Vampires and capitalism, remakes and gimmicks: Odin O’Sullivan reviews Robert Eggers’ update to a classic of the horror genre, Nosferatu.
In Capital: Volume 1, Karl Marx, in a suitably gothic turn of phrase, notes that “capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks” (342). This representational link between vampires and the insatiably extractive nature of capitalism can be read throughout the vampire literature of the subsequent decades with both Carmilla (Le Fanu, 1872) and Dracula (Stoker, 1897) featuring wealthy reclusive aristocratic vampires with a thirst for more than just blood.
The first cinematic representation of the vampire, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: Symphony of Horror (1922), maintains this representational link and casts a large shadow over subsequent vampire films. Film scholar Lorna Piatti-Farnell argues that the legacy of the original Nosferatu on continuing representations of the vampire within Western cinema is clearly visible. She notes that “Nosferatu set the unavoidable foundations for seeing vampires, in a number of textual and cultural contexts, as intrinsically connected to the notion of commodities and possession, and, in the majority of occasions, as strongly associated with wealth” (144).[1] This link between the vampire and wealth can be seen in almost every vampire film since; from Vampyr (Dreyer, 1932) to 2008’s Twilight. The 2024 remake of Nosferatu, directed by Robert Eggers, is no exception.
Contexts and Crises
The historical and cultural context of the day courses through Murnau’s original Nosferatu, from Count Orlok’s position as an undead and decaying member of the aristocracy, to the wave of pestilence and disease he brings to Wisborg. This Nosferatu was released in Germany in 1922, four years after the end of war in which 2 million German men died and “4.2 million returned home shell-shocked or horribly wounded and disfigured”.[2] This was followed by the 1918-1920 flu pandemic, which killed upwards of 20 million people, and a series of worker uprisings and revolutions in Germany and abroad. It was also two years after the abortive Kapp Putsch, and one year before the Nazi Beer Hall Putsch.
Writing on the film, Siegfried Kracauer notes that the representation of Count Orlok as a blood-thirsty member of the nobility was part of a “procession of tyrants” in 1920s German cinema as the German people “nursed no illusions about the possible consequences of tyranny; on the contrary, they indulged in detailing its crimes and the sufferings inflicted”.[3]
At a moment in which the political future of Germany was unsure, the imagery of the tyrannical vampire can potentially be read as both a critique of tyrants just recently deposed in Germany and Russia and as a cautionary tale of potential tyrants to come. Now, over 100 years later, four years after a global pandemic, in the midst of new inter-imperialist wars, a genocide in Palestine, climate catastrophe, and the ascent of the far-right globally, we find ourselves in a moment in which the political future of the world is uncertain. It would seem, then, that a remake of Nosferatu could potentially speak to our current cultural moment, as horror cinema so often does.
The Remake and the Gimmick
The narrative in Eggers’ update does not vary massively from the original. Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is tasked by his employer with bringing a deed of sale for a property in Wisborg to an elderly and reclusive Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in Transylvania. After he arrives and Orlok purchases the house in Wisborg, Hutter discovers Orlok is a vampire. He is then trapped in the castle while Orlok sets off for Wisborg in pursuit of Hutter’s wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), an object of obsession for him, bringing with him a plague of rats and disease.
While the performances are strong, with Lily-Rose Depp in particular standing out, formally, the film is more conservative than the audacious and expressionistic original. The decision to modulate the tone, away from the first iteration’s slow creep of looming dread punctuated with moments of gothic terror, to a more straightforward horror, is one of its core weaknesses. This is exemplified by the film’s dependence on the jump scare. The jump scare as a filmic device can be understood, following Sienne Ngai, as a “gimmick”. These are “tools that have a strange way of stealing attention” – labour-saving devices to “abbreviate work and time.”[4] Jump scares extract from the viewer through a lazy short-hand what the original works aim to achieve through its radical and expressionistic formal style: fear.
In the 1922 Nosferatu, “strips of negative film are used to present the woods as a maze of ghostlike white trees against a black sky; the “one-turn-one-picture” camera method transforms the clerk’s coach into a phantom vehicle uncannily moving along by jerks; the spectral ship glides with its terrible freight over phosphorescent waters”. All of this technical ingenuity “served the sole purpose of rendering horrors”.[5] While Eggers’ film is certainly visually accomplished in some regard (the first, feverish sequence in Orlok’s castle springs to mind) it is more stylistically straightforward. He relies too often on generating fear in the audience through something appearing suddenly and loudly on the screen so as to shock us rather than using formal techniques that unsettle us and imbue us with dread.
The Vampire as Capital, the Vampire as Tyrant
This is not to say that the new Nosferatu is awful. Some aspects of the remake’s narrative content are particularly interesting developments on the original source material. It is set in the same fictional German town in the 1830s and maintains the original’s central construction of the vampire as “an affluent individual, keen on possessing commodities, including real estate properties”.[6]
In some ways the representation of Orlok as “keen on possessing commodities” has been intensified by Eggers, much in the way capitalism itself has intensified in the century between the films. In a pivotal scene, when asked who or what he is by Ellen Hutter, Count Orlok replies “I am an appetite; nothing more.” As a force of pure appetite that ‘lives the more…it sucks” but will never truly be sated, Count Orlok can be read as a representation of capital itself; a capital that only a few years ago rode a wave of disease, brutally consigning large populations to death in service of its appetite for that which sustains it – living labour. This is on show in the original film as well, but the remake foregrounds it in a provocative way, linking the appetite for property, wealth, possessions, and blood, to mass death.
Similarly, the centralisation of sexual desire and particularly the medicalisation of female sexuality in the 18th and 19th centuries is something the original film never explores. As industrial capitalism developed and relied on the reproduction of the labour force, female sexuality was reduced to its reproductive capacity, hidden in the home, and if expressed openly, pathologized. The film emphasises this shift in how sexuality was understood and relates blood to libido, as Helen’s ‘illness’ (libido) is said to be due to her overproduction of blood. It is Helen’s over-production of blood/libido that makes Orlok desire her so, and why she is able to withstand being fed on by him.
Today’s Nosferatu takes that which the 19th century sought to hide – female sexuality – and makes it the weapon which defeats Orlok. But in doing this, the film muddies its own critique. Victorian medicine under industrial capitalism makes female sexuality monstrous, and the film in its attempts to explore this, risks affirming that monstrousness.
In short, while Nosferatu (2024) attempts to update and develop upon the original in its content, its formal conservatism sees it come across as less audacious and radical than its 100 year old predecessor. An ensemble of strong actors carries what may have otherwise been a lacking and toothless adaptation.
[1] Piatti-Farnell, Lorna, ‘The Vampire’s Hunger: Nosferatu’s Legacy of Blood, Luxury, and Roaring Consumerism’, in Simon Bacon (ed.), Nosferatu in the 21st Century: A Critical Study (Liverpool, 2023), Pg. 144.
[2] Massaccesi, Cristina. Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, Auteur Publishing, 2016, Pg. 13.
[3] Kracauer, Siegfried. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of German Film. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, Pg. 77.
[4] Ngai, Sienne. Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form. Cambridge & London: Harvard University Press, 2020.
[5] Kracauer, 78-79.
[6] Piatti-Farnell, 144.
