In recent years, amid emptying pews and elite apathy, filmmakers trying to both convey a religious sensibility and garner mainstream accolades have taken a few different approaches. Some have focused on a transcendent sense of wonder toward the things of heaven, à la Terrence Malick in The Tree of Life. Others, like Martin Scorsese in Silence or John Michael McDonagh in Calvary (or, more subtly, Greta Gerwig in Lady Bird), have captured the historical or cultural import of religious institutions.
And still others, like Robert Eggers’ stunning remake of the 1922 vampiric classic Nosferatu, have tried to scare the hell out of viewers.
Set in the fictional mid-19th century town of Wisborg, Germany, Nosferatu stars Lily-Rose Depp as the newly married Ellen Hutter, whose covenant to her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) seemingly put an end to the ghastly visions that had haunted her since adolescence. But when Thomas sets off to execute a real estate deed in a secluded Transylvanian castle (#redflag) and so secure a decent living for himself and his wife, he’s captured by the literally bloodthirsty Count Orlok (the titular Nosferatu, played by the ever macabre Bill Skarsgård). In his absence, Ellen’s visions return—and escalate into full-blown possessions.
It soon becomes clear that the hypnotic and sanguivorous Orlok is the source of Ellen’s visions, and that he intends to reunite with the now-grown woman in the flesh. Thomas manages to return to Wisborg, but so does Orlok. Mayhem ensues, and though a few Wisborgians—Ellen, Thomas, and the occultist Prof. Albin von Franz (Willem Dafoe) among them—know why their neighbors are gruesomely perishing, most of the city folk simply believe they’ve been hit by a plague.
It’s potentially misleading to list Nosferatu as a “religious” film alongside the likes of Silence or The Tree of Life. While a somewhat recognizable Christianity certainly appears onscreen—a marginal crucifix here, a brief scene at a convent there—Eggers seems far more interested in the pagan religiosity of, say, Romanian townsfolk who bless their houses with garlic and go grave hunting for vampires.
Yet the film—and this is one of the most interesting things about it—nevertheless takes even this unconventional, foreign religiosity seriously. The otherworldly setting where some people treat vampires not just as scary but real seems essential to whatever point Eggers is trying to make, which poses a question for the presumably secular audience consuming arthouse films in 2025: What’s the use of entertaining the perils of demonic vampires rather than merely finding them entertaining?
Three interpretations come to mind. (Oh, and here’s where the major spoilers start.)
There is, of course, an allegorical approach. Thomas’ well-intentioned ambition for financial security, despite Ellen’s protestations not to leave her behind, kickstarts the plot. Moreover, it’s heavily implied that Ellen first summons Orlok not just out of crushing loneliness but out of a misfired adolescent lust. (Imagine pleading with the universe for Prince Charming from the solitude of your bedroom and instead getting Dracula. Yikes.) Nosferatu is often explicitly sexual, and it’s not an accident that Orlok (“I am appetite,” he declares at one point) is also by far the most grotesque. Put all that together and the film comes out looking like a traditionalist allegory for chastity and a properly ordered domestic life. Sex has power, a corrupting one even. Husbands, love your wives more than your jobs.
But if that strikes you as too trad, Nosferatu can also be watched as a modern feminist allegory. Perhaps it’s not desire run amok that the film critiques, but rather a rigid sense that female sexuality should be repressed. “My entire life, I’ve done no ill but heed my nature,” Ellen tells von Franz, suggesting that it’s not her lust to blame but rather Orlok’s masculine possessiveness. Moreover, the film also asserts that heroism doesn’t only come from a Y chromosome. “In heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis,” von Franz tells Ellen. “Yet, in this strange and modern world, your purpose is of greater worth. You are our salvation.” He’s ultimately right: Wisborg’s reprieve comes not from He-Men running around trying to drive iron stakes through vampires, but from Ellen’s feminine resolve.
The allegorical interpretation of Nosferatu, whether of the traditionalist or feminist variant, is probably the most comforting. (It’s not really about belief in vampires … it’s about social issues.) It’s certainly more comfortable than a plausible skeptical interpretation.
Speaking about his path to atheism, the podcaster and fourth-of-a-horseman Sam Harris remarked of religion, “At best this is often just a waste of time, but at worst it is manufacturing violence.” That’s an attitude shared by Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a shipman and friend of Thomas who voices Harris-esque concerns within the context of the film. Sure, he’s a nominal Christian, but he’s more importantly a skeptic of Ellen and von Franz’s vampiric fancies (i.e. the sort of religiosity that Nosferatu explores more attentively). When the latter hypothesizes that Orlok must return to his grave before the cockcrow, rather than taking concrete actions to stop “the plague,” Harding breaks down. “Don’t you see there’s a bloody real plague, gentlemen? A real epidemic that is really killing real people?”
So perhaps Eggers primarily uses the otherworldly as a foil of scientific reason—as a nightmare to show just how backward and demented the “religious” world that believes in demonic vampires can actually get. And it’s a nightmare alright: The skeptical Harding, the symbol of hard-nosed rationality, meets a painful fate.
But here’s the rub, which also brings me to the third interpretation: Within the context of the film, Harding is wrong—it’s von Franz and Ellen who are right. It really is the otherworldly Orlok who is really terrorizing Wisborg and inflicting real pain upon its residents, not a plague that can be medicinally managed or understood scientifically. And Eggers’ screenplay sometimes seems directly pointed at the 21st century viewer who thinks this supernatural ideation is hogwash. At a key moment, von Franz tells Harding:
I have seen things in this world that would have made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb. We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the devil as Jacob wrestled the angel, and I tell you if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.
It’s moments like these that make Nosferatu feel less like a societal allegory or a skeptic’s nightmare and more like a gateway of sorts to a religious sensibility from a time gone by. That was a time when, to borrow from Charles Taylor’s seminal work, A Secular Age, the border between our material world and the world of not just God but spirits and beings both sacred and profane was “porous.” In this porous world, Taylor writes, “The presence of spirits, and of different forms of possession, is no more a matter of (optional, voluntarily embraced) belief than is for me the presence of this computer and its keyboard at the tips of my fingers.”
Which opens up a host of other problems, mainly centering on the veracity of the supernatural (or lack thereof) and whether we’d even want to forfeit our buffered distance from it. But if the mark of good art is its capacity to articulate previously unconsidered ways of looking at the world, then Nosferatu succeeds by forcing us to experience a time when otherworldliness was as real as a garlic clove.
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