastfeeding and again I think that is part of Herzog's kind of revulsion to the sex scene, to the sexuality and in his mind the kind of love that Orlok is looking for is not sexual love but some kind of maternal love and the love that a mother would give to a child, right? So throughout that film when Sad Boy Orlok is talking about not having love and not being loved and things like that, it clearly seems to be more of the love of a maternal figure that he's seeking out than the love of a romantic or sexual partner in that particular film. 

But I mean, I think I agree with what you're saying in terms of the animalistic qualities of all of these things, right? And in terms of Hutter mistaking the bites on his neck for mosquitoes, in terms of the Venus fly traps and the leeches and all of those sorts of things. And I think that really is about our kind of animal drives and this idea, again, you know, which we find in Freud, but lots of other places as well, that we have these inherited drives that we have gotten from our animal ancestors and they are baked into our DNA. They are ineradicable. We cannot control them. We can't repress them to the degree that they go away. They only go underground and they are there as a part of of our kind of unconscious. And, you know, at the end of the day, they're just kind of lurking there and we have these desires and passions and drives that we can't control. 

And again, to me, that's most clear in Eggers in terms of Ellen and her conflicted nature. And she clearly has this sexual drive which has caused her to summon Orlok in the first place. The film is pretty clear that the initial moment for her is essentially that she was masturbating and her father saw her and scolded her and told her that she needed to repress those drives and repress those desires. And that of course doesn't work and the repression only makes them go underground, which leads to her calling out into the darkness, right? The film opens basically with a prayer, which is like, to me, anything. a guardian angel, right? Is there anything that can come to me and save me from the repressive father who, you know, used to seem like a great dad, but as soon as he found out I have my own sexuality, my own desire, my own drives, you know, he immediately came down and said, what are you doing? You can't touch yourself, don't you know? You know, the film doesn't get that explicitly into it, but it seems to be, you know, a kind of religious reaction to her touching herself and he comes down as the repressive father figure immediately and tries to eliminate her desire and drives, but obviously they're still there. So again, to me, this kind of animalistic drinking of the blood is a part of those two drives, right? The sexual drive as well as, again, what Freud calls the death drive, right? The drive to return things to their natural state of decay.

Katherine
So first I want to comment directly on this scene where Ellen goes to her window and cries, come to me. Just in terms of, I guess, of like vampire pop culture and lore, that line, come to me, is also very important in the context of Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. there is this idea underlying those texts that vampires will sit and they'll listen until they hear the voice of someone who is ready to die and who wants death and then they'll descend upon them. This is quite explicitly how some of the characters in those books operate and I mean I don't know if it's a direct citation of that on the part of Eggers, I'm not going to accuse him of being a Rice fanboy without evidence, but I do think it can sort of help us in thinking about the nature of Orlok as a predator, both in the literal creature that eats other creatures sense and then also obviously in the sexual predator sense. There's the idea that she summoned him, but how is it that he happened to hear her? That's the other question that's always sitting at the back of my mind as I watch this film. And I can't help thinking of the other vampire stories I've read which have these scenes of vampires sitting and just listening to sort of the voices in the heads of all the people, know, in the city around them and picking the one that's like the most desperate and that is crying out for death in the most clear voice.

Matt
I mean, I think there is support for that, right? Like later in the film when Ellen is talking about her vision or dream where she's getting married and holding hands with death, she says, that was the happiest I've ever felt in my entire life, right? So there clearly is this idea that she is seeking out both simultaneously, you know, sex and death, right? know, pleasure and desire as well as complete and total annihilation and non-being. I mean, I think that's there. Unfortunately, Eggers would probably never say that because again, he doesn't like to talk about these sorts of things and he doesn't want to get that much, think, into some of those influences or ideas. But I don't think you're wrong in saying that that's there.

Katherine 
I mean, he says it in the movie, is what I think. And one thing that is striking about this film is how sexual the relationship is between the married couple, Ellen and Thomas. Whereas we know that in 1922, it's like these stage kisses where they're like, mwah mwah, on each cheek and he spins her around. It's very childish in that way. Because obviously they weren't going to represent on stage in 1922 or on film what we see in the 2024 movie. But, you know, there is this frankness about sexuality within the film that I found very refreshing, in a way. And, you know, one might say about the original Dracula, part of the problem that has given rise to the idea of a monster like Dracula is this inability to extricate death drive from sex drive because sex is seen as culturally scary. You know, that's why Jonathan is so freaked out when he encounters, you know, the three brides, the, you know, or rather that's why they're there as such a frightening presence of these sexually forward female figures. 

Whereas from the very beginning in the 2024 movie, we know that there is a great deal of romantic and erotic affection between the married couples. You know, they're joking about how many kids, you know, the friend keeps having with his wife, because they're so, you know, he is so attracted to her and so on. And Ellen is this character who is really resisting the idea that she is sinful or unclean for having, you know, this natural sexual drive. 

And I think one thing I really appreciate about Eggers as a filmmaker is that it always seems to me, he is first and foremost trying to put himself in the audience in the mind of a person from the time period he's representing. So in The Witch, that's a story, if you've seen it, I highly recommend it to anyone listening. It's pretty short too, it's an hour and a half, so it's easy to watch. That's a film where the script is really inspired by early modern texts describing people's fears of witches and their supposed encounters with them. We are in the world of those characters where witches and demons are real, they're out to get you. It is very frightening and it reduces you to kind of emotional desperation knowing that, you know, the family goat might actually be Satan. You know, it's very literal, but it's very effective in that way. And, know, say in The Northmen, his Viking epic, which is the story of Hamlet, the main character is like a Viking berserker warrior. And we see the scene in which that character believes he's turning into like a bear or a wolf before going into battle. And we see, you know, how he imagines the Valkyrie as this figure who is literally going to, you know, carry him to Valhalla and so on. 

And then I think in Nosferatu, he's really interested in what is it that actually makes the vampire frightening to a 19th century person? And I think, you know, he's shedding all these stereotypes we have about the Victorian era as one in which people didn't think or talk about sex at all, had completely cordoned off that part of their psyche, even in the context of marriage. And he's interested in this contradiction. People were kind of forced to live and knowing themselves as sexual beings, knowing themselves as beings who were embodied and had all kinds of desires and limitations and pain that they experienced. The experience of men being expected to be very dominant and patriarchal figures, but actually experiencing vulnerability, for instance, in the face of someone like Orlok, where physically, know, Hutter or Thomas can't defend himself. 

And what we're seeing is the way that the figure of the vampire just completely brings into the open all of these anxieties about what you know yourself to be versus what society is trying to impose upon you and the way it's trying to keep you in a little box where you can't have any of these feelings or fears. And just the fact of him being this rotting corpse, like he's not a sexy vampire by any means, he's not, you know, one of the characters from True Blood or Twilight or anything like that. Just the fact that he is this rotting thing that is still highly sexual, still has a very keen appetite for food and drink, obviously, because what he eats is blood. It's so disruptive to the idea of Victorian society as one that's obsessed with hygiene and keeping the body covered and hidden away.

Matt
Right, but I mean, think that seems to be precisely what is so attractive perhaps to Ellen. And they have, I mean, there's a full frontal nudity scene where Orlok, right, gets up out of his coffin and, you know, he has a, he has a penis, right? You know, I didn't see that coming. I did not expect a full frontal rotting corpse scene, but there it is. So I mean, he does, right? So Eggers in a sense does establish the character as sexual in a certain sense, although also repulsive, right? But I mean, I think that is part of the point again, which is that the things that frighten us and repulse us are also, you know, sexy in certain ways. And I think a lot of what you're talking about too is these kind of fears that men have about being quote unquote "cuckolded," right, which is that their wife or their woman is going to be taken by another man, a man who is more of an alpha than they are, a man who is more prodigiously sexual and powerful and whatever.

There's this scene in Eggers where Ellen kind of thrusts her face towards Hutter's crotch and basically says, like, you could never please me the way that he pleases me and all of this kind of stuff, which, again, I'm sure those kind of narratives were around during the time, but they certainly are also around these days. And there are a lot of those kinds of both fears and insecurities as well as it's a definite kink that people have these days as well. And so that's still, you know, as much as he does make period pieces, I think, you know, he may have also had some contemporary things in mind in terms of making that really, really explicit that this is a relationship in which the powerful, sexual vampire is cuckolding, you know, the husband who lacks, you know, that kind of vitality and things like that.

Katherine 
Though I think what complicates it a little bit is, I think everything you're saying makes total sense, I think that's why I found the explicit depiction of Thomas as also being a sexual victim of Orlok so interesting in this movie. Because in that scene, there's a version of this movie where that dimension that I just described concerning Thomas was much less explicit or not investigated where we do just see the straightforward narrative of, you know, the wife saying, you know, he's so much more virile than you, like you're not as much of a man as the disgusting corpse with a penis. But it's kind of like both of them working, channeling all their raw emotions about their having been victimized by this monstrous figure. Like they're kind of, I don't know, this feels like a weird route into saying this, but it's almost like they're equals or equalized in some way by the damage that has been done to them by Orlok. Like the fact that her husband has been put sort of in the same position as her with respect to, you know, having been fed upon and like sexually victimized. And the fact that they do end up having sex at the end of that scene, it kind of reaffirms their attachment to each other in spite of this looming figure of the predator from outside. Does that make sense?

Matt
Yeah, no, I do. And I think that's where some of the folks who don't like the Eggers film because they find it really problematic. I think that's where a lot of them come in, where is, know, Ellen at the end of the film has to resubmit herself to the person who, you know,  raped her as a child. And the film is structured in such a way where adding that childhood encounter in means that she now needs to like resubmit herself to her rapist to be taken advantage of again. But then there is this ambiguity in terms of, well, is she actually getting real pleasure from this? Is there some part of her which desires this to be revictimized? And then you add the piece in with the husband and then you add in the audience, right? Which is, you know, as the audience, it's entirely possible to watch this film and be just completely titillated by it when it is in fact, you know, also a story about, you know, an abuser and a woman being abused and people being sexually abused by this kind of arch predator. 

And so it brings up some really, I think, complicated feelings for some folks watching the movie and kind of struggling to like, oh, I feel you know possibly turned on by this I you know what but maybe I shouldn't be I don't want to be because it's this narrative of abuse but, is the director making this narrative of abuse sexy? Am I meant to feel that that abuse is sexy? Am I meant to feel, you know, turned on by this? What if I do feel turned on by this? What does that say about me? So I think for some folks that creates this really kind of nebulous space in which they're uncomfortable perhaps with what they're feeling given the reality of the narrative. That is what stuck with me after my initial watching of the film. More than a lot of the other things that we've talked about, that's the thing that I really sat with after I watched it for the first time, was that it was a really exciting film and then you kind of go back and intellectualize it a bit and you're like, wait a minute, should I have been excited by the film in that way? I think that's to Eggers' credit and I think he is trying to do that, right? He's trying to create that zone where these intense feelings come up in the audience and they're not quite sure what to do with it or how to resolve it. I think that was his goal.

Katherine 
I would say that the discomfort it generates is a sign of the film's success. Because, I don't know, every time I watch it, I think there's part of me that's like, maybe this time when I watch it, know, Thomas will save her at the end, he'll show up and stake Orlok. But what would that mean as a narrative, you know, that if terrible forms of abuse and violence have happened, you can sort of tidily do away with them if a man runs in and saves you at the last minute, I think. I don't know, I think there's a way the film that kind of captures the impact that traumas can have on people, you that you can't really just exercise them from your psyche. think it, the mark of that will always be present, not just with the individual, but you know, in culture, you know, so many say of the films that we consume contain, were either made by people who we know were abusers or they literally contain scenes of abuse and violence. You know, the way we were talking about with Fitzcarraldo where one of the extras was beaten on set.

But one thing that always comes to mind is, this might seem a little bit random, but an interview I read with Amelia Clark, who played Daenerys on Game of Thrones, and she has talked about how much she disliked performing naked on that show. So, you know, now if you go back and watch, you know, those scenes where, you know, she's married off to Khal Drogo and has to have sex with him for the first time, we're seeing the story of a character having that experience, but we're also literally seeing footage of the actress feeling on some level sexually coerced or exploited by the fact she was expected to appear nude in this film. So, I don't know that there is a resolution to that. I don't know that we can throw out every piece of media that is built on exploitation of women or other forms of exploitation because we'd have nothing left. We kind of have to sit with our discomfort and self-disgust maybe and then move forward from there. So I think that's why I see this movie as successful because it doesn't give a satisfying conclusion to the traumas that are encountered and render it.

Matt
That was completely my take as well. And again, like similar to the way in which blood can both signify that which is life giving and life affirming, as well as death and destruction, right? Sexual desire operates the same way, which is that it can be wonderful and affirming and, and pleasurable and a part of life, but it can also unleash the absolute worst, most predatory instincts in people and it can unleash forms of death as well. And that's not going to be resolved anytime soon again, because I think it is just, it's baked into our humanity and these drives that we can't quite understand or put our fingers on which operate at levels which I think are below consciousness not to get too overly Freudian here but I mean I think that is is a kind of fundamental truth about humanity that that can't be resolved.

Katherine 
I mean, I think I actually kind of disagree in the sense that I think the way I describe the point that I think you're you're kind of getting at is the stories that we tell about sexuality in our culture encourage the expression of sexuality through violence. You know, if our idea of what a man is, for instance, is someone who is violent and who takes whatever they want, whenever they want, then, you know, their sexual life is going to be just another expression of that. You know, just like if we were, this will sound kind of absurd, but we are talking about vampires. If we were to substitute sexuality for the hunger drive, you know, the fact that people get hungry doesn't mean we all go around eating each other and committing cannibalism, you know, because a person was the nearest thing to us. 

I think the narrative undergirding rape culture is that men in particular have this insatiable sex drive that's going to express itself regardless of whether consent exists. And I don't know, maybe it's like our belief in that myth is what gives rise to the Nosferatu on some level. Because an environment where there wasn't this narrative about sexuality as something violent and dirty. That is a world in which Nosferatu would have no power, at least in a sexual sense. Maybe he would still be able to cannibalize people. You know, he, Ellen wouldn't have been this lonely figure who was able to be kind of duped by him as a young girl.

Matt
Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's anything inherent in men that makes them predators. I think it is a function of power. And I think what it is is if you give a person enough power where they can act on all of their desires with impunity. Some people will do so and that will have an outsized impact on the community, the civilization, things like that. I think if you give women the kind of power that men have historically been given, some women will do the same thing in which they will enact their desires in destructive ways. So I don't think it's a particularly, you know, it's not inherent to male biology. It's not inherent to female biology or anything like that, I think it primarily is about power. And so if you are like Orlok and you literally have the, can overpower anyone you want as a means of expressing your desires and fulfilling your hungers, right? That's essentially what you get.

Katherine 
But then the one thing you can't have is actual relationship, I guess, to another person because everything is premised on fear and power. That's why Ellen's consent is important, is that that's the one thing she's able to withhold. And I think all of this is why I liked the characterization of Thomas Hutter in the 2024 movie. He's not, the movie doesn't take that turn where he reasserts dominance over Orlok by staking him, you know, like the penetrative sort of action, you know, that we know from Dracula. 

Matt
So we're going to end with a bit of something that I noticed in one of the screenplays here, which I thought was really fascinating. So this is the original screenplay for the 1922 written by Galeen, which does not make it into the film. So I wanted to read this little bit of the screenplay and then kind of think through what happens because this doesn't make it into the original and then really doesn't make it into the other ones kind of subsequently. 

 So in the original, in the screenplay, we are with the Hutters. So Ellen, this is a quote about her. "She is sulking now and trying to placate him, but he pulls out his watch. It is late already. He has to go. He kisses her goodbye. But she calls him back again to confess that she hasn't got any money left to do the shopping.
He pulls out his purse with a sad look and holds it up. There's nothing in it. They both sigh. He leaves with a heavy heart. The moment she is alone, she takes a small basket of potatoes, which is all she can find, the last resort of the poor housewife, and starts peeling them. A potato drops on the floor, the kitten comes up and plays with it." So again, that's from Henry Galeen's original screenplay. I found this really fascinating when I read it because in each version, they seem to have a fairly stable kind of bourgeois existence. At least that's what we're led to believe when we see their home. I think this is especially true in the Herzog version. In the Eggers, we do get some commentary on class in terms of Hutter being in debt to his friend, the wealthy ship owner and things like that. And then so he mentions that he has a debt to him, which he isn't currently able to pay off. But there's generally the sense that these this couple seems to have a relatively stable home. They have a place to live, have, you know, again, in each film, it's slightly different in terms of how much they have and, and how bourgeois it looks. But generally speaking, they look to be stable and solid. Ellen is certainly not like scrounging for the last potato to feed herself and things like that.

And I'm really interested in just kind of thinking about what would happen if that had made it into the film, if their poverty had been a bit more desperate, if class, I think, was a bigger consideration, I think, in some of these films. I think it makes the actions of Hutter a little bit more ambiguous in terms of his ambition to become someone prominent in Herr Knock's firm and to go all the way to Transylvania at the drop of a hat. Because without this, he's an ambitious person. He's trying to climb. He's trying to rise up the ranks and be more kind of solidly bourgeois like his friend, rise up in society. But with that
original screenplay, you know, it seems to be actually poverty that's driving this and the fact that they're struggling to be able to afford food and things like that. So I found this really interesting that this did not make it into the film and that they cut this, they cut this kind of class aspect out of it. And I was interested to kind of hear what you thought about that and what you thought about the way class operates in the films.

Katherine 
I think that's really fascinating and I wonder if it would have been included maybe just to placate audience members who would have been like, I don't get it. Why is he going to the land of thieves and ghosts? You know, it creates more immediate desperation to sort of drive him on this unsafe journey. But then in the 1922 version, he doesn't seem to think it's particularly unsafe. And I wonder if he was more of a working class person or someone who's under economic duress of his relation to the local people he meets in Transylvania would be quite different. Because he's very dismissive of them. think along, there's sort of a racial ethnic dimension, there's a city country dimension, but also a class dimension. You know, he's an urbane gentleman who is kind of looking on these country peasants as though they have nothing to say to him. But if he were someone who knows what it means to, I mean, they didn't look like they were starving, obviously, they're just you know, sort of farming people. I think having come from that kind of class position might change his relation to them and incline. For some reason, my instinct is telling me he might be more inclined to take them seriously because he didn't see them as removed from himself in the same way. Maybe that's totally off base as an instinct. 

But I think also, you know, moving into say the Eger's Nosferatu. The question of his motivation not being that of, you know, really intense economic stress, it draws out this theme of like predator and prey in an interesting way. Because, you know, in the 1922 version, like I said, Hutter is kind of just this, what's that word like gormless guy who's like smiling and trotting off to like the terrifying castle where everyone's saying like, no way, man, that place, read this book about vampires and the seven deadly sins, like, you know, and he's sort of chipper and laughing up until, you know, he is actually confronted with the figure of Orlok and his horses who are dressed like Grim Reapers and all of this. 

But in the most recent movie, I think we see Thomas really feels like he's in a bad situation. But there's that part of his brain that is the intellectual and rational side that says you're being silly. Even when he, you know, is out in the country and he kind of feels like these people he's encountering are weird and the place he's in is uncomfortable. He sleeps with his boots on, because, you know, clearly you don't do that if you're comfortable, you know, in the place you're staying. He has this horrible vision in the night where he sees maybe a woman being sacrificed, then looks down and there is indeed mud on his boots. All these signs saying, no, something really bad is happening and you need to get out. But he just keeps going until it's too late when he's sort of been abandoned at the crossroads and then Orlok's carriage comes to pick him up. And at that point, he kind of knows he's been caught. There isn't a moment when he enters the castle and feels at ease and then there's a turning point, as I think we see more of in the first two movies, especially with the cutting himself on the knife sort of being the turning point where it's like, something really is messed up about Count Orlok.

You know, that whole time he knows, you I think he feels that he's going to die in this place from the very beginning. And it's that prey instinct being activated. He's like a frightened rabbit that can only sort of freeze and like go through these motions. And even the way he escapes, the way it's depicted, you know, which I think is similar to the Dracula novel. Like he jumps down and we think maybe he's died, you know, flinging himself into the water below. And he might as well have probably would have been preferable than being in that castle with Orlok. And I think if you have this pressing economic need, it's almost, as you said, money in the waters and distracting us from that tension between the rational mind and the instinct that something is wrong. Like I need to get out. I shouldn't be here. Whereas if he's thinking, no, I need the money, like it's sort of dilutes the intensity of what makes the film frightening.

Matt
Yeah, that is really interesting. I think it actually makes more of a difference towards the end as the plague gets going, which is there's not a lot of depiction of class difference, I think, in some of those scenes in the films. I mean, especially in Herzog as civilization collapses and at the end you have these people who are like, well, well, what are you gonna do? Civilizations collapsed, let's eat, drink and be merry here. They're all like well dressed, right? So it's not like the city's poor who are coming out and saying, well, the city sucked, anyway, it was never good for us, so good riddance. It's like the wealthy and they're all, you know, again, like finely dressed and they've got these kind of banquet tables laid out and they don't seem to mind that their wealth and privilege is collapsing in front of them, which is really kind of interesting. I didn't notice too many depictions either in Eggers in terms of once the play gets going, distinctions of class among different residents of the city, things like that. Other than, you know, some people live in big houses and other people are trying to get a spot in the hospital bed and things like that. I don't know if that's something maybe you picked up on a little bit more. But again, just to me, I think it's something which is interestingly missing. And I kind of wonder, are there some vampire stories which perhaps do a better job of dealing with class in your opinion? You would probably know more than I would.

Katherine 
There is really interesting novel that I think I brought up in our Dracula discussion, which is actually a retelling of the Dracula story set in like the Soviet Union. And, you know, the idea of communism versus capitalism is a running theme and characters conversations. That's a book called The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, which I cannot recommend highly enough. It's really fantastic. But you know, it's interesting, this question of, I guess, of bourgeois economics does come through in a lot of the vampire stories. Like in Carmilla, I remember it's an English family that doesn't have much money in England, but they can go to Eastern Europe and live really well. And, you know, sometimes there'll be like servant characters who seem to have a bit more knowledge about folklore and so on, but it's almost this anxiety of downward mobility of the middle-class person who's not at risk of starving or anything, but it's kind of a question of luxury and dignity that seems to recur. I think in modern vampire novels, you get a much wider range of characters.

The Sookie Stackhouse novels that inspired True Blood have a very working class setting. They're set in the American South, where the vampire who comes back was one of the landowning families who had had a plantation in the antebellum period. And the main character is a waitress, as we all know from the TV show. But I think apart from the idea of the vampire as this aristocrat who is out of time, and is kind of trying to reassert their power even after the era of what we think of as the feudal aristocrat has ended. I can't really think of a working class vampire story as such, but they must be out there. There are enough vampire books in the world.

Matt
I think that may be somewhat the legacy of Dracula, of how important that novel is to so many vampire stories and again, with the wealthy count and things like that and the real estate game and you know, which the wealthy can play and others can't as well as the characters in that particular novel and I think maybe that perhaps does not lend itself as much to a kind of working class vampire story, but that's really interesting. Did you have anything that you wanted to throw in in terms of an additional take or?

Katherine
I did have a thought about the 1922 film, the very end, when, um, you know, Ellen has allowed Orlok to feed on her, the cock has crowed, he evaporates, ends up a little smoking pile of ash on the floor. And we know she's dying, but she has this final moment where she seems to like spring to life and exclaim like, Hutter, like she's full of life again and then falls back. This is a very theatrical moment. It's very typical of Victorian stage plays, but it's also very typical of lot of illness narratives. And I guess this brings us back to our earlier conversation about the plague. But that moment for me, I was like, this is the end of La Boheme, the Puccini opera, which is a tuberculosis narrative about a working class woman who is slowly dying of tuberculosis and it ends with her death. 

But there is this trope that you see in a lot of places, like throughout, you know, the decades. It even came up, I was thinking of the Chernobyl series from HBO, where we have as a plot point the fact that apparently if you're suffering from radiation poisoning, you will experience a remission of symptoms that makes it feel like you're getting better right before things get really bad. And I was just thinking a little bit about, okay, what is the function of this moment at the very end of the film? Like it shows her triumph, maybe it shows a suggestion that the ill person in their presence on the boundary between life and death has some kind of almost preternatural energy or awareness. Maybe it's a suggestion of the persistence of some kind of life into and after death. But I really found it an interesting contrast to the end of the 2024 movie where, I don't think she exclaims like Thomas or anything like that, but we kind of see her give this look, like this smirk when she knows that she's defeated Orlok. And that's kind of what we get instead of this sort of operatic moment of her sitting up and going, like Thomas, I saved you.

Matt
Yeah, I mean, for me, I tend to read the ending as a kind of, an ending which is pleasing to Christian viewers who want to be reassured that at the end the Christian worldview will reinsert itself and triumph. And so obviously there is the parallel between the sacrifice of Jesus in Christianity, which Christians believe has defeated death and made eternal life possible in the kingdom of God and things like that and obviously Ellen's self-sacrifice to save the city and perhaps the world from the plague of Nosferatu and things like that. And again, Nosferatu is most associated with the shadows and the darkness and the sun coming up can be seen as the kind of light of God, the light of Christianity, again, chasing the shadows away and bringing what was done in the darkness to the light and things like that. That tended to be how I interpreted that. Again, like I don't think that that is Eggers' view necessarily. I don't, I certainly don't view Eggers as some kind of, you know, religious zealot who feels that in the end, you know, the proper symbolic order needs to reinsert itself as the dominant order and, you know, things like that. But, to me, that's how I kind of interpret that.

Katherine 
It's an interesting moment that kind of just ties together a bunch of the different threads we were pursuing throughout our conversation, I think. And it's sort of like a hinge between the 19th century and the 20th, 21st century context, different representations of that ending moment.

Matt
Do you have any recommendations for things to read or watch alongside of these as we close?

Katherine 
Well, there's a book that I now want to read, is a novella called Pale Horse, Pale Rider which is from the 1930s in its account of the Spanish flu. As you can tell, I was thinking a lot about disease in relation to the early, the 1922 Nosferatu. Another text which I mentioned earlier is actually the show Twin Peaks and the movie that accompanied it called Fire Walk with Me. I wouldn't be surprised if Eggers in his interpretation of the character of Orlok and his relation to Ellen had those David Lynch productions in the back of his mind because they're sort of a spectral predatory male figure that preys on a young girl in the course of, that is at the heart of those two stories. And I think Lynch is someone who took a lot of inspiration from Herzog, David Lynch being the director of Twin Peaks. So that's a text that I'm going to return to, think, after our conversation to see if I can like test my theory that it might have been some kind of inspiration part of the journey of creating Nosferatu 2024.

Matt
I agree and I have rewatched a lot of those things actually recently. Twin Peaks, Fire Walk with me and The Return and I definitely see that I see that connecting thread between Laura Palmer and you know a lot of the things that are happening in some of these different versions of Nosferatu and again I think in those series Lynch is definitely dealing with desire and death and how those things overlap and how in those again Laura Palmer's desires lead her to a particular place where she encounters this kind of predatory supernatural figure. I think you're definitely right about that. I think that's spot on.

For my recommendation, I also went plague narrative. and I said, Daniel DeFoe A Journal of the Plague Year, which I did read shortly after COVID because a lot of people had it pretty high on their kind of like, these are some things that you should read along with the COVID pandemic kind of things. And it is, it's just harrowing. It is harrowing to read his account of the plague, I'm not sure that Defoe personally lived through, he grew up hearing stories about it.

Katherine 
No, he didn't. Sorry, this is one of my, yeah, sorry. This is one of my bug bears actually is that historians love to read that book as a historical record, but he's writing about events at least a couple generations before he lived. And it's almost, I would say better understood as a kind of early novel, historical novel versus an actual historical record or memoir. I'm not taking away from the worthiness of the text at all, but just something to keep in mind, like, as you're moving through it, that it has, this narrative of the plague has been filtered through a couple of generations and a changed political context and all kinds of things. But please go on.

Matt
Yeah, no, that was my understanding of it as well, is that it was passed on in oral tradition. And so, you know, he would have grown up hearing stories about this plague and what it was like. But again, I found a lot of it hit really hard, particularly people who felt like they were trapped. They had nowhere to go where they could escape it. And I mean, I remember having discussions with my wife in terms of like, what do we do? Where do we write this thing out? Like, where do we go to not get the COVID or, you know, the contemporary version of the plague, well, we can't go anywhere. Because if we try to go here, we can't go there. And it's going to be there too. And so a lot of that novel is kind of dealing with those anxieties in terms of people not knowing where to go and trying to desperately find some kind of place where they would be safe from this thing.

And again, the societal collapse that happens in that novel, and you can kind of compare that again, especially to, I think, more the Herzog in which all authority has ceased. There's no longer a police force or a jail. The mayor is dead and nobody knows who's in charge. And so it's a really interesting and kind of harrowing read, I think.

Katherine 
And the people dining in the town square while their bodies piling up all over the place, which unfortunately did happen a lot during COVID because I think a certain number of people were in denial or stopped caring. Yeah.

Matthew Park 
There you go, that's when outdoor dining was pioneered, right? We are inheritors.

Katherine 
I was thinking, I was thinking more, you know, how at some places they refuse to close restaurants and stuff. But yeah, actually outdoor dining might have been the responsible, you know, response to what was going on. They were just being, you know, communally, you know, aware in their choice to celebrate outside.

Matthew Park 
Well, thank you, Catherine. I really appreciate it. This was a lovely conversation. Again, I think if the goal of this podcast is to raise more questions than answers, I definitely have a bunch now that I can go back and kind of rewatch. Foremost in my mind, again, is rewatching the original and thinking a bit more about Ellen and the way in which she might be more active, I think, than I had. kind of originally perceived or interpreted throughout the film. So thank you for that.

Katherine 
Yeah, I think it was the Eggers' version that sort of set me up to see her as maybe being more of an agent than, you know, I would have otherwise in approaching a movie from that time period. But thank you so much, Matt. These conversations are always fascinating and I feel like we could go on for another two and a half hours.

Matt
Easily. mean just just talking about boiling rats itself I feel like we could.

Katherine 
Yeah, I don't understand how boiling rats helps anything really, but...

Matt
I don't know. I'm only relaying what I've read. And I don't know what it is about the paint that the rats needed to be boiled. But yeah, that's the thing. That's the thing that once you know, you can't unknow. And so now we've spread that knowledge like the plague.

Katherine 
But they have a term for that now, is an info hazard. Is that, am I using that properly?

Matt
That should be the info hazard podcast and we just tell people about things that they really don't want to know and now they cannot unknow them. You're welcome, audience. All right, thank you, Katherine.