Stop calling Nosferatu ‘Gothic’

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

Warning: This article contains spoilers.

Horror movies aren’t especially known for their delicate themes and social commentary, but fans had high hopes for Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which promised to deliver a masterclass in adapting Gothic literature and its traditional layered symbolism to the big screen. Eggers faceplanted in about 10 minutes, even though he had more than 80 other Dracula adaptations — plus the original 1922 Nosferatu — from which to draw inspiration.

In addition to being a lackluster movie, Nosferatu represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the Gothic genre, leaning heavily into aesthetics and leaving little room for character development, emotion or plot, for that matter. After having laughed through the movie, I left with an appreciation for the cinematography and costume design, and the solace that at least Willem Dafoe had fun making it.

Courtesy photo.

Eggers managed to check off every superficial box for a traditional Gothic tale. Rats? Check. Necrophilia? Check. Castles, disease, death and the heiress of Gothicism herself, Lily-Rose Depp? Check, check, check, check. Yet, despite throwing everything at the screenplay, Nosferatu was devoid of substance.

Eggers barely introduced the characters, let alone delved into their relationships, and therefore never gave audiences a reason to care if they lived or died. Plus, despite gruesome deaths and Ozzy Osbourne-style pigeon snacking, the film didn’t conjure a single shudder.

Frankly, it was hilarious to watch the all-star cast — including Depp, Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Bill Skarsgård — give it their all for a script that failed to deliver any kind of meaning.

Nosferatu doesn’t deserve to be called “Gothic,” it’s an unintentional comedy at worst and a vapid horror movie at best.

The concept of the unheimlich — translated as “uncanny” or, more literally, “unhomely” — is central to the Gothic genre and identifies the unsettling feeling that only comes from a twisted familiarity. Stories like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House or Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak evoke the unheimlich by perverting the domestic sphere — taking a family-centric, traditionally safe space and using societal norms and supernatural elements to turn it against the occupants. This violation of the domestic is often understood in sexual terms.

Eggers had everything he needed to follow in del Toro’s footsteps with the protagonist Ellen Hutter (Depp), whose character embodies this violation on paper. 

As a vulnerable young girl, Ellen is essentially raped by the vampire Count Orlok (Skarsgård), who takes over her body from across Europe. From that point on, as Ellen briefly mentions, she feels unclean and unworthy of being in the domestic sphere, embodied by her friends, the Hardings, who have a seemingly perfect, traditional family.

Ellen has all the hallmarks of a Gothic heroine, as she’s stripped of her family and bodily autonomy and faces the threat of sexual violation, but Eggers never explores her character development. It seems the director was distracted by the fact that, unlike in 1922, he could write real sex scenes and make Depp moan every other line.

Instead of showing the psychological ramifications of Ellen’s abuse, Eggers stops at depicting a gorgeous 25-year-old getting raped over and over again — first by Orlok, then by her husband, then by Orlok again. Depp’s character is reduced to a sexual object by the men on both sides of the camera.

Nosferatu could have been a chilling tale of love, sacrifice and bodily autonomy, as well as an exploration of concepts like purity and virginity. It was, instead, a visually stunning but ultimately unfeeling adaptation that did nothing but retread a very old and often told story.