***Spoiler alert! Major plot points and the ending of “Nosferatu” are mentioned in this article, so beware if you haven’t seen the movie yet.
Horror films have long equated sex with death, while vampire lore, indeed all gothic horror, wades into deeper emotional waters involving romance and love, making death more untimely and tragic.
In Nosferatu, Robert Egger’s creates a romantic horror film that even when it strays into the grotesque, it remains a love story at heart. The film’s climactic scene is as grotesque as you can get, with a naked Count Orlok lying atop Ellen, his warped and twisted form in sharp contrast to her lithe, young body beneath him. This blood-sucking night creature doesn’t imbibe the way of traditional vampires with a nibble on the nape of the neck. Instead, Orlok attaches his jaws to Ellen’s chest and pierces her chest cavity with his fangs to drink directly from the tap. This act is the physical consummation of the oath that Ellen made with the Count when she was young, at least that is what Orlok believes it to be at first.
Savoring every last drop, Orlok feasts on her blood longer than he should, and before he is sated it is dawn, and the rising sun appears to destroy the ancient being. It is a painful and brutal demise, and every frame of his anguish is captured on screen. His torment is not merely corporeal as he suffers deep heartache and bitter anger because as he is dying he realizes that he had been betrayed.
Ellen appears satisfied as she smiles while cradling Orlok’s head in her hand and he bleeds out of every orifice in his body like he was succumbing to the Ebola virus.
Orlok’s love for a woman whom he has waited so long and traveled so far to claim has deceived him, sacrificing her own life to save the life of her true love, Thomas Hutter. And isn’t that the ultimate measure of love? Ellen survives only long enough for Thomas to arrive, and they have a final moment together.
In the final shot, we see Ellen in a lover’s embrace with Orlok’s skeletal remains. Lily-Rose Depp, who plays Ellen, calls the ending “heartbreaking and kind of bittersweet in a way because she’s doing a good deed and she’s breaking the curse, but she’s also indulging in a dark desire that she has.”
Nosferatu is a tragedy, in essence, and clearly a love triangle. There is love between Ellen and Orlok, and between Ellen and Thomas, a good and righteous man, the antithesis of her demon lover. While these are two very different kinds of love, this is precisely what gives this film its edge and its place among other top romantic horror movies.
Despite the supernatural element in the unlikely “relationship” between Ellen and Count Orlok, she is a relatable and sympathetic character. Perhaps this is because so many people know what it’s like to be drawn to a person who they know is bad for them. Even when someone in this kind of a relationship decides to get out of it, it is often difficult, sometimes impossible to do so. And the lingering effects of a bad relationship can go on to torpedo all subsequent relationships, including the one with a person who is true soul mate.
This is what happens to Ellen in Nosferatu, only her previous relationship was with someone who was not only bad for her, but someone who was evil incarnate.
It might be open for debate whether Nosfertu is a genuine love story or if Orlok is a stalker, but it was Ellen who summoned the Count, inadvertently or not. The film opens with Ellen, then a young woman, in a state of deep despair. With a mother who is dead and a father who shows her little affection, Ellen is lonely and desperate to be loved. She could not have been more vulnerable when she asks the heavens for someone who will care for her, but it is a demonic supernatural entity, Count Orlok, who answers her plea, appearing to her in a nightmarish vision. The ancient vampire takes complete advantage of Ellen’s despondency, and an irreversible bond is formed between them.
Orlok’s desire for Ellen evokes dark dreams she cannot control, but when Orlok becomes aware of her marriage to Thomas, he arranges to travel to her to consummate their relationship and fulfill the promise she made to him when she was young. However, Orlok cannot simply take her. Although the Count has ways to convince her to do as he desires, including bringing a terrifying plague with him and personally sucking the lifeblood from all those who Ellen loves, she must willingly give herself to him.
When she finally accepts Orlok into her bedroom, she is wearing a white dress with a veil.
“You accept this of your own will?” Orlok groans.
“I do,” she responds, as if it were a wedding vow.
Orlok then leans over her, his gruesome body overshadowing hers, and his kiss seals both their fates.
Ellen’s love-bond with Orlok is what distinguishes Egger’s Nosferatu from the original 1922 film, as well as all Bram Stoker-based vampire stories depicted on the page and the silver screen over the past century and a quarter.
Audiences have come to expect the Count, both Orlok and Dracula, to covet his love interest (Ellen Hutter/Mina Harker) spontaneously because of the physical beauty she possesses, then use his powers of enticement to lure the vulnerable and helpless femme fatale to him. In Egger’s film, Ellen is neither a victim nor is she weak. She is an unapologetic, strong, ambitious woman who doesn’t shrink when confronted by her past or by Nosferatu when he returns to claim her for himself. In doing so, she displays all the archetypical characteristics of a hero, and she becomes someone for whom you route for as well as sympathize.
Eggers has stated in interviews that it had always been clear to him that Nosferatu is a demon lover story.
“Death-and-the-maiden is a popular motif in art history,” Eggers said. “When you see Lily-Rose (Ellen) looking like a doll and Bill (Nosferatu) looking like a skull with a mustache, it’s a powerful contrast.”
“I want people to go, ‘Is he going to bite her face off?’ And then it turns into a kiss,” said Bill Skarsgård, the actor who portrays Orlok in the film. “Nosferatu is a very heightened fairy tale story, but also it’s two people potentially falling in love. It isn’t love, it’s something else, but love is maybe the closest thing to it that you can kind of relate to. If it’s not love, it’s a craving and it’s an appetite and it’s lust and desire to devour.”
Depp has said that the filmmakers intended to give this iteration of Nosferatu the feel of a love-triangle, because in the end it was a love story.
Depp added that they wanted both “real sensuality and real desire” between Ellen and Orlok, “which makes the scenes all the more engaging and scary. This young woman is repulsed by him and petrified and horrified, but at the same time, there is a longing there.”
We all know that love can be empowering, but it can also be destructive. Having summoned Count Orlok as a young girl, Ellen has a certain power over him. In the end, Orlok is who is vulnerable, and Ellen takes full advantage of this, killing him even as her own life drains away.
In any tragedy, there are two victims, as there is in Nosferatu, but is Count Orlok deserving of any sympathy? His death scene is protracted, and you’re not a monster yourself if you feel sorry for him.
Bill Skarsgård regards the finale as ‘death and ecstasy,’ suggesting that in his final moments, Orlok was seeing the sun for the first time in hundreds of years, so he was mesmerized by it and fearful. “And in a way, maybe that is what Orlok wanted all along,” he said.
It could be that the desires held by both Ellen, who craved love from any being, and Count Orlok, who lusted for a young beautiful woman, were so strong that their mutual destruction was inevitable. Is this the dark lesson about love that the filmmakers wanted to educe in Nosferatu?
Maybe not, but this Valentines Day, even if you’re not in the perfect romantic situation, embrace the musical Zen tagline, if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one your with. And be thankful that the person lying down next to you right now is not a demon.
Or are they?
Published 2/14/25