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Nosferatu as Vampiric Healer of the Shadow of Death
- Norland Tellez, PhD
- 3 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Robert Eggers’ 2024 masterpiece Nosferatu affords us a powerful mythic mirror of the collective spiritual climate that produced it. Beyond the personal or childhood issues that motivated Eggers to re-make Nosferatu, we must contend with the universal transcendent appeal of the story and characters as they open up the mythic dimensions of the film.
Although it is hard to spoil a movie that has been made and remade several times over a hundred years, readers should be warned: there will be spoilers ahead for all versions.
The archetypal imagery of Nosferatu reveals and conceals traumatic soul truths that reverberate through our own times. The painful insights that the film uncovers are again covered up by the very aesthetic spectacle of the film: the brilliant production design and pacing, the music and dialogue, audio and visual effects—all combine to constitute the mythic experience of the film. In the fantastic element of disgust and horror, where symbols begin to break down and rot, the proximity of the Real appears. Beneath the garb of imaginary horror, a traumatic truth speaks. Let us remember that in true mythology both logos and mythos are combined. Like body and soul, they are inextricably bound up, both literal and symbolic, imaginary and historic, everywhere all at once.
A deep mythological reading of Nosferatu would thus involve us into another crucial dyad, that between individual psychology and the collective structures of our social reality. The creature is the shadow of mass murder, obscurely repressed and buried into the depths of the collective unconscious. Expressed in the form of the plague, this collective shadow is an actual evil of genocidal proportions. Real bodies and actual blood baths pave the way of a vampiric system that threatens the very existence of human life on earth.
Real horror hides beneath an imaginary one. Therefore, to consider this film through the lens of horror is to contemplate the shadow of our collective evil, both within and without—are you not scared yet?
Nosferatu is the healer archetype in its negative form; it heals by means of death, which puts an end to all fear and anxiety— along with everything else. Rather than being the healing element, Ellen is “healed” by becoming the scapegoat victim of a collective evil.
ouroboric evil
In the opening and ending scenes of Eggers’ Nosferatu, the fundamental mythos of the film is revealed in ouroboric fashion. Forming a circular ring of mythic violence, the alpha and omega of the film dramatize the sacrificial logic of its narrative vision. Beginning and end together shape a single action: the sacrificial rape and killing of the human soul for the sake of appeasing a monster.
Drawing from the archetype of child sacrifice “to heal the land,” the anima figure, Ellen, is surrendered to the insatiable hunger of the Vampyre. This is the tragic and pessimistic core of the Nosferatu myth: the sacrificial death of the human soul, crushed and sucked dry by the evil spirit of the collective shadow of our present system.
With the final image of the movie, where the Vampyre is melted into Ellen’s lifeless body, having drunk all her blood, the myth of Nosferatu is complete. Both moments form a ouroboric structure of an Evil nature. Any attempt to celebrate a triumph over this pyre of self-immolation is snuffed out, entirely belied by the priceless ransom paid to the demon: a human soul. Although the creature may be dead, Evil ultimately takes the day. The rats will continue to spread the plague following the inexorable laws of microbiology. Nowhere does the film show proof of the magical end of the plague. So the anima dies in vain. Evil claims a prize that is too dear to pay, certainly for Thomas as well as for most audiences who do not share the triumphalism of child sacrifice.
Sacrificing virgins
There are three most famous adaptations of Bram Stoker’s novel to film, beginning with Henrik Galeen’s 1922 script for F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. In 1979, the theme was again picked up by Werner Herzog, who saw in it a great challenge for postwar German cinema, Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, translated into English as Nosferatu the Vampyre. Despite the innovations of both Herzog and Egger, in no version of Nosferatu does Ellen or “Lucy” survive. The sacrifice of the feminine is the most brutal change made in the mythic template of Nosferatu. In Stoker’s original ending, Mina does not die. Following traditional expectations, the destruction of the monster is placed squarely in the hands of the men, giving Jonathan Harker the satisfaction to decapitate the demon himself.
The reactionary or “backward” ways of the dangerous archetype of child sacrifice is explicitly admitted by the film as the centerpiece of its horror. As Count Orlok says to Thomas when he touches upon the sacrificial image:
“I fear we yet keep close many superstitions here that may seem backward to a young man of your high learning.” (31:52)
Both at the beginning and end, as well as during the clandestine Romani ritual, the image of child sacrifice is established as the central mythic archetype of the Nosferatu myth.
The new scene of the sacrificial rite— which the Roma themselves wished to end—makes the archetype of child sacrifice a more prominent image in Eggers’ version. This sacrificial scene with the Roma people is his original contribution to the Nosferatu myth. In no other version do we find such a scene with an important difference. The Roma people did not sacrifice their young girl to the demon. Their culture is not identified with the brutality of that ritual. Instead they use the sacrificial victim to lead them to the creature in order to kill it. The Romani offer a model for the only morally acceptable solution: kill the monster without killing the child! The presence of the Roma people as outliers or “errant wanderers” (31:42) gives sacrificial slaughter of children its “pagan” or pre-Christian cultural context.
The wise old lie
To modern audiences, needless to say, the sacrifice of children for the “salvation of the land” can only have its place in horror fiction. Such ritual practices are absolutely abhorrent to modern sensibilities and no amount of ‘neopaganism’ or ‘multiculturalism’ is going to change that evaluation. Thank God. Horror movies like Nosferatu, therefore, must work very hard to romanticize the gruesome sacrifice of an innocent victim.
The chief propagandist of the movie’s ideology, as we should expect, is Dr. von Franz who repeats the famous Oedipal line to Thomas from the beginning of Murnau’s version: “Not so fast, my young friend! No-one outruns his destiny” (3:47). Now near the end of the story, Eggers has the Old Wise von Franz, hysterically filled with religious fervor, yell out to Thomas who desperately runs back to Ellen:
“In vain! In vain! You run in vain! You cannot out-run her destiny! Her dark bond with the beast shall redeem us all. For when Sun’s pure light shall break upon the dawn: Redemption. The plague shall be lifted! Redemption. ” (1:57:22)
The change from his to her destiny exposes the true horror of the film: the use of the scapegoat mechanism. Far from being vanquished, the genocidal evil of the Vampyre has been naturalized and normalized within the given social order. Branded as an archetypal means of healing salvation for the collective, the sacrificial slaughter of the scapegoat victim becomes the “cure” for the plague.
Horror movies like Nosferatu, therefore, must work very hard to romanticize the gruesome sacrifice of an innocent victim.
The healing of death means the death of healing. It is the death of the individual soul on the sacrificial pyre of a great collective evil. As Count Orlok had explained to Ellen, the banality of evil is rooted in its blind nature, a force that cannot be killed:
“It is not me. It is your nature. […] I am an appetite. Nothing more.” (1:26:42)
The death-cure is an evil concoction for the soul’s self-annihilation. It is a suicidal vampyre that finally takes Ellen. The sacrifice of the anima is the price we pay for the functioning of a genocidal status quo. It is the perpetuation of a vampyric cycle of collective violence which is being turned within and without. As the Arch-Shadow of our capitalist system, evil remains shrouded in the obscurity of an anonymous doctrine whose spiritual and material functioning is tearing our society to pieces, and turning our civilization into a soulless void. This is a crucial insight into the archetype of the shadow, as George Monbiot has expressed it: “Its anonymity is both symptom and cause of its power.” A system that profits from collective murder portends the realization of our worst fears and nightmares. In view of the true horrors of the world, we should be afraid. For we might be next.
In the end, the sacrifice of Ellen does not offer any metaphysical solace. There is no tragic wisdom, no redemption, no epiphany, no consolation at all. Spellbound to the Vampyre of ideology, our soul will die; the only “healing” you can expect from the vampiric system is death. We have come to the final point where, as Campbell writes, “The human mind … has been united with the secret cause in tragic terror” (The Mask of God, Vol 1: Primitive Mythology, 55). Without redemption, without rebirth from the Mother, the murderous violence of our collective shadow brings about a fundamental loss of soul, both for the individual as well as for the whole society. In the face of true evil Nosferatu can only tell us to brace ourselves: it’s time to be scared and horrified.
MythBlast authored by:
Norland Téllez is an award-winning writer and animation director who currently teaches Animation and Character Design courses at Otis College of Art and Design, Cal State Fullerton. He is also conducting a Life Drawing Lab at USC School of Cinematic Arts. He earned his Ph.D. from Pacifica Graduate Institute in 2009 with a dissertation on the Popol-Wuh of the K’iche’ Maya, which he is currently translating and illustrating in its archetypal dimensions as the Wisdom of the Peoples. You can learn more at norlandtellez.com.
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Healer.
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"The dominating idea of the sacrifice is that already noted, of a reciprocal dual offering: an eternal being is given life in this world, and temporal lives are returned to an eternal being. Through various modulations it is thereby suggested that an original downcoming or self-emptying of this kind produced the universe and that through properly conducted ceremonials reproducing that original act, life in the world is renewed."
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Part I: The Sacrifice, 75-76