When you’re lovers in a dangerous time
Sometimes you’re made to feel as if your love’s a crime
Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight
—“Lovers in a Dangerous Time” by Bruce Cockburn
Some days I feel half dead. The world’s on fire. There’s injustice in every corner of the planet. The strong manipulate the rules to prey on the weak, the rich grow richer off the work of the poor. On an existential level, 2024 was a cold, hard year. Cold, hard—vampiric, even—the darkness closing in with a lurch to clamp its teeth on the lifeblood of its next victim, vitality running crimson in the dark.
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) is all darkness, with silvery cold light serving mostly to outline deeper shadows as Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) makes his influence known. The titular monster in Adrien Beau’s The Vourdalak (2023) works primarily at night too, but his own vampiric influence is obvious even by day. Both are hungry and never satisfied, and they’ll exploit the weaknesses of their victims to get what they want. Human goodwill and love are loopholes for these monsters.
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Robert Eggers knows how to make familiar monsters frightening once again. His films, drenched in the folklore and religion of other times and places, take the beliefs of their characters so seriously that everything is made manifestly literal: the titular witch in the woods of his debut feature, the mermaids and sea-gods invoked by the mad keepers in The Lighthouse, the Valkyrie in The Northman. These beliefs are not mere curiosities. For Eggers’ characters, these beings are real sources of terror that motivate his protagonists to act and react.
Even if they’ve never read the book, most people know the story of Dracula through cultural osmosis and myriad movie adaptations: a rich foreign count buys a decrepit abbey in the middle of London, the better to slake his unending thirst for blood in a land that is enlightened and therefore unaware—or skeptical—of legends about vampires. By extension, they also know the story of Nosferatu, a warped-mirror unauthorized retelling of Dracula that changes the names but very little else. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 original is a film object both cursed and blessed, condemned to be destroyed for breaking copyright, and yet rising again—much like a vampire itself—from private collections to compel generations of filmgoers. Murnau’s film has sired its own line of vampire movies, lurking in the shadows of the better-known Dracula, including Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) and the reimagined version of its own making, Shadow of the Vampire (2000). Each one is a little stranger than its predecessors, like a half-remembered version of Dracula turned more nightmarish in the telling, an invitation and a dare to any future filmmakers who want to cut their teeth on a challenge.
Eggers dares. His Nosferatu draws inspiration from Murnau’s film without cribbing. Plot-wise, it’s all the Nosferatu that came before: Count Orlok creeping in from the Carpathian mountains, the hapless agent named Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) sent on a dangerous journey to sell him a parcel of land in the rich and enlightened town of Wisborg in Germany, and Thomas’s newlywed wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who proves to be a prize the vampire wishes to take, as well as the vampire’s eventual downfall. But it’s also all Eggers: a movie that makes the nightmare imagery coldly literal through its dedication to period-correct costuming, production design, and dialogue.
Eggers’ films have a severity to their presentation, and Nosferatu is no different from its predecessors. Ellen wears loose white nightgowns and stiff dresses with strict lines: femininity loosed in the moonlight, contained during the day. Orlok’s face carries traces of historical illustrations of Vlad the Impaler, more woodcut than replica of Max Schreck. Daylight is the gray of an overcast winter sky; interior shots are lit warm by candlelight and firelight, while at night the film is stripped of color, the actors tipped by silver moonlight. The film looks like book illustrations from Victorian novels, restricted to a couple of subjects per shot and held at tight ninety-degree angles. We rarely see a character unless they’re in profile or facing the camera directly. Despite its hard right angles, the film floats: the camera is handheld, turning and panning, never quite static, its movements belying the level of control needed to compose and stage and frame each shot while still appearing organic. Eggers’ film delivers an intimacy that still holds the audience formally at arms’ length. His artifice acts as a constricting force that paradoxically sets audiences free to think through the reality of living in another time and another place.
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The Vourdalak announces its own artifice through very different means; while Nosferatu is modern in its commitment to historical accuracy, The Vourdalak is presented like an artifact of ‘70s grindhouse pictures, gushing with Super-16 film grain and buckets of blood, half in and half out of focus. Based on an 1839 short story by A.K. Tolstoy that pre-dates even Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel, the broad strokes of the plot are less familiar than those of Nosferatu, though The Vourdalak’s thumbprints can still be seen on later vampire stories. A French envoy named Marquis Jacques Antoine Saturnin d’Urfé (Kacey Mottet Klein), traveling through a distant land, is set upon by bandits who take his luggage and his horse. He’s given directions to the house of Gorcha (voiced by Adrien Beau), a man he’s been told will be able to help him—but upon his arrival, he discovers Gorcha is missing, having gone off despite his age to fight a Turkish invader who’d recently attacked his village. Gorcha left his family with instructions to keep watch for him, but should he return after six days, they are to refuse him entry, because he would no longer be himself but “an accursed vourdalak.”
Of course, he returns just after his six days are up, and it’s immediately clear that something is wrong with him—though his family continues to acquiesce to the monster who had once been their patriarch. Gorcha is no longer a man. He’s portrayed by a massive marionette with gray skin and hooded eyes, his lipless mouth drawn back over long yellowed teeth in a cadaver’s smile. When he speaks, the tone is mocking, almost flirtatious. “We’re not accustomed to welcoming powdered courtiers to our table,” he tells d’Urfé with a sneer, though the hand gesture that accompanies the insult reads like a motion to come closer. Vourdalak and vampire alike are repellent and compelling, both predators that draw in their prey even though everything about them is a signal to run.
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The monsters are real, powerful, capable of exerting their wills on the world. Both films abandon any pretense at knowing how this evil came to be; what’s scarier is that it exists already, that it’s caught the protagonists flat-footed, and that it’s potent. Vourdalaks are an accepted part of life in Gorcha’s country, routine as a plague outbreak, while nosferatu are akin to conspiracy theories traded by eccentric learned men. The whole world’s gone mad, and us with it; how else would the vampires’ influence make sense? Gorcha’s son Jegor (Grégoire Colin) behaves as though nothing has changed, as if the monster who’s come back could possibly still be his father. Ellen’s brother Friedrich (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) insists that everything “will be just fine,” skeptical that the spell his sister has fallen under is anything more than a strong case of female hysteria.
Ellen knows things she shouldn’t know. She knows that Thomas will be given a position by Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), the real estate broker in town; she knows too that Thomas will be immediately sent away on business, on a trip that will doom him. Her eyes shine with an infernal light when she realizes what she knows, the same light that shines in Herr Knock’s eyes as he celebrates sending Thomas away on his errand to Orlok, a man “with one foot in the grave, so to speak,” and the same light in Thomas’s eyes once he enters Orlok’s castle. They all fall under the vampire’s shadow, a reaching claw of a hand that stretches across their town, that creeps its way through passages and up walls, incorporeal and yet able to unlock latches, to manipulate physics, to push human beings up to the brink of madness and beyond.
Orlok’s shade catches the moonlight in a blowing curtain, holding Ellen in thrall. Lonely, she’d called out for a companion—“a guardian angel, anyone”—in a prayer in the night, and she got his presence in response, a monster who takes advantage of her loneliness and her attunement to the supernatural, mentally and sexually violating her, then claiming ownership over her mind and body simply because he can.
The vourdalak, too, is a sex pest and a pervert, occupying d’Urfé’s bed, taunting the envoy about his attraction to Gorcha’s daughter Sdenka (Ariane Labed). The monster’s embodiment as a puppet makes him all the more unsettling, because he’s physically present, an impossible creature made flesh with a thirst for blood, somehow simultaneously comedic and obscene. Sdenka and her sibling Poitr (Vassili Schneider) understand what’s become of their father, and they have the means to stop him through spells and song—wisdom that Jegor dismisses as old wives’ tales. It’s implied that Gorcha was not a good man in life either; the family behaves with extreme deference to both Gorcha and Jegor’s face, the younger siblings lining up with Jegor’s wife Anja (Claire Duburcq) and son Vlad (Gabriel Pavie) whenever the patriarchs call them, hands clasped severely in front, heads bowed, a posture borne of fear. Father knows best, even when his actions will destroy his family. Why question the rules?
Vampires are sticklers for rules: no entry without invitation, no venturing out in the bright sunlight. They’ll be repelled by garlic, by the cross, by the Eucharist. Fall under a vampire’s thrall, and you’ll be damned to a life of being consumed without pity or mercy until the vampire’s curse is broken and the monster is released from its own un-death. The methods of getting rid of nosferatu are varied from place to place, observes Professor von Franz (Willem Dafoe), though he could be talking just as easily about the vourdalak. The trick is finding the correct method—silver, the stake (metal in both films—the better to pin a vampire down, according to Eggers), fire, a consecrated host from the Eucharist, or the cross.
The most important rule of vampirism is that vampires must take, and take, and take. Orlok refers to himself as “an appetite, nothing more,” a creature who had dwelt in “an eternity of darkness” before being invited in by Ellen. Once in, he won’t leave; once he has a toehold in her consciousness, he’ll cling to her without letting go. “Like the plague,” says Professor Von Franz, “his only object is to consume all life.” Humans may care about the reasons behind the rules, which function to help preserve the fabric of society and the sanctity of human life; vampires only care about the rules as a weapon for getting closer to their victims. They believe in the letter of the law, but they’ll violate its spirit the moment they’re given the chance.
Gorcha (as the vourdalak) behaves according to rules familiar to both Sdenka and Poitr. Vourdalaks return to their family; they prefer to eat the people they love. There are rituals to observe if someone you know has been preyed upon by a vourdalak: circles of stones and candles, cracked eggs and blood; songs to be sung, incense to be burnt. A vourdalak is dead already, a demon in the body of a loved one, and cannot be killed, only halted. Set their house on fire. Impale them with a stake so they can’t leave their grave. Do everything that goes against the rules for respecting the sanctity of the dead. The vourdalak has already violated the reasons those rules exist in the first place, preying on the strong, the weak, and the unbelieving alike.
*
Humans are not accustomed to thinking of ourselves as prey animals. We exist at the top of the food chain; we’ve built cities and societies. D’Urfé considers himself to be part of the pinnacle of civilization, accustomed to dances and fine food and the companionship of beautiful women. Seeking help at Gorcha’s house means that he’s fallen far from his station, stranded at the edge of the map of the known world, helpless and birdlike in his confusion. Thomas, too, finds himself over the edge and gone too far. When he arrives at Orlok’s castle, it’s well past the middle of the night, the grounds deserted. Thomas stands alone in the doorway, framed under layers of white arches embedded in the blackened stone, the full weight of the castle’s walls coming down to bear on his body. He’d been so tall and strong standing next to his wife back home, but now he looks like a lost little boy.
D’Urfé and Sdenka and Thomas and Ellen learn an unsettling truth: we’ve civilized ourselves out of thinking that we can be destroyed by evil from within and without. They know what everyone else around them denies: predators walk among us every day, and the most frightening part about the monsters is that they, too, are human.
“To defeat evil, we must first face that it exists,” states Professor von Franz. Neither Jegor nor Friedrich can face up to it; Jegor lives in blank denial, unwilling to admit that anything is wrong with his father, while Friedrich seeks out scientific explanations for what might ail his sister. A hyperactive uterus, guesses the family doctor (Ralph Ineson), or else grief over Thomas’s long absence. If there’s no such thing as monsters, then there has to be a logical explanation. Their unbelief makes them the prime target, an entry point to destroy everything.
Orlok comes to town on a plague ship laden with rats, drenching the town with disease. It’s an apocalypse, a revelation that civilization alone cannot save them from the vampire, though most of the citizens have no way of understanding the sickness as a result of the vampire’s influence. One street preacher shouts passages from Revelation about a beast rising from the sea amidst the chaos of coffins and abandoned funeral trappings. It’s the end of the world, and only the rats are happy. For his own part, Gorcha lurches from family member to family member, starting with his grandson, his hunger spreading to the boy’s mother Anja, then Jegor; Sdenka and Piotr can only help so much when the remedies they provide are given halfway to unwilling patients.
*
“You are late,” Orlok greets Thomas upon his arrival in Carpathia, and the reproach sounds like one Thomas heard, weeks before, from the associates at Herr Knock’s in Wisborg who had accused him of keeping his boss a quarter of an hour past the appointed time. Thomas’s time at the castle has been appointed for him already, though he can’t yet know it. We in the audience do, because we know the story from countless retellings, and because the camera drifts ahead of Thomas, always pushing the frame a few beats ahead of his own hesitant footsteps. Thomas can only follow the camera’s strict gaze. His path has been preordained. Once locked in the castle, the only place he can go is down dank stairs to the crypt. All roads lead inevitably to death.
Ellen is far more attuned to the inevitable power of death and entropy than Thomas. When he brings her a bouquet along with the bad news that he’s to go away, she looks down at the flowers, aghast. “Why have you killed these beautiful flowers?” she asks him. They’re lilacs—a springtime flower. It’s late fall; they would have been grown in a hothouse, their destiny to be cut off from the plant that bore them, to look beautiful and smell sweet before dying in someone else’s house. The scent of lilacs is entangled with death throughout Nosferatu, first appearing in one of Ellen’s dreams, then lingering over the locket she gives her husband for his journey, a talisman that Orlok takes from Thomas.
When Ellen opens the window of her room to the cold moonlight, inviting Orlok in, she hastens what was already going to happen. Orlok is already in the room. The count’s influence feels as powerful as fate and death. He’s followed all the rules that must be followed, bent all the ones that could be exploited, and the path has led him here. Likewise, the vourdalak’s coming is heralded by a prophecy of sorts, which Sdenka recounts to her family and to d’Urfé. Framed by rays of light, her dark eyes sad, she quotes her father’s parting words: “May God preserve you if I return after six days.” He came back late, both temporally and metaphysically speaking. The family crosses themselves at the mention of the vourdalak—a gesture that acknowledges the reality of the evil and its power, and—in Christian theology—a symbol of the redemptive power of an act of sacrifice so great, no human is capable of repeating it.
When Thomas arrives at an inn within walking distance of Orlok’s castle, the inhabitants cross themselves too, warding the windows with religious icons and garlic. (There’s an icon hanging in Gorcha’s house as well, but this one is skeletal, with gray-green skin stretched over a bald head, bony fingers lifted into a blessing, a harbinger of the undead creature still to come.) An old woman ushers Thomas to his room, then presses a cross into his hand. He can’t understand her, but she repeats a warning in Romanian: “there is no escape. Pray, pray, pray.” This woman has seen it all before; she knows that it will all happen again, unlike the Wisborg inhabitants who cannot find it in themselves to acknowledge that evil exists, let alone that it can corrupt.
There’s a sickness endemic to the inhabitants of Nosferatu’s story, people who exist to be filled up with grand themes, then drained dry by Orlok, their suffering preordained by virtue of the movie being a remake played straight—and by the cycle of violence visited upon them by the vampire. There’s also a sickness that permeates Gorcha’s family, implied to have come from him even before he changed; they fear him and his firstborn son Jegor. Ellen asks Professor Von Franz whether “evil comes from within us, or from beyond?” For both stories, the capacity for evil is within, and the catalyst comes from beyond. In both films, the law of entropy drives the plot, leading to the breakdown of society, family, the self, until there’s nothing left but all-consuming death. Following the rules, even and especially in the interest of self-preservation, means a kind of inertia, an unwillingness to acknowledge the novel evil in their midst. They’ll be devoured in their denial.
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Vampirism cannot comprehend self-denial, nor self-sacrifice. It doesn’t know love, only selfishness. Orlok is a hungry emptiness that only knows how to take and take, destroying everything he touches. The vourdalak does the same, starting with the small and the vulnerable, claiming to love the family he came from, and destroying them in the process. Love—the kind that forgives, that sees beyond faults time and again—is a weakness, the thing that can be exploited by the monsters. But because the vampire disregards it, it’s also a saving grace.
To love is to give, to sacrifice, to want what’s best for another, even at cost. The monsters take; the lovers give, an imbalance of power that will see the monsters satisfied and the givers drained dry. Love will destroy you, lay you bare, make you vulnerable. Sometimes it ends in heartbreak; it always ends in death. Brokenness, like evil, is present both within and beyond a person.
The world’s always been on fire; it’s just harder to see through the smoke once you’re aware of it. To give in to the appetites of the monsters is to admit defeat. To fight back, even against terrible odds and worse options, is to believe that a better world might be possible, even if we’re beyond saving ourselves. Orlok demands that Ellen submit to be his bride; her husband had unknowingly signed her away when he was in Orlok’s castle. She must uphold the contract, and Orlok demands that she do so of her own free will. She agrees to the terms, not because she wants to keep the rules that brought her to the awful decision, but out of the desire to save her husband and the rest of Wisborg with him. If she could keep him distracted till the break of dawn, sunlight will end the curse and contract and the undead life of the count. A willing sacrifice; a Christlike act. Eggers makes the horrible a thing of beauty, the dead woman in a bed strewn with lilacs, the monster at her breast almost an afterthought in his own destruction.
The Vourdalak ends on similar terms: d’Urfé, having become a victim of the monster, chooses to die rather than risk Sdenka’s life. If he returns to the court, everyone he loves there will die; he must give up his dances, his women, and fine French cooking forever so that they can all be preserved. D’Urfé sacrifices himself with a faint smile on his face. He won’t succeed in halting the evil entirely, but it’s a clear moral victory, perhaps the purest thing he’s ever done.
No one human being has the power to fix everything. We have to keep living it out, day by day, even though the odds are stacked too high, the darkness too deep, the evil all-encompassing. The work may be futile on an individual level. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. We, too, have one foot in the grave—but we also have one foot out.