Nosferatu: The Feminist Gothic - My Life In Horror - The Ginger Nuts Of Horror Review Website 17/06/2025

Nosferatu: The Feminist Gothic – My Life in Horror

Re-imagining a story as familiar as Nosferatu’s isn’t an enviable task. The original film is, of course, foundational to what we know as cinema (not to mention horror as a genre), a loose adaptation of an already familiar story in the form of Bram Stoker’s iconic, Victorian horror, Dracula. Since then, there have been numerous retellings of the same story in myriad different mediums. The themes and imagery have been adopted, adapted, cannibalised and assimilated into popular culture and the collective consciousness (becoming mythic).

How, then, does one take a story that everyone knows in its most intimate details and render it not only compelling, but relevant in a present-day audience’s eyes?

2025 has not been a good year. Despite being in its infancy, it has thus far proved politically horrific, culturally disastrous and, on a personal level, riven with various losses and traumas.

Nosferatu: The Feminist Gothic - My Life in Horror

Writer/Director Robert Egger’s adaptation of Nosferatu was, for my part, a ray of bleak moonlight in otherwise impenetrable darkness. As fans of my on-going podcast series, Not The Same Log, will know, Eggers already has profound resonance in my interests: From the sublime The Witch to the peculiarly hilarious The Lighthouse, Eggers has variously surprised and illuminated, his work as transgressive as it is beautifully rendered.

In anyone else’s hands, I would’ve been dubious to the point of frustration at the thought of a re-imagining of something as iconic, as sacred to cinema, as Nosferatu. Whilst it has been done before -and done beautifully-, I found it difficult to conceive how the story could be made fresh and relevant again (not to mention how any present-day adaptation could fail to dilute what has gone before).

However, with Eggers at the helm, I approached this with a heady sense of anticipation: Whatever else it was, I knew it would be strange, interesting and intelligent. Even given that foreknowledge, I simply wasn’t prepared for its sumptuous Gothicism, its unrelenting, Thanatic bleakness.

Those familiar with my work will know I absolutely adore Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation of Dracula. Its re-imagining of the material as a sumptuous, erotic, grand guignol horror pantomime renders material everyone and their dog knows inside-out fascinating and fresh again. It stands in my mind as one of the most beautiful renderings of this story, taking the skeleton of Stoker’s original work and layering in romance, eroticism and redemption.

Eggers take is its antithesis: Equally sumptuous, equally decadent, but in an entirely opposite extreme:

Here, all romance and eroticism is stripped away from vampire mythology; the world is a bleak, shadowy, stultifying nightmare in which sorrow, death and suffering are inevitable. The vampire itself is not aspirational; it is a cancerous force of disease, decay and madness. Furthermore, its ambient effects on the world around it are overtly corrosive: Where the vampire goes, disease, madness and despair follow.

It is Egger’s sumptuously Gothic Feminist manifesto, a story that takes themes and fascinations originally explored in The Witch and applies the tropes and subjects of gothic horror to their exploration.

Here, one woman’s supreme unhappiness is enough to call the titular Nosferatu from his deathless slumber. Within the oppressive, prescriptive confines of Victorian-era Germany in which she finds herself, she has no place or purpose, no means of realising her own happiness or even a sense of her own identity. Variously queer and neuro-atypically coded, she is a creature outside of place or pattern, who exists in defiance of the Patriarchy that surrounds her and thus is left with no other expression than a species of “madness.”

Before Count Orlock even descends, she is caught like a moth in a jar, hoping to find some salvation from her dissatisfaction through an act of supreme conformity (i.e. the surrender of marriage).

However, the film makes it plain that her assumed source of salvation is a delusion; just another form of conformity and, ultimately, damnation. No role or narrative this culture prescribes or provides is adequate, nor can any salve the profound dissatisfaction driving her to self-destruction.

Male characters are variously distant or dismissive, including her husband-to-be; patriarchal figures who either resent her for her non-conformity (which is congruent with being diseased) or fancy themselves her protectors and saviours (when in fact they are merely symptoms and vectors of the same fundamental affliction).

In contrast to the florid sensuality and pantomimic vitae of 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, everything here is bleak, leaden and moribund; a central irony of the film lies in the fact that, were Orlock never to occur, were there to be no horrific or supernatural influences in her life, her trajectory would still be much the same:

Patriarchy is inextricably woven into her world as an innately corrosive force: No love or lust or life can sustain it, no sincere desire or sense of identity can survive it. This is the state our protagonist finds herself in at the beginning of the film, arguably before anything overtly horrific has made its influence known in her life.

In extremis, for the sake of her own soul and sanity, she cries out into the void; a primal scream that is the plea of every woman, every victim of Patriarchy down the centuries. Not to God, not even to the Devil; not to anything so defined or prescribed. But to anything. Any power or passing agency that might hear and take pity on her.

Unfortunately, in this reality, the only extant “god” is Patriarchy itself, and it’s arguably this that lends the Count Orlock his diseased, parasite immortality; it is the monstrous motive force that runs in his rotten veins, the hideous engine that suspends him beyond death, even when his carcass has long-since passed beyond any tolerance.

The film is intelligent enough not to make Count Orlock the answer to her problems, the solution to or salvation from Patriarchal imposition. Rather, Orlock is its avatar and physical manifestation. The film is framed such that Orlock can be read as a living dream; a projection of neurosis and the abuses of Patriarchy given perverse animus (he even paraphrases as such at various intervals: “I am an appetite”).

Orlock is “male” and masculinity at its most poisonously moribund; an entity that confuses dominion with love, cruelty with affection, objectification as desire. His “romance” is that of the narcissist and domestic abuser; the stalker, rapist and murderer of women. That the film draws deliberate parallels between his obsessions and the ostensibly more salubrious “marriage” our protagonist hopes to enter into is an acute commentary: One is little different from the other. For women, what is called “marriage” under Patriarchy is parasitic, vampiric and consumptive.

In aesthetic, symbolic terms, the film pulls no punches: Barring the bleak “appetite” that drives him, Orlock is a sickly, infested, scabious creature, a rotting corpse animated only by its leech-like desire to consume. Its intimacies are those of the parasite for its host, the cancer for its victim, and there is nothing even remotely erotic or redemptive in its nature.

In Orlock’s homeland, reality itself has devolved into a state of shadows and superstition; peasant populations cower in fear at his legend, consumed by their own xenophobic insularity and impotent rituals. This is as much evidence of Orlock’s corrosive influence as anything innate to their culture. Within the film’s mythology, he is decay, death and the slow annihilation of history. His presence alone is enough to foment disease and madness. Even the elements and geography are out of balance around him, physical reality becoming a distorted nightmare.

When he arrives on the ostensibly more “civilised” shores of 19th century Germany, he doesn’t so much bring that elemental evil with him as reveal it: Where he passes, all of the insanities of history and innate to our natures that “civilisation” is designed to obscure and sublimate come raging to the surface. All structure and comfort and certainty break down. He foments plague and violence and base behaviours amongst humanity without actively doing anything, with no wider agenda or design. His presence alone is enough.

Symbolically, the implications are overt and incendiary: His conflation with Patriarchy itself makes his diseased, elementally corrosive nature a vicious commentary on the phenomena: Patriarchy, in the film’s purview, is a thing of historically-enshrined, elemental disease and hereditary insanity. It is the manifest evil of our traditions that we assume and enshrine without question, against which the violence and rationalism of men is entirely impotent (in fact, men in general are as infants in the face of it; it supplants, consumes and disregards them, renders them variously subservient to its whims and utterly incapable of comprehension or combat).

Women are simultaneously its victims, its property and its bane: It approaches women with assumptions of absolute comprehension and intimate knowledge of their desires and states of mind, and uses those assumptions to bludgeon and mutilate them into roles better suited to its designs and appetites (i.e. as livestock, cattle to be dominated and consumed).

There is nothing overtly romantic in its overtures; nothing that it promises in the way of revelation or salvation. It simply assumes ownership of women, attempts to subjugate them into its narratives without heed to their individual identities, confusions and desires. It is, as it confesses, a hollow, insatiable void; an abyssal appetite that cannot be sated. Myopic, obsessive, authoritarian, domineering. Abusive, sadistic and unthinkingly violent, it doesn’t even take pleasure in its conquests and consumptions, because it is incapable of such:

Joy, energy, frisson, eroticism; all are anathema to this entity. They corrupt, wither and die in its purview. This, the film subtly states, is the nature of Patriarchy; a force of history that turns us against our most essential natures, makes sin and shame of our sincere passions, renders us isolated, afraid and alone in our own skulls.

Ultimately, it is a force of death, a moribund, carrion thing so intent on its myopic dominions that it ultimately destroys itself in their pursuit (Orlock’s ultimate destruction comes not from the righteous vengeance of men, rites of science or religion or magic, the assumptions and assertions of tradition, but thanks to the intuitions of the very woman whose dissatisfaction conjured him in the first place. Even then, his self-destruction is engineered by giving the parasite what it assumes to want; “woman” itself becomes a sacrifice to its appetites, which cannot be sated, and which therefore consume all, including their host).

The vampire, and thus Patriarchy, is driven by unnatural and unclean appetites; desires that are leech-like and consumptive. Even when Patriarchy gets what it assumes to want vis-a-vis “woman,” it is dissatisfied, insatiable and so consumed by the act of dominion, it allows itself to be destroyed.

Orlock is simultaneously the assumed power of unchecked, untempered patriarchal “masculinity” and its antithesis. Or, more accurately, he reveals the self-destructive inclination innate to said assumptions of “power:”

Through indulgence, through parasitic consumption and coercion of “woman,” it is destroyed: There is no joy in this communion; only dominion and concession. But there is joy in its death, even if it happens to require sacrifice to bring it about.

Here, ideologies of reason and religion are impotent. Both are products and proponents of Patriarchy, both infested and bedevilled by it. As such, when brought to bear on Orlock, they have no power, no purchase. All of the traditional means of combating or defending against The Vampire are impotent against him, because they belong to the same historical systems and assumptions he manifests.

Only one man even begins to perceive this; Willem Dafoe’s Albin Eberhart; a man who is himself somewhat outside of those systems and assumptions, an exile from scientific circles and academia by dint of his theories and obsessions. Also, nominally asexual, existing outside of the prescribed politics of gender, marriage etc. He understands because he perceives from outside the fish-bowl looking in. He apprehends that Orlock is an expression and symptom of a more profound disease, and that his ultimate defeat is not a cure, merely a sad reprieve from a sickness that is pervasive and inalienable.

It is easy to read his dynamic with Ellen as that of a paternal, patriarchal figure sending “woman,” indeed, “daughter” (as their dynamic is framed, despite the incidence of their not sharing blood) as sacrifice to the ultimate manifestation of Patriarchy at its most loathsome. And, indeed, this is one facet of the film’s conclusion.

But that reading, ironically, robs Ellen of the agency she herself clearly evinces by the film’s end: She has exorcised her demons by that point, made peace with the unsatisfying sham of marriage and play of sex she has engaged in theretofore. She goes to Eberhart not as an ignorant naif seeking direction from some patriarchal sage or prophet, but as the only conspirator she has who can even begin to understand what she intends. If anything, she uses Eberhart in order to enact her own design, desperate and self-sacrificing though it may be:

The logic of the solution is, in itself, uniquely “female” in a Patriarchal sense; irrational, illogical, based on emotion and intuition. It is the desolation that love and sincere female, sexual pleasure, power and liberation wreak on Patriarchy:

By choosing, by taking her own agency, she becomes poison to Patriarchy, sunlight to the vampire. It isn’t simply the dawn that spells Orlock’s death; it is Ellen and the luminously corrosive power she wields by finally knowing herself.

Throughout the film, she plays numerous roles; those of doting friend and submissive wife, of the lady about town, the victim, the vector of evil and madness. By the conclusion, she has shed every skin, abandoned every mask, and become numinously herself.

Like Orlock, she too is elemental at that moment; not the victim or subject of Patriarchy, but its antithesis. Orlock, blinded as he is by the “appetite” that defines him, cannot see this: She is merely another victim, another creature to objectify, dominate and ultimately own.

That myopic blindness, that witless assumption of power, is ultimately what destroys him. As for Ellen, her death too is symbolic: It’s clear from the beginning that she doesn’t belong in this Victorian world of men and their systems. There is no life for her there; it is not made for her, nor she for it. Had she survived, had she gone on, then it would have rejected her and made a monster of her more terrible than Orlock; a demoness from the sublimated darkness of Patriarchy’s haunted sub-conscious, where witches and succubi and furies dwell.

That she actively rejects that; defies being “saved” by or for men and their world, is a conscious inversion of both the original Nosferatu and Dracula upon which it’s based. Here, the female lead is not some cypher for the male characters; some prize or victim. Those that ostensibly work to “defend” her make that mistake as much as Orlock. In many respects, the apparent “love” of her husband is just as shallow, aesthetic and impositional as Orlock’s diseased conflation of love with dominion. It merely takes a softer, more insidious form.

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Neither serve her, ultimately; neither provide what she needs or desires. So, she rejects both via their consummation: By the medium of sex, which is a blasphemous rebellion and weapon in itself when initiated by her, she simultaneously submits to Patriarchy and fundamentally poisons it: She does not become its object or some disposable expression of dominion, but a creature more antithetical to the world that is its desolate kingdom than Orlock (who is its avatar and natural manifestation).

To be ended by her own agency, destroyed by her own hand, is a unique expression of power in this world that denies women any other. To do so whilst simultaneously entrapping the ultimate avatar of Patriarchy in its own self-immolating appetites is an expression of power unlike any the various male characters are capable of expressing. It is a magic and an art beyond any spell or science, beyond any religious rite. And it is the ONLY measure that ultimately dispels the pall of disease and madness cast by Orlock’s presence.

But it is also a spell of absolution in the opposite direction: By choosing to embrace Orlock, to make a lover of death itself, she steadfastly denies the prescribed life she would’ve otherwise been subjected to; she uses the very incarnation of Patriarchy to defeat itself and its every aspect in the same instance.

The dawn that comes in the aftermath isn’t for the world, which is still as diseased and wretched as it always has been. It’s for her; the expression of her magic, her idiosyncratic spell. It isn’t even the means of Orlock’s death, per se; that comes the moment he falls into her trap, into her bed. The manner in which she almost comforts the creature like some parasite child in the throes of its death demonstrates the power she has reclaimed in that moment:

She is Khali, she is Tiamat, she is Lilith and Coatlicue; creator and destroyer, Mother and lover, and all power is hers for a single, blinding instant.

And it is the inevitable death of Patriarchy itself, at the point of its apotheosis and ultimate indulgence. The commentary here is subtle but excoriating: Patriarchy is moribund. Even when its dominionist demands are met, when “woman” becomes all it prescribes, it devours itself, obliterates itself. It is the darkest Ouroboros; not a symbol of infinity, but of infinite impotence, infinite self-mutilation.

Conflating that with the parasitic, verminous Thanatism of the vampire is a master-stroke, especially in an era when the most Conservative, corrosive species of Patriarchy are on the rise once more.

This is essential horror; a marker of what the genre is for, at its most rebellious and revolutionary. As a closing statement of where horror cinema sits at the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, it is audacious and inspiring; an ironic source of macabre illumination in an increasingly bleak world.

George Daniel Lea 19-04-25