#bc… van helsing is using Ancient Wisdom re garlic and not cluing anyone in as to why….

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

From the review in Bloody Disgusting that talks about how Ellen Hutter in Nosferatu 2024is a much more feminist heroine than Mina Harker (title of the article: How ‘Nosferatu’ Became a Feminist Retelling of a Horror Classic)

Revealed to be an ancient vampire, Dracula follows Mina to the seaside town of Whitby and begins transforming Lucy into a creature of the night. While she does have some agency, Mina’s life revolves around caring for others. A former teacher’s assistant, the idealistic young woman has given up her own career and learned to type with plans of serving as secretary for her husband’s ambitions. Stoker’s Mina is a traditional woman of the time, valued for her purity and content to dedicate her time and energy to her husband.

wow ok i found this so annoying i went to skim the piece to make sure there wasn’t some added context that would mitigate it (certainly you can to some degree read mina this way…. at the start of the book…..) and ummmmm:

A work of post-Enlightenment fiction, Dracula features a male fixation with innovation and technology. As Lucy’s life hangs in the balance, a doctor named Abraham Van Helsing arrives to perform a dazzling blood transfusion designed to save her from the undead curse. This academic warrior has become known throughout the literary world as a vampire hunter skilled at using new technology to battle centuries-old folklore. Murnau’s variant is Professor Bulwer (John Gottowt), a Swiss Paracelsian who specializes in parasitic plants and demonstrates the predatory nature of phantom-like organisms. Both credentialled men take charge of the paranormal mission and use scientific knowledge to defeat an occult figure, dismissing ancient traditions as regressive barbarism. 

this is literally not true of stoker’s van helsing lol…. it’s like a whole Thing where he has to explain to seward “yah i’m a man of science but also i believe all this woowoo shit it’s complicated”……. also sorry but it’s actually crazy to be like “nosferatu 2024 is feminist bc ellen activates her inchoate atavistic wisdom of the ages in the face of rational thought” when actually one of the most annoying things about the movie is that it sets up the rationalism/atavism dichotomy and then positions female power wholly within the realm of the atavistic & primal (but still male approved bc she needs van helsing to tell her she’s right and also that she would have been a great high priestess of isis lol?????)…. which is not a trope i love and not one i would call feminist especially given that whatever critique the movie is trying to make of post enlightenment scientific practices is diluted by having van helsing be Guy Who Gets It all over the place… i was actually just talking with @awildwickedslip about how nosferatu 2024 van helsing (i literally don’t remember if he has a different name sorry) is positioned as more confident & flawless than book van helsing (contrast 24 van helsing’s sure-footed indignation about psychiatric treatments that read as barbaric to the modern eye with van helsing expressing in the book that if it were up to him he would have let renfield go so good thing seward is here who is an expert on psychiatry - a decision seward himself second guesses immediately after and which of course has disastrous results…)… i mean what are we doing here lol. i would never call dracula a feminist book but that just makes it wild that eggers found new ways to insert being annoying about gender in the year 2024 and it makes it really crazy to act like this is some profound feminist reinvention. lol. anyway i got so distracted about all this other stuff i forgot to say what immediately pinged me which is that this is one of the more annoying misuses i’ve seen of the relationship between agency and feminist readings of fictional works since i saw someone say jupiter ascending couldn’t be feminist bc the heroine has agency taken from her at every turn