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Friendly Hello and Introduction!
Hello hello everyone! I hope everyone is staying safe and warm. I've had minimal writing motivation lately, so I'm excited to dive into something I absolutely love!! I've seen Nosferatu four times in theatres, and I fell even more in love with it every time I watched it. I love gothic themes within cinema, whether through the background, the music, or the story; it doesn't matter; I love it all. I had to seriously debate whether or not I would talk about Ethel Cain's recent album Perverts or Nosferatu first. I saw Nosferatu for the first time on Christmas Eve while on a date with my wonderful boyfriend, and he's been hearing me talk about it since bahaha.
This will contain spoilers!! If you have not watched Nosferatu yet, I strongly encourage you to watch it.
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Nosferatu (2024)
Apologies for the unorganized thoughts, I don't think I'll be going into the background of Nosferatu, but instead, I'll just dive right in and just write as much as I can about the movie. I absolutely loved this movie, it was so incredible to see and I plan on seeing it again and once I'm able to get a DVD copy of it, I intend on adding it to my collection. The acting from Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, Aaron-Taylor Johnson, and Nicholas Hoult to Simon McBurney and Bill Skarsgård was absolutely breathtaking,
Plenty of people have made light of Ellen's character and the performance that Lily-Rose Depp gave during her virtual audition to her performance in the movie. I want to establish that I personally never had any feelings about LRD before this movie; a lot of the media I consume does not really feature her. I'm not coming at this from a biased angle; this is purely my raw opinion, especially after watching it multiple times. I think she did a phenomenal job; one of my favorite scenes that she had done was when she was having a seizure/"fit" on her knees and begged Thomas not to leave her. It was something that really gave me the feeling that gothic horror aims to do: disturbing yet erotic.
It takes a lot to put on a good disturbing performance, and I know a lot of people found the scene where Ellen was ripping her dress off and seizing funny; I think this draws back to the problem I mentioned in my last blog of the irony epidemic. People are unable to sit with their discomfort or sincerity, and they have to make light of everything to avoid sitting with that feeling. Many people laughed during the movie and made light of the entire thing afterward. Maybe that's just me taking art too seriously, but this movie never intended to be funny; there were no comedic breaks.
I'll also say this as well: I do not like that cheesy, overproduced film style that received way too much money to push out cliches; this film is definitely not one of those. Robert Eggers absolutely outdid himself. The cinematography was so beautiful, a blue-tinted world that felt so cold to watch, filled with chillingly beautiful scenes. I absolutely adored the fact that they had designed Orlok's costume to be geologically and historically accurate, including the fur, the mustache, and the nails; it was all so beautiful. I love how they didn't try to make him "scary" in the traditional vampire way, but literally made him a chunk of rotting flesh, something undead. Don't get me wrong, I definitely appreciate the pretty, handsome vampires like Lestat and Edward, but I love the ugly ones just as much.
Bill Skarsgård did an incredible job, and the dedication he had taken to get into costume and train his voice to go as deep as it did and for it to actually sound as if existing was painful for Orlok was terrific. He really pulled off an incredible performance and was able to really take me out of the real world and immerse me into the story. I think the fact that his fellow actors didn't have much time to see his costume and only really got to see him during the shooting was an incredible directive touch to create an honestly chilling interaction between Ellen and Orolok, Thomas and Orlok, etc. I absolutely LOVED the performance that Simon McBurney gave, the insanity, the eating of live animals, the blood, everything. It was done magnificently and truly made me so uncomfortable. "I was supposed to be the king of rats" hahaha.
There are people who interpreted this film as purely a woman who had experienced the haunting of past assault, which, again, all films are up for individual interpretation. There is no direct way to interpret art, and everyone can take something home with them when consuming media. There was a common theme of people complaining about how Orlok had groomed Ellen as if vampires are supposed to be moral beings. Vampires historically are known as incredibly psycho-sexual immoral creatures. Edward from Twilight was quite literally decades older than Bella, who was in high school, but people don't complain about the immorality of that love story because he's conventionally attractive.
I think that this story has underlying themes of sexual shame and confusion with self-identity, I think Ellen was pushed into a position she didn't want at the end, and I do agree with that, however, I think that Ellen had sexual and romantic repressed her feelings for Orlok, she was disgusted that she honestly had a pull towards him, and she viewed herself as unclean or unpure. This, again, makes sense during this time period, considering purity in terms of sexuality was a huge part of the social culture.
Overall, I think this was an absolutely phenomenal film, 10/10, I gave it 5 stars on Letterboxd, and I fully encourage everyone to go watch it and the original Nosferatu!! Thank you so much :)
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