Robert Eggers’ intriguing new gothic horror film, Nosferatu, has arrived on video-on-demand, although its visual brilliance and intense atmospheric presentation warrant a watch on the big screen. A remake of Murnau’s 1922 cult classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, the film follows Ellen and Thomas Hutter, a loving newlywed couple whose lives are suddenly thrown upside down because of an old curse and the presence of a terrible supernatural presence. Overall, Nosferatu is definitely a great film driven by the rich visuals and acting performances and is a must-watch for every horror fan.
Spoiler Alert
What Is The Film About?
Nosferatu begins with a young woman praying to some guardian angel she reveres very passionately, as tears roll down her cheeks and make the intense nature of her plea very evident. She prays for the angel, or the spirit, to come to her and bring her comfort, and her calls are soon answered in a highly supernatural manner. Visible only in shadows, a tall, looming figure appears to enter the room and lift her up, following which the woman is seen sleepwalking in the garden in front of her house. The scene then shifts to many years later, in 1838, at the town of Wisburg, Germany, where a young couple struggles to find enough time for each other. Very recently married, Thomas and Ellen are deeply in love with each other and wish to spend all day together, but the very natural need for money to keep the family afloat gets in the way of their romance.
As an employee of a company called the Knock & Associates Estate Agents, Thomas is used to commissioning the sale of properties to interested customers, and so he feels grateful when his boss, Herr Knock, calls upon his service for a new sale. Herr Knock reveals that he has been in advanced talks with a foreign count who has been interested in buying a home in Wisburg, and that an old and abandoned property in the town, called the Grunewald Manor, has been selected for the sale. Thomas is a bit confused as to why someone would want to buy such an extremely old and rundown house as Grunewald Manor, but Herr Knock assures him that the count has been specifically looking for such a property. Therefore, to ensure that the sale is carried through without any problems, Thomas has to travel to the count’s castle, somewhere in the high reaches of the Carpathian Mountains, east of Bohemia, and carry out the final talks and also possibly the signing of the contract.
Despite the somewhat unnatural and suspicious air about the whole deal, and also the need to travel to a distant corner of the continent, Thomas Hutter agrees to take the job in order to earn the commission from the sale and secure the financing of his new home with Ellen. However, the newlywed Ellen does not agree with the need to spend so much time away from her so soon after marriage. Moreover, Ellen seemingly senses that something odd might happen to her husband, and her ability to feel certain things from before is evident from her earlier proclamation about Thomas being sent away from the country even before he had reached his workplace. Nonetheless, Thomas ultimately leaves home after helping Ellen move in with his friend Friedrich Harding, not aware that a dark and dangerous horror is about to turn his life upside down.
Who is Count Orlok?
Thomas Hutter’s journey to the foreign country, which is clearly Transylvania (as mentioned in the original source of both Eggers and Murnau’s films, Bram Stoker’s classic 1897 novel, Dracula), begins in a usual manner but starts to take an odd turn when he reaches the Carpathian Mountains. One night during his journey through the snowy mountains, Thomas stops for rest at a local village, where he is initially the center of all attention, quite understandably, being a foreigner. But when he reveals that his aim is to reach the castle of Count Orlok, the distinguished gentleman who is about to buy Grunewald Manor, the village elder refuses to let him stay. It is only when Thomas offers a significantly higher amount of money for shelter that he is allowed to spend the night at the village. However, his sleep is disturbed by the loud chants of the villagers in the middle of the night, as a procession is held to the nearby graveyard. Out of curiosity, Thomas follows the procession to see the villagers dig up an old grave and strike the dead body with a stake, with blood gushing out of it in an unnatural manner.
The next morning, Thomas wakes up to find the whole area abandoned, with the villagers having taken away his horse as well. He has to walk through the heavily snowed fields and forests until a horse-drawn carriage seemingly being driven by nobody appears in front of him and throws open its doors for him, as if it has been magically sent only for him. The carriage finally takes him up the mountain to the grand but old castle of Count Orlok, which is steeped in darkness and mystery. Thomas’ first introduction to Count Orlok is already quite creepy and uneasy, as the man seems as ancient as his castle itself, with frail, ghostly fingers and long nails protruding out of them. But what is even more sinister is the count’s attitude towards Thomas and his hurry to get the contract signed right away, without even letting him rest for the night. Finally, the contract is drawn up by Count Orlok himself, in a foreign language that he claims to be the noble tongue used by his family, and although Thomas cannot understand even a word of the document, he is pressed into signing it.
It is after the contract has been signed that the truly unholy nature of Count Orlok starts to reveal itself gradually, beginning with Thomas having the most horrific nightmares during his stay at the castle. His situation becomes such that he fails to differentiate between reality and his nightmares, and starts to lose control over his mind very soon. As he goes around exploring the lifeless castle one day, Thomas stumbles upon an old stone sarcophagus and removes its lid to get the worst shock of his life. He finds Count Orlok’s naked and rotting corpse inside the coffin and tries to strike it with a stake just like the villagers had done earlier. However, much to his horror, the count wakes up and gives chase, even employing a pack of wild wolves to attack Thomas. The young man somehow escapes by jumping out of a window into the river flowing beside the castle and is then rescued by a group of women far downriver.
It is this group of religious women who warn Thomas that the dark and dangerous shadow of Count Orlok is still hunting for him, while explaining that the count is an embodiment of pure evil. They reveal that the count was originally an enchanter, or sorcerer, during his lifetime, who regularly indulged in black magic and seemingly made pacts with the Devil. As a result, the Devil himself ensured that Count Orlok’s evil soul could once again possess his corpse and go about committing blasphemy after his death, and this brought him back to life, in a way. Around the same time as Thomas goes through all this ordeal, Ellen suffers some strange episodes of somnambulism and seemingly possession of her soul back in Wisburg, and a learned scientist and occult researcher, Albin Eberhart Von Franz, is consulted by Friedrich and his doctor, Willhelm Sievers. It is Albin who clarifies, a bit later in the film, that Count Orlok is actually a feared demonic being better known as Nosferatu.
Thus, Count Orlok, or Nosferatu, is actually a vampire who feeds off the blood of humans and other animals in order to stay alive even after his death. With every possible supernatural ability at his disposal, he confuses Thomas with the nightmares and visions, only so that he can bite into the young man’s body and drink blood from it in order to survive. The count’s actual identity is the reason why the villagers refused to let Thomas rest at their village after they learned that he was going to the castle in order to conduct some business with Count Orlok himself. Vampires, or similar supernatural beings, are seemingly common in this part of the world, because of which the villagers often dig up bodies of suspected vampires and strike them with stakes. It is most likely that they abandon the village after realizing that Thomas is already somewhat in control of Orlok, and in a last attempt to stop him from going up to the castle, they steal his horse as well. However, Thomas realizes the dangerous nature of Count Orlok a bit too late, and as he recovers and then rides back to Wisburg, Nosferatu is already on his way there aboard a ship.
Why does Nosferatu desire to unite with Ellen?
After Nosferatu arrives at Wisburg, he is wholly determined to unite with Ellen at all costs, and he does not even bother to keep his human appearance anymore. It is gradually revealed in Nosferatu that there is an old connection between the demonic being and the woman, which stemmed from Ellen’s sensitive nature as a child. Both because of her emotionally sensitive nature and also because of her strange physical ailments of somnambulism and apparent seizures, Ellen was a very lonely child, neglected by not just others her age but also by her own parents. As she grew into a teenager and then a young adult, the girl desperately yearned for some company and attention, and so she prayed with all her might for some angel or spirit to connect with her. At the beginning of the film, we are shown one such instance of her trying to invite some spirit to give her company. Unfortunately, it was the evil spirit Nosferatu that reached out to her, and they both gradually developed a psychic bond, the exact nature of which is not revealed in the film.
However, when she grew up some more and eventually found Thomas in her life, Ellen disregarded all psychic and spiritual bonds to marry the young man and start a loving family of her own. This upset Nosferatu tremendously, for he always wanted her only for himself, and the marriage was technically a betrayal of the spiritual bond that Ellen had unknowingly made with him. Therefore, he started to hatch a plan to get close to her, beginning with appearing in her visions and warning her that he was soon coming to unite with her. This was where Herr Knock, a devil worshipper himself, came into the picture, as he agreed to work for Nosferatu and intentionally send Ellen’s husband, Thomas, to Transylvania. The contract for the sale of Grunewald Manor was just a ruse, for Nosferatu wanted to trick Thomas into annulling his marriage with Ellen. This is exactly what he does, by making him sign a document written in a foreign language, which actually states that Thomas willingly ends his marriage with Ellen for a bagful of gold coins, which he was indeed paid by the vampire.
Both because of the spiritual bond they had established and also the overwhelming feelings from his side, Nosferatu yearns for Ellen with all his being. He craves to have her attention and also to make love to her physically, because of which he hatches the elaborate plan and he even takes away the locket she had given to Thomas, with a lock of her hair inside it. Therefore, Nosferatu can be seen, in a twisted sense, as a tale of a demanding lover refusing to accept his beloved’s choice of moving on in life, and the vampire can be easily compared to a toxic ex-lover who desires to control every facet of one’s life even years after separation.
Did Thomas save his beloved wife?
When Nosferatu arrives at Wisburg, he brings a devastating plague with him, which starts to kill hundreds of people with every passing day. As Ellen refuses to give herself to Nosferatu, as she still loves Thomas and wishes to be with him, the vampire threatens to hurt everyone close to the couple. He kills the young children of Friedrich Harding, and also his wife, Anna, who were the closest friends of Thomas and Ellen. With all this death being caused by the vampire, both Thomas and Ellen decide to take matters into their own hands, although Thomas feels that he is about to save his wife from the monster. Thomas, Albin Eberhart, and Dr. Sievers set out to journey to Grunewald Manor and kill Nosferatu with a stake. They spot his coffin too, but then realize that Herr Knock, who had vowed to serve as the vampire’s slave, has taken his master’s place in the coffin, after having sensed that the men will come to kill Nosferatu.
On the other side of town, Ellen realizes that she has to be the one to bring an end to the monster, and so she technically uses herself as bait. She invites Nosferatu during the night and then finally agrees to be his lover, knowing well that this would distract him till the morning. As Nosferatu happily consummates their union and then drinks her blood, the sun does rise and kill him, finally bringing an end to his cursed existence and all the death and suffering that he had brought along with him. Therefore, Thomas is not able to save his beloved wife from the vampire but finds Ellen dead with Nosferatu on her bed.
Why does Ellen sacrifice herself?
In Nosferatu’s ending, Ellen makes an ultimate sacrifice in order to stop the plague and the series of deaths by giving up her own life in the process. There was an inherent feeling of shame and guilt in Ellen which she carried in herself ever since she bonded with the vampire. This bond, in itself, stemmed from a deep and overbearing sense of loneliness, and although she knew that welcoming Nosferatu was purely evil, she had gone through with it. She had always known that the vampire would come to claim her, and that its dark presence left a shadow in her life, which was apparent by how Ellen dreamt of her marriage with Death, which killed everyone gathered at the ceremony.
Therefore, in a sense, Ellen always knew what she had to do in order to get rid of Nosferatu, and having once cherished the company of evil in her lonely life, the only solution for her now was to embrace evil once again. Her acceptance of Nosferatu in the end is synonymous with her marriage with evil, as even the words she utters are ones used during a marriage. But unlike her dream, this acceptance does not kill others, but prevents death and suffering, and Ellen becomes a savior of the tormented. Despite having to give in to Nosferatu’s demands in a physical sense, Ellen does protect the life of Thomas, who would have soon been killed by the vampire, thus making it apparent that she loved Thomas more than anyone else in the physical or spiritual realm.
What Do the Flowers Symbolize?
The fact that the same flowers that Thomas used to bring her often are seen strewn over a side of her dead body seems to suggest that she still had her beloved husband on her mind, even in the very final moments. In the beginning of the film, Ellen said, “why have you killed these beautiful flowers,” suggesting that men always want to possess things, to make them their own, unaware of the fact that plucking something as delicate as the flowers from their root not only robs them off their beauty and independence but also kills them slowly. Her next line in the scene, “they will only die in a few days” also points out how Ellen had already prophesied what was about to come. Throughout the film, she kept telling people that she could see the future and maybe she had seen her death too or these flowers lying dead beside her corpse.
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