With the long-anticipated release of Nosferatu, books editor Caragh-Rose examines why audiences can’t stop sinking their teeth into the vampire narrative.
A century ago, Nosferatu cast a shadow over entranced audiences in an unauthorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s seminal horror novel, Dracula. Today, reanimated by director Robert Egger, he bites back. Vampires, in their multiplicity of manifestations, have long stalked the human imagination. Glittering or gangrenous, Cullen or Count, their fixed designation in the cultural imaginary as one of our most beloved horrors is absolute, spanning various films, books and genres. Why, though, do we keep inviting them in?
Most modern conceptualisations of the vampire arise from their characterisation in Gothic Victorian texts – most famously, Dracula. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’ says, “The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy … the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals,’ ‘that which warns’… the monster signifies something other than itself.” Therefore, our vampires reflect the cultural anxieties born from the Victorian era, a time rife with hyper-religious dread and moralism. The fear of perversion – moral, sexual or otherwise – pervades the genre.
The Victorian vampire is ambivalent: uncanny, human, but not quite. This is their appeal and their horror. Firstly, their depiction as undying defies the unnatural order. The mere proliferation of their being constitutes an act of blasphemy, a mockery of God’s design. They are intrinsically other and wrong—which puritanical society scorns. Blood, associated in Christianity with deliverance and vitality (e.g. the consumption of Christ during Communion), is corrupted through the vampiric feeding ritual, the victim marked and pallid. It is no coincidence that Dracula’s primary victims are women, doubly repressed in their desires. Thus, to the second point – this monstrous otherness embodies a fear of sexual corruption. When an undead Lucy Westerna, one of Dracula’s victims, ravenous in appetite, perishes by a phallic stake to the heart, Stoker returns the natural order, bringing her to submission and purity through death. In Sheridan Le Fanu’s preceding text Carmilla, the titular vampire seduces solely another woman, the chaste Laura. The moral bounds of Victorian society collapse. A blood-sucking bite becomes intimate. That Carmilla, terrible yet desirable, makes herself a guest in the familiarity of Laura’s home and Dracula, a foreign misanthrope, infiltrates ‘pure’ England, suggesting a fear of infection, invasion and self-recognition in sin.
While the vampire embodies these regressive fears, the context in which they were bred contributes to their more modern embodiments of liberation and transgression. Their current overt associations with sensuality, as conveyed by popular franchises such as Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, filter these ever-present desires and fears romantically, reflecting the release of repressed desires.
Nosferatu climaxes with the protagonist Ellen’s willing sacrifice to the beastly Count Orlok, who she refers to in the film as her ‘shame.’ In a macabre exhibition of intimacy, he feasts upon her blood, so entrenched in lust that he neglects to notice the impending dawn. The two perish, entangled in one another. By integrating with her shadow, Ellen conquers her sexual repression. Orlok’s significance, as a symbolic culmination of unmet passions, is twofold. On the one hand, he represents the dangers of suppressed desire. On the other hand, his continuous stalking of Ellen positions him as her predator, his insatiable appetite and lust leading to both of their undoings. Neither reading nullifies the other, arranging the timeless vampire narrative as perpetually relevant as society opens itself up to contemporary discussions concerning female sexuality, its liberation and its subjugation. Orlok appeals to each unspoken edge of the psyche.
The vampire endures due to its innate contradiction: corruption and liberation, the monstrous and the desirable. Undying.
And so, the door remains open.
