The Triumph of Patriarchal Order in 'Nosferatu'

Nosferatu’s end is a vignette of a woman working to conform herself to her culture’s understanding of a proper woman, all so that her society might be safe and her city return to its proper order.

Focus Features

In Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu, there’s something deeply wrong with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).

She contains too much blood, so much so that it bulges her pelvic area and spills out of her mouth and eyes in nightmares. She raves and shudders and falls to paroxysms, and she is sad, cataclysmically sad. Hers isn’t a sadness prompted by an external factor; rather something we might now call a mood disorder, long-standing and inexplicable in its ebbs and flows. In the film’s preface, we see that Ellen, driven to the deepest pit of hopelessness, calls out a prayer to the universe, asking for anything that might help her to find a reason to stay alive. Nobody responds but Nosferatu’s (Bill Skarsgård) astral or incorporeal projection. Ellen takes him for divine intervention and welcomes his company, but he is closer to a parasite than an angel. He is darkness that eats light, he is the anti-order, he rules the shadows of proper society, that miasmic space that Ellen’s sadness has driven her to. Nosferatu, abusing Ellen’s naivete and trust, visits her repeatedly, sexually possessing the vulnerable girl again and again and again under the cloak of night. He becomes her singular and grave shame. Her sadness never once abates, until she meets Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), hope for the future incarnate, whom she marries.

With a steady and present love that keeps her out of her staggering sadness, Ellen, feeling more meaningfully saved from herself, feels she doesn’t need Nosferatu anymore, feels she is freed from her reliance on him as a momentary distraction . Maybe he will see her real-world companionship and consistent joy and leave her alone, as a respectful angel might do. But the parasite is only emboldened, feeling an urge to consume Ellen wholly, physically. As Nosferatu makes ingress into Ellen’s life in an effort to possess her, Ellen puts up a fight, and so he begins to destroy her world. The film follows Ellen as she experiences Nosferatu’s terror, and as she attempts to shed it once and for all.

Sometimes she likes sex with Nosferatu — she tells Thomas as much, that the vampire has provided her moments of bliss — but it is obvious that the union is something that is predatory, something that is, at every instance, destroying her existentially and morally. This is obvious in how Ellen as a character carries shame about Nosferatu and her sadness. It’s evident throughout the film the work Ellen is doing to iron over this shame, whether it be at her desires or behaviour — when Thomas is leaving, she plasters a soft, compliant smile to her face even as tears fill her eyes; when she tells Willem Dafoe’s von Franz about her father finding her unclothed one night after a tryst with Nosferatu (it is suggested she is institutionalized after this discovery), her eyes widen and her tone is hushed, as if aghast at herself; after her breakdown, she apologizes to and thanks the Harding family endlessly for caring for her. It’s as if she is constantly cleaning up after herself.

There is a dichotomy in the film between the way that Ellen is and the work she does to hide or express regret or pass judgement over the way that she is; there is a distinction between herself and internalized social standards, or her superego. She doesn’t embrace her actions so often as she expresses a pained awareness that she is making others uncomfortable or is crossing some boundary. Ellen very much feels that something about her is out of step with regular society, something that needs to be fixed or hidden or even punished. She wouldn’t quiet herself or force a smile if she did not believe that her thoughts were irregular, if she hadn’t acutely felt the pain of her father’s judgemental gaze and subsequent shunning so many years ago.

The film charts a battle between Ellen’s desires and appetites, and her shame, which sees the former as wrong. It’s a battle that is uneven from the start because her shame is fueled by hefty societal norms. By the film’s climax, Ellen is all duty, her desires having been defeated by her growing sense of shame and responsibility for the calamity befalling her town. The film ends on her choice to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Ellen accepts Nosferatu into her room for their first physical union — he will drink of her blood, finally, the act that the sex was but a prelude to — but this is only because it’s a trap. Ellen keeps Nosferatu with her until the sun rises, at which point Nosferatu burns and turns to ash in the golden light. Ellen, with a triumphant half-smile trembling on her bloodless lips, dies, too.

For some, Nosferatu, specifically its ending, is a feminist reckoning of the idea of consent and a renegotiation of power. “Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen [...] pursues redemption for her own sake,” Vulture writer Roxana Hadadi writes of the film’s ending, which she juxtaposes against F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, of which Eggers is indelibly enamoured. In Murnau’s film, Ellen is a mere instrument, much like a wooden stake, she the tool by which the evil is defeated – outside of her function as a tool of destruction, her character has no agency or lifeblood. Eggers’s Ellen, meanwhile, is all blood as she stands centre stage and commands the story — her psychic landscape is excavated and thoroughly explored by Eggers. Because the film is a fleshed-out portrait of Ellen, for Hadadi, Ellen’s final act becomes not a “swooning surrender,” but “a springboard for an exploration of consent.” Ellen “chooses to return to her past shame of having a relationship with him in the first place, redeeming herself by using that relationship to vanquish him,” writes Hadadi. Hadadi sees the female figures in Eggers’s Nosferatu as having glittering agency and power as they “readily stare down doom,” creating a milieu for Ellen to be able to, by the film’s end, “reclaim her sexual past and strip it of its original humiliation and contrition.” According to Hadadi, the film ends with Ellen “deliberately weaponizing her body,” and thereby becoming “her own hero.”

Hadadi’s reading is certainly galvanizing — in Nosferatu, she finds a beautiful depiction of women who hold their own and stand up defiantly against traditional order; in Nosferatu, she finds empowered women, a feminist dream. Hadadi’s reading is deeply generous and exciting, but it is also myopic and superficial. Because the thing is, Nosferatu is, like many horror texts, deeply leaden with cultural and traditional meaning that we would be remiss not to consider. A meaningful analysis of the film that takes into account the stories modern Western culture tells itself about monsters finds that in Eggers’s Nosferatu, women are not as empowered as they seem.

Upon closer and analytical inspection, we see that Eggers’ Nosferatu tells us a tragic story of a mentally ill and abused woman who stands distinct and apart in her society. She is seen as a raving madwoman by all around her. Experiencing all manner of abjection, and disheartened by others’ (mainstream society’s) perception of her as “wrong” and their judgements against her, she goes on to ultimately sacrifice herself by committing suicide; this sacrifice, to her, is a correction of her wrongs. The film’s end is a vignette of a woman working to conform herself to her culture’s understanding of a proper woman, all so that her society might be safe and her city return to its proper order. Ellen is the monstrous-feminine example par excellence, an “other” in much the same way that Count Orlok/Nosferatu is, and the film’s ending, read with an understanding of order and disorder within traditional horror stories, telegraphs ultimately the triumph of patriarchal order.

The “Other” v.s. the Prevailing Moral Code

It’s no well-kept secret that Count Orlok/Nosferatu is a descendant of Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula — Murnau’s film, which Eggers’ is a direct adaptation of, is itself an unauthorized adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula. Murnau changed names around for his film so as to make it more accessible for German audiences. What might be more select knowledge is the idea that Dracula and by extension Count Orlok are the embodiment of a socio-political “other.”

An “other” is not a real person, but rather an imaginary vessel who represents marginalized people in a society. The “other” is a figure created by the dominant culture because it needs an ideological scapegoat, a figure that serves as receptacle for the culture’s displaced guilt, anxieties, and fears, while at the same time, by its existence, affirms the culture’s continued dominance and power. You can’t have power without someone to oppress. In the case of the Western, Christian cultural imagination, the “other” serves to, by virtue of its difference to or embodiment of the negative (or “shadow”) of “the self” (Christian male; dominant, patriarchal power), assuage guilt surrounding mistreatment or exploitation of marginalized folks, because the figure works as an antagonist in cultural stories. The “other” can embody all that which the mainstream culture is existentially afraid of; or the “other” can justify or reinforce colonial power. Because they’re an antagonist, they deserve to be expunged or oppressed. The label of “other” is slapped onto any figure by the Western, Christian imagination who strays from the right way to be (white, Christian, and male) or from supporting this idea.

Even if a culture is not overtly religious anymore, it maintains ideas of “otherness” in its ideology, its folklore, the stories it tells itself over time to justify power and oppression. The “other” runs rife in our narratives, appearing as tropes and archetypes. The “other” is preserved in binary notions of gender: a man ought to be traditionally masculine and white, a woman ought to be traditionally feminine and white. In patriarchal culture, women are otherized when they are believed to be bound to the body and the senses, over which the devil holds sway and through which men are so easily tempted into sin — they can be saved in religious terms through subservience to a patriarchal faith. Over the course of a cultural secularization, this idea is transmuted to a biological justification for women’s subjugation: because we are at the whim of our mercurial and changing and bloody bodies and passions, in stark distinction to being ruled by reason, we need to be ruled over. Meanwhile men, according to this logic, are rational and have an easier time ignoring or discounting their bodies. To be traditionally masculine means to be rational and strong and independent, means to be a person to whom dominance and leadership come easily; to be traditionally feminine is to be earthly and in need of guidance so as to live piously or rationally. Anyone not fitting this inflexible dichotomy — a madwoman, for example, or a person of a different race or religion, people who have other things to worry about than serving a Christian patriarchy — is labelled a threatening “other.”

Nosferatu as a story serves as a perfect case study of a Western patriarchal society’s battle against “otherness.” Count Orlok represents an ethnocultural “other,” a non-White being threatening the White man and his power. Count Orlok has old money, his being as the vampire Nosferatu serving to represent an ancient evil, allied through punishment with the devil. Thomas learns that the Count used to be a Solomonar, a wizard in Romanian folklore. “A black enchanter he was in life,” a nun tells Thomas. “The devil preserved his soul so that his corpse may walk again in blasphemy. You are lost in his shadow. [...] His evil cannot enter this house of god. [...] He cannot leave here. [...] He must return to the cursed earth wherein he was buried.” Literally needing soil to survive, Nosferatu is earth-bound, like the feminine “other,” and much unlike the proper Christian person, who looks and aspires to the heavens.

As a vampire needing blood to survive, the Count poses a direct threat to the good Christian folk of Wisburg, to whom he brings a literal plague. Scholar Leonid Livak, in his book called The Jewish Persona in the European Imagination, explains the cultural meaning behind blood-drinking for Count Dracula, who becomes younger with every sip of Christian blood: “This medicinal effect draws on the blood libel legend,” an antisemitic belief that Jewish people — codified as the “other” in the Christian imagination — used the blood of Christians in rituals. This vampiric trait is transplanted onto Nosferatu, along with many of Dracula’s physical markers of “otherness,” such as his (in Livak’s words) “hooked nose,” and “claw like hands,” both of which appear overwhelmingly in antisemitic iconography, Livak says. “Although Stoker never explicitly calls Dracula ‘jewish,’ he enlists the lexicon of ‘jewish’ difference [that is, a vocabulary defining an ideological figure existing only in the Christian imagination and having nothing to do with historical Jewish people] in order to make his monster more frightening at a time when the average British reader fears the large-scale arrival of Jewish migrants fleeing Russian pogroms and discrimination.” A story like Dracula, incorporating “othering” language and motifs and markers, worked to justify real-world bias, disenfranchisement, and persecution of real-world, marginalized people.

Because Eggers’ adaptation is painstakingly faithful to Murnau’s, without challenging Murnau’s representation of the vampire, he, unbeknownst to him, has re-animated for modern audiences, the figure of Nosferatu as a distinct figure of “otherness,” at least according to Christianity. These are markers that Nosferatu shares intimately with Dracula, and the religious and cultural concerns of Stoker’s story and Murnau’s adaptation appear with direct force within Eggers’ film.

The figure of the vampire has a distinct function in Christian tales: to reveal the need to uphold the dominant order. In an essay called “Vampire Suicide” that appears in a book called Suicide and the Gothic, writer Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock explicates the dynamics at work in stories of vampires that end specifically in the vampire committing suicide. In these stories, a vampire lives an immortal life of grandeur and sin, sensuality and passion, and then by the end, they realize their immorality and begin to experience remorse for their actions against human life, because these vampires retain an anthropocentric human morality, which “places humanity at the centre of a cosmic contest between good and evil, with vampires aligned with the latter.” Over the course of their long lives, they recognize their own status as an “abomination” and commit suicide so as to cease being a “blot on the human conscience.” Stories ending in a vampire’s suicide naturalize the allure of eternal life and reaffirm a human ethical code – the reader sees this beautiful life of sin and splendour, and lest they lust after it themselves, they see that such a life only and ultimately ends in remorse and self destruction, with good triumphing over evil, always. The anthropocentric human morality that Weinstock describes is, in other terms, a patriarchal moral code that in Nosferatu retains a Christian underpinning; it is crisply delineated socially — through religious acts (of the nuns), and through secular images of industry and healthy city life — against the destructiveness and illness brought on by the monster, and within Ellen, in the friction between her madness and socially-structured shame.

Now, Nosferatu isn’t a story told from the point of view of Count Orlok, meaning we don’t know how he feels about his immortality. More importantly, Count Orlok doesn’t commit suicide, he is killed through a trap that Ellen lays. While Murnau’s story finds a protagonist in Thomas, Eggers places Ellen at his tale’s centre. While Nosferatu as the vampire retains distinct markers of Draculean “otherness,” it is told from the point of view of a young woman. It is understandable, because of Ellen’s privileged position, why it might be alluring to praise Nosferatu for being feminist. The film elevates a female perspective, righting Murnau’s wrongs and bestowing an agency to Ellen. Where Ellen in the silent film is swooning and longing, a limp somnambulist victim, in Eggers’s film, her history is fleshed out and she orchestrates her final fate. But what is Ellen’s story, exactly? And what does her final act mean in the face of the vocabulary of otherness and the patriarchal morality that Weinstock describes?

Ellen is deeply depressed, and has always been afflicted with a weighty melancholy, one that Thomas is aware of when he marries her. But Ellen’s issues are not just mental, they are not just to do with a long-standing psychological affliction. Rather, her mental state is articulated by both Ellen and professor von Franz (Willem Dafoe) as linked to her physical being. There is something very wrong with Ellen, an insanity reaching down to her very core.

After a failed exorcism, von Franz describes Ellen as “cursed” and possessed by a demon. “Demonic spirits more easily obsess those whose lower animal functions dominate,” he says. “Demons like them, they seek them out.” When Dr. Sievers (Ralph Ineson) counters, saying that Ellen could easily be any other insane woman, with her illness just delusion borne of her melancholy, von Franz heartily objects. Ellen’s case is more than mere melancholy: “This is no delusion,” he says. “I believe she has always been highly conductive to these cosmic forces, uniquely so.” Von Franz calls Ellen a remarkable child for her innate link to the supernatural; she was born into the occult world, he says later.

Ellen asks von Franz upon their first meeting whether evil comes from within or from beyond. For Ellen, it is the case that there are certain types of people who are more open to evil than others. Her menstruation is liberal, she has “too much blood” says von Franz, she is altogether too much woman, much too much in her body, trying desperately to reach the goodness whose contours are sketched by other women in her society. And this attempt toward goodness is what reveals in Ellen her shame not only at her relationship — however forced it is — with Nosferatu, but also at her natural self. Ellen refers to herself as “base” for her relationship with the Count that started off as bliss but then swiftly turned to torture. “It would kill me,” Ellen says in clipping sentences, suggesting that the Count threatened to kill her should she resist. “It was you that gave me the courage to be free of my shame,” she says to Thomas. “He is my shame, he is my melancholy,” Ellen says of the Count.

Upon closer inspection, Ellen reveals herself to be as much an “other” as Count Orlok. In Nosferatu, the “other” is split in two. As much as the Count represents a racial “other,” Ellen represents a sexual other. While Ellen is not a vampire specifically within the story, she is a “blot on the human conscience” in the sense that she has always been her animalistic self, a strain first on her father and his household, and then on the Harding household, a strain on the finances of a successful, civilized man. She is everything a proper woman in her society ought not to be: loudly insane, experiencing paroxysms that even a corset cannot contain. She sleepwalks, weeps incessantly, and experiences verboten sexual desires. She is a stark contrast to Anna Harding, a picture of Christian goodness who has borne two blonde children, with a boy on the way. Anna doesn’t even think about sex, while her husband Friedrich is described by Thomas as a bull – virile in the way a man ought to be, he is always hungry for sex, he cannot keep his hands off his wife even in public. Anna, meanwhile, blushes when Friedrich tries to kiss her in public, telling him to consider what others might think. Anna is soft-spoken, a consummate mother, an angel in white — so white she often blanches into the light wallpaper behind her — she is the mother in the Madonna/Whore dichotomy, while Ellen is the Whore epitomized, sad and loud and earthly, existentially and morally wrong, ashamed and unabashed before a proper, masculine man like Friedrich, and desirous of sex with her husband.

Ellen and her body put on an extraordinary show that is proof of the supernatural, proof for the rightness of the formerly disgraced professor von Franz’s occult beliefs. Ellen, in her state as a madwoman, is unruly — a story that ended with her continuing on in her unruly ways, uncured and sexually hungry, would certainly be renegade. But Nosferatu ends with her death. By the film’s climax, Ellen is reformed: though mad, she has retained a patriarchal morality, a superego that ultimately takes the throne in her psyche and, through a steady rain of shame, lashes her ego and id in line. Her supernatural ability, her link to her body and her animal instincts, are thus made a tool for the dominating order. Plagued by shame and a feeling of responsibility, Ellen commits suicide so that Nosferatu can die, so that Wisburg can be saved.

Suicide As Destruction of the Monstrous Feminine and Restoration of Order

If Nosferatu represents the Western, patriarchal fear of losing power to a cultural “other,” its racism and xenophobia, then Ellen represents the patriarchal fear of a woman’s sexuality, or, the monstrous-feminine. The monstrous-feminine is defined by film scholar Barbara Creed as the embodiment of everything that is “shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject” about women. Creed employs philosopher Julia Kristeva’s definition of the abject as that which “disturbs identity, system, order.” The abject is the source of horror and “works within patriarchal societies as a means of separating the human from the non-human and the fully constituted subject from the partially formed subject.” In our cultural stories, the abject is often woman. “One of the key figures of abjection is the mother who becomes an abject at that moment when the child rejects her for the father who represents the symbolic order,” writes Creed.

In Nosferatu, Ellen is abject. Her blood, her saliva, her sweat, her moans of pleasure, her seizures, the way she fingers Nosferatu’s blisters, all represent that which is taboo in a woman. And Ellen knows this, hence her shame, hence her suicide. By the time Ellen realizes what must be done to defeat Nosferatu, Wisburg is falling apart around her. People lie dead on the streets littered with horse shit; rats have already eaten away at Anna, who, along with her darling daughters, Nosferatu has exsanguinated. Wisburg has fallen to decay and abjection.

Only Ellen, in her position as abject, is able to save Wisburg precisely because of her unique link to the abject, to the occult and the supernatural. Through her body she has served as proof of the reality of the demonic, and it is through her body again that it can be defeated. And this is because of the shame she feels. Ellen is, while embodying the abject, like the remorseful vampire that Weinstock describes: she retains an anthropocentric or patriarchal morality, by virtue of her elevation to the level of protagonist by Eggers. The society around her, specifically Ellen’s father, Friedrich, and to a more soft extent Thomas and Anna and their pitiful glances, have shown to Ellen that the way that she is — intrinsically different, strange, eerie — is out of step with the normal movement of society wherein women are quiet, self-abnegating, and subservient to men. The people around her, even as they love her, have sowed a deep sense of shame into Ellen. For Ellen has, if considered in a vacuum, done nothing materially wrong; her actions only appear wrong when considered within a patriarchal morality.

“I know it must be me, Professor,” Ellen says with a sad sort of determination to von Franz in their final meeting. “His pull to me is so powerful, so terrible, yet my spirit cannot be as evil as his,” she goes on to say. In other words, Ellen knows that she must rise above and out of her body toward self-abnegating goodness as defined by her society. “We must crucify the evil within us,” von Franz says to her, “or there is no salvation.” But Ellen protests, with a prick of indignation rising within her: how can she need salvation if all her life she “has done no ill but heed [her] nature,” if all she has done in life is follow her feminine animality? It’s strange that Eggers writes this indignation into Ellen in this moment, it feels, like her status as protagonist, an attempt to empower Ellen, but it’s an attempt that pales and feels hollow in the face of her overwhelming sadness throughout the film, in the face of her repeated declarations of shame, her figurative self-flagellation before Thomas and admissions of guilt and remorse, and in the face of the tenor of the conversation she and von Franz are having in this moment about quashing evil. She cannot feel shame and also feel as though she has done nothing bad, for shame itself is the feeling of having done something bad, of having crossed a social more; and she cannot feel shame unless good and evil have been laid out before her by her culture. This statement by Ellen feels ad hoc and in service to von Franz’s subsequent line advising her to follow her nature to defeat Nosferatu. (If it really was the case that she needs no salvation, that she never fell from grace because she has done nothing wrong, then she would not sacrifice herself, then she would not die; she would, rather, persist in her ways. But Ellen dies of her own volition, all in service to her community.)

In a swift turn, Ellen’s animal nature, after the corrective guidance of socially-imposed shame, which has taught her that her animality is wrong, is laid on a correct path; it has now become a tool for patriarchal morality. Ellen, as soon as she decides to sacrifice herself, is naturalized as a threat to patriarchy, becomes its servant. “I fear Nosferatu is impervious to any of our iron stakes,” von Franz says. If she wants to be saved in the eyes of the order, the feminine “other” must use her monstrosity to destroy the racial “other.” “You are our salvation,” von Franz says to Ellen. And with a tear running down her cheek, she says, “Thank you,” and readable in her face is a relief at von Franz’s words: his advice has given her the salvation she moments earlier said she did not need. She has a path toward patriarchal goodness. As pallbearers carry a steady stream of coffins outside her window, and as the sun dips into twilight, Ellen, with tears streaming down her already-wet face, dons her bridal gown. She knows death is upon her as she bids Thomas farewell, relishing the feel of his final kiss, and accepts Nosferatu into her room.

Ellen’s final moment is literally an act of consent, but to label it thus is to grossly misread everything that has led to it. The sadness that weighs heavily on her lids is an acceptance of the duty of salvation — through sacrificing herself she can save her town. Her act contains confidence but her sadness, like tears soaking through a handkerchief, weighs her movements, for she is so obviously sad to be leaving her world. Her final act is self-sacrifice; anything but jubilant, her final act is kin to suicide.

But most importantly, her final act allows for the triumph of patriarchal order. Throughout the film, Ellen, with her body, has served as what Creed describes a typical “illustration of the work of abjection.” Nosferatu, through Ellen, foregrounds the abject — Ellen’s “blood, vomit, saliva, sweat, tears and putrifying flesh,” (one of the most indelible images in the film is von Franz poking a pin through Ellen’s wrist so as to let her blood) — so that we may confront it and satisfy the perverse pleasure of witnessing that which is gross and threatening. In the way we can’t help but pick at a scab or look at roadkill out of an irrepressible curiosity, we look at the abject in horror movies and feel a certain sort of pleasure.

Creed writes that, “having taken pleasure in perversity” we can then “eject the abject.” Crucially, Creed writes, “although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same – to bring about an encounter between the symbolic order and that which threatens its stability.” This encounter is, for Creed, “the central ideological project of the popular horror film.” We watch a horror film, countenance the abject, and in so doing, are able to satisfy a perverse urge, and are all the better able to “re-draw the boundaries between the human and non-human.” Or, in other words, to re-draw the boundary between maternal authority, the monstrous-feminine, and paternal law, patriarchal order. After taking in the abject, which threatens our safety specifically, and societal order generally, and experiencing the vicarious thrill of danger, we can look away as the credits roll, satisfied and with a greater sense of safety and selfhood. We have a better understanding of what we are and what we are not; having dabbled in the verboten, we feel confident in ourselves for adhering to straight society. We’re not as gross as that, we think. This witnessing of the abject is the same as what Weinstock describes as having our cake and eating it to when it comes to vampire stories: we vicariously experience the splendour of immortality, but our desire and lust for the taboo is curbed by the vampire’s shame and remorse at the selfsame splendour, and their suicide reasserts the line between the evil and the anthropocentric good.

Watching Nosferatu, we confront the abject again and again in Ellen, who doesn’t revel in it as much as she is pained by it. By the film’s end, she, having shepherded us through our confrontation with the abject, herself draws the line between it (the “others,” including herself and Nosferatu), and Wisburg, walking us from monstrous-feminine to a proper being in society. Lest anyone lust after Nosferatu, Ellen shows the existential turmoil and moral quandary such animalistic pleasure brings, and through her suicide we are jolted onto the right path of goodness, of upholding the order that Wisburg knew before Nosferatu’s plague. We see the gross through Ellen and, satisfied, go back to being proper citizens. We would never want to turn as decrepit as Nosferatu, would never want to have a stake poked through our wrists. Ellen would never want to be as damned as he is, as immortally chained to the soil, she absolutely does not want to continue in her abject ways, chained to the whims of her own body, over which her society-fed shame peaks by film’s end, and so she turns to straight society.

Eggers, regardless of his intentions, has offered us a weighty cultural story in Nosferatu. And despite all his attempts at empowerment, he delivers a monstrous-feminine figure who, working within a storied tradition of narrative alterity, ultimately kills herself, but not before retrieving any power Nosferatu gained over Wisburg and delivering it back to the city, so that her community can return to its patriarchal order. If anything, it feels as if Eggers is posturing toward something revolutionary or edgy, but too afraid to fully commit to it. He doesn’t have Ellen buck authority. Rather, he has her make an elaborate show of her abject-ness, because as a madwoman, this function of bearing witness in her body to disorder has been determined for her by a strong literary tradition of “othering.” According to this tradition, Ellen as a woman is natural home to the abject, and as a madwoman, she is natural scapegoat — this is a tradition Eggers does not challenge. Ellen runs through a carnival of abjection, only to ultimately be reformed from it, to deny it or shrug away from it, because straight-laced society’s rules and rigors have succeeded in entrenching in her that the abject is deleterious. Ellen facilitates the order’s reign, as do many of us when we take our perverse pleasure in the abject through horror films or sidelong glances at grotesqueries, only to then return to the cleanliness of patriarchal society, where she, and we, march toward death. In Nosferatu, Eggers is a mere tourist in the land of the abject, ultimately too afraid of the monstrous-feminine to let her triumph.

It seems an overwhelming tragedy to have Ellen in life suffer as a sexual “other” and the embodiment of the abject, and then to die as she finds peace in patriarchal morality. Ellen is doubly victimized by patriarchy, first explicitly otherized by her society, and secondly by Nosferatu, the bearer of patriarchy's displaced fears about losing power. She is never cured of her sadness, she never stops being an “other,” a madwoman, abject — she is only walked to the decision to extinguish herself by patriarchal morality, her intense sense of shame and duty. Any reading of this film as empowering is deeply misguided, for this film, despite Eggers’ intentions, telegraphs the triumph of patriarchal power against the monstrous other, racial and sexual. The ideological complexities and consequences of Nosferatu stand in stark contrast to something like Eggers’ 2016 film The Witch, which, though it has its own hefty history and corresponding murky ideological tradition, does not end in the monstrous-feminine, the witch, dying, but rather in her persistence in her ways, it ends in her literal ascendence.

To see Ellen’s self-sacrifice as empowering is deeply misguided and a grave message to send to anyone who might find resonance in her psychological landscape and existential hellscape. Ellen’s alterity ought to be celebrated, and her choice to die mourned.