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apoloadonisandnarcissus · 17 days ago

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“Nosferatu” (2024) and the Female Gothic Genre, Paganism and the Occult

The Gothic novel genre is deeply connected with female authors like Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Brontë sisters, Mary Robinson, and Charlotte Dacre, because it allowed them to explore themes that were “off limits” to women at the time (19th century) especially sexuality and women’s place in a patriarchal society. Hence the “Gothic female” genre was created, as a way for female authors and readers to digest their mixed feelings about these topics. This is the world Robert Eggers transports his audience in “Nosferatu” (2024).

This film checks every box of the Gothic genre: claustrophobic atmosphere, environment of fear, the threat of the supernatural, ruined buildings (usually from the Medieval ages), dreamlike states, nocturnal landscapes, demonic possession, blend of “high culture” and “low culture” (folklore), superstitious rituals, melancolia, melodrama, decay, fate, the macabre, the intrusion of the past into the present, stories of persecution, imprisonment and murder as metaphors for social conflict.

Indeed, the audience can’t analyze this story through contemporary lenses or bias, because it’s suppose to be an immersive experience into the Gothic genre and the Victorian era. The terms “gothic” and “romantic” exist in their historical context; “gothic” as in the literature genre (gothic novel), and “romantic” as in the 19th century artist movement (Romanticism).

No, this is not a story about grooming nor abuse... it can be, but not in the way many are interpreting it. Folks also need to let go of previous adaptations and their meanings, because this is Robert Eggers take on this story. And, it’s everything a remake (or retelling) should be, because its not a rehash, it’s a new interpretation of a old story, “Dracula”.

Robert Eggers tells us that the themes of sex and death are at the core of his story, it’s a “demon lover story”, and it’s Count Orlok and Ellen psychosexual connection that makes his adaptation different from the rest.

Ellen is our female gothic protagonist, and, like similar characters of the genre, she’s a persecuted heroine fleeing some a villainous outside force, personified by Count Orlok, the archetypal Death. Metaphorically, she’s a young woman haunted by her own mortality, by Death itself. She also has a sense of Doom looming over her, the heavy hand of Fate; can we outrun our destiny? “Providence!” Herr Knock screams throughout the film; as in a supernatural force, commonly God, guiding humanity destiny.

Ellen is no typical young woman, though. As she tells Von Franz, she had occult powers since childhood, being able to perceive glimpses of the future and suffering premonitions (knowing the contents of her Christmas gifts and when her mother would die). Her father called her “his little changeling girl”, as in the European folklore of human children kidnapped by supernatural creatures (fairies, demons, etc.) and a substitute being left in their place. Herr Knock also compares Ellen with a “sylph”, when he informs Thomas he’s to travel to Transylvania. “Sylphs” are air spirits from 16th century Germanic folklore and alchemy, a sort of nymph connected to air element in hermetic literature; throughout the centuries they have been culturally associated with fairies, too. We have two characters in the story connecting Ellen with a fairy-like creature. Interestingly enough we, the audience, see her floating in the opening scene.

“You are not for the living. You are not for human kind”, Orlok tells her, and calls her “enchantress”. Von Franz also said Ellen could have been a priestess of Isis had she been born in pagan times. Isis is one of the major Egyptian deities, considered the goddess of magic and healing. She was also connected with the Dead and funeral rites, since she was the sister-wife of Osiris, ruler of the Underworld. Pagan priestesses also entered trancelike states as Ellen “hysterical seizures” or “epilepsies” when communicating with the spiritual world, which is what Von Franz, the occult and alchemist student, recognizes in her. Ellen is a supernatural force, too.

Eggers Orlok was a sorcerer in life, a practitioner of Black Magic. He was one of the Solomonari, wizards from Romanian folklore, believed to be students of the Devil, who learned to ride dragons, and control beasts and the weather. In Eastern European tradition, the Solomonari were believed to be recruited among common folk and disguise themselves as beggars, Orlok is a Romanian nobleman who sought to achieve immortality, to conquer Death. As the abbess tells Thomas, the Devil preserved Orlok’s soul that his corpse may walk again in blasphemy, as a vampire feeding off the blood of the living and spreading plague.

However: who was it who awoke Orlok in “Nosferatu”? The Devil or Ellen?

At the prologue, we see Ellen crying and begging for companionship. She prays for a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort, a spirit of any celestial sphere, anything, to hear her call and come to her. She’s summoning some occult force and inviting it into her life. Orlok answers her call. And why is she doing this? She feels lonely, isolated and misunderstood by those around her. As she tells Von Franz, she’s no longer her father’s “little girl” and he recoils from her touch, because she’s no longer a child. As she grows older and enters womanhood, she starts to feel ostracized and put aside by 19th century society who has rigid gender expectations of her.

According to Orlok, it was Ellen who awoke him: “O’er centuries, a loathsome beast I lay within the darkest pit… ‘til you did wake me, enchantress, and stirred me from my grave. You are my affliction.” Which Ellen later confirms to Thomas: “I have brought this evil upon us” because she sought companionship and tenderness. This is a belief Von Franz also shares: it’s Ellen who “wills it”, and she’s the one who unleashed this plague upon the world.

This is very fitting with the Gothic female novel, where the supernatural connects with female societal status of this time period, generally women’s discontent with patriarchal society, difficult and unsatisfying maternal position (in “Nosferatu” we see this with Anne’s character, where she equals being pregnant with being drained of her life force) and their role within society (fear of entrapment in the domestic sphere, their bodies, marriage, childbirth, etc.).

Eggers’ Orlok is a combination of several Romanian folklore creatures, associated with vampirism: strigoi, moroi (these two are the “classic” vampires) and zburător (a ghost-like creature, usually handsome, and only visible to young women, attacks at night, usually newly-wed ladies and does “indecent” things with them). The influence of this legend in Ellen and Orlok story is evident.

Ellen tries to summon a spiritual companion in her teenage years, most likely when she reached puberty and her sexuality was starting to awake. A demon who’s a personification of appetite, devourance, sex and death is the one who answers her calling. They end up in a sexual spiritual connection, as Ellen experiences her sexual awakening with him, as shown in the prologue and later confirmed how Orlok took her as his lover. She also reveals to Thomas it was “sweet” and she “had never known such bliss” at first, until it turned into torture (seizures and nightmares), when her father found her laying unclothed and called her a sinner and it’s implied she might have been institutionalized, as she tells Von Franz. This episode might be a metaphor for masturbation and the historical shame associated with it. Hence her connection with Orlok being her “melancholy” (depression) and her “shame”, symbolic for the sexual urges 19th century society forced women to repress.

Count Orlok is the archetypal Death; which culminates with the “Death and the Maiden” motif at the end. This was a very popular Art History archetype around the so-called “Plague years” (14th to 16th century) in Europe, and it’s often connected with other motifs like “Danse Macabre” and “Memento Mori”. It has several meanings depending on the author intent, usually a reminder of our mortality, but also a meditation on sex and death, as in the French “la petite mort” (“little death”), the post-orgasm sensation, sexual release potentially causing temporary loss of consciousness (fainting) or dizziness. In the Medieval Ages, physicians believed orgasms could lead to death because they drained the “life force” from the body. This was when the term “petite mort” was created, and this belief persisted into the Renaissance and beyond. In “Nosferatu” this probably translates in the sexual pleasure that Orlok imprints on his victims as he drains their life force.

Ellen’s “hysterical seizures” miraculously stop once she meets and marries Thomas Hutter, our tragic romantic hero. This can also be a nod to Gothic Bildungsroman (“coming of age”) genre; where the female protagonists grow from adolescence to adulthood in the face of the impossibility of the supernatural, and come to the conclusion there’s a rational explanation. In Ellen’s case, it’s medical, as she’s diagnosed as a melancholic somnambulist hysteric (in another words, a depressive hyper-sexual sleepwalker).

At the beginning of the story, Ellen and Thomas are newly-weds fresh out of their honeymoon, which means sex (historically necessary to consummate marriages). With Thomas, Ellen is “free of her shame”, as she says so herself. Because, her sexuality is safely contained within marriage, as it’s socially acceptable. But Thomas dismisses her concerns about his well-being, and doesn’t believe her until he experiences the supernatural first-hand, having an homoerotic encounter with Orlok himself, which also causes him great shame. This is probably a Easter egg for Bram Stoker possible closet homosexuality and “Dracula” being a metaphor for that.

Thomas’ main concern, throughout the story, is to fit into the patriarchal ideal of his genre, as a provider for his wife, and he aspires to be like his long-time friend, Friedrich Harding, the “perfect patriarch” with the perfect religious and dutiful wife, Anna, and their precious children. The Hardings are the perfect Victorian family; they are everything society expects them to be. Friedrich even chastises Ellen for her nature, and it’s clear he resents her for what she represents: “otherness” and “deviance” to societal norms.

However, soon enough, Ellen’s seizures return, symbolizing Thomas cannot sexually satisfy her. She’s “too ardent” as Harding calls her. “More! More!” She begs Thomas when they have sex to scorn Orlok. Not only her sexuality is too strong, but Thomas also shares with Friedrich his desire to wait to have children with Ellen because he wants to gain financial stability first. This in a time period when contraceptives weren’t widely spread, meaning abstinence.

Symbolically, Ellen’s seizures can also be connected with her fear of childbirth. Her “epilepsies” return while she’s staying in the Harding household, where they are children and Anna is pregnant. Children is what is expected of Ellen next, after all. But it’s sexual pleasure that Ellen seeks, and this causes her great shame and torment, because 19th century women weren’t suppose to known “such things”. “Sin! Sin! Sin!” as Ellen’s father screamed at her when he found her naked.

Fear of entrapment represented as Ellen tries to rip off her corset and “free herself”: this happens during one of her Orlok induced seizures.

As Robert Eggers tells us, Orlok both disgusts and attracts Ellen, she loves and hates him at the same time. He’s repulsive, rotten, animalistic and lustful, both literally and metaphorically. His character design is meant to invoke contradictory feelings in the audience: overall he’s foul and monstrous, but he appears almost handsome in some shots. This is intentional. Not only he’s a personification of Death, but of Ellen’s repressed sexuality by 19th century society. He represents the monstrous and dangerous female sexuality the Victorian era sought to contain. He’s the transgression and taboo theme in this Gothic story, as well: necrophilia. Which is probably Eggers “gotcha” moment to “vampire lovers” everywhere, as he forces his audience to confront their own bias.

Ellen herself is a medicalized character, as we see her being institutionalized, drugged, bound to her bed, forced to wear a corset to bed, and used as a scientific experiment by physicians. She’s not in control of her own body, and has little agency over it, overall. We see her being contained, literally and metaphorically, too. This is probably meant to symbolize women as a whole in 19th century Western European societies. The “disability of being female” is one major theme in Gothic female novels, after all.

And if Ellen unleashed Orlok unto the world and he’s connected with her what does this mean for this story? The obvious interpretation of the ending it’s Ellen sacrificing herself to save Wisburg from Nosferatu’s curse, like every other adaptation. But this appears to be somewhat disconnected from the overall themes of this particular retelling. Here, it’s Ellen who unleashed the curse, and only her can put an end to it.

We see Ellen summoning Orlok in two occasions: at the beginning and at the end of this tale. At first, she did it unconsciously, she dabbled with the occult and wasn’t aware of what she was inviting into her life. However, does this indicate Ellen has some degree of control over him? Orlok himself says she’s “his affliction”, and they are bound to one another. She’s not only a seer, she’s compared with a priestess of a Goddess associated with funeral rites and with the ability of resurrection and looking after the Dead (Isis). We can almost interpret her as a necromancer.

Here, we can have a different interpretation of Orlok unleashing a plague upon the society who ostracizes Ellen for her nature. Symbolically, he’s her reckoning, her vengeance upon society norms and expectations of gender. He’s the “plague carrier” and brings a “blood plague” transmitted by rats (symbolic of the Black Plague; the medieval ages terrorizing the modern world of science and rationality) upon Wisburg, and the “good Christians” who contain and shame “Pagan” Ellen.

Orlok’s most notorious victims are the Hardings, the perfect patriarchal Christian family model Ellen can never fit into; the patriarch Friedrich, the pregnant Anna and the two children. This also fits the Gothic female genre of the supernatural menace as a metaphor for women’s status in 19th century society. Ellen doesn’t want to be married to a patriarch like Friedrich, she doesn’t express any desire to become pregnant nor have children of her own. Consequently, we see Orlok killing all of these archetypes in the narrative.

Interestingly enough he spares Thomas and saves him for last when he should be his first victim once he arrives at Wisburg, because he’s the husband. However, Thomas is a character Ellen loves and cherishes, as he somewhat accepts her nature and represents her chance at a “normal life”. He’s also determined to save her from Death/Orlok, but is unable to. Symbolically, Ellen chooses death over conforming to gender norms and expectations.

However, we can’t forget Ellen’s supernatural nature, nor her connection with Orlok. She weds Death at the end, she’s no longer terrified of him, and she fulfills their covenant, and her dream premonition of marrying Death: “standing before me, all in black… was… Death. But I was so happy, so very happy. We exchanged vows, we embraced, and when we turned round, everyone was dead. Father… and… everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible. And - But I never been so happy as that moment… as I held hands with Death.”

A “covenant” is a pact, both a religious and a occultist practice. This is a “blood covenant”, as their flesh becomes one and he drinks from her. “Blood is the life” is a quotation from the Bible, where “blood covenants” are also mentioned, because a “blood covenant” has the power to either destroy or redeem. For instance, Christ’s sacrifice redeemed humanity according to Christians. “Redemption” as Von Franz says, because only Ellen, like Christ, can redeem the habitants of Wisburg. He uses the expression “with Jove’s holy light” before dawn redemption will come to them: “Jove” is Jupiter, the “King of the skies”, and its energy neutralizes Saturn’s, connected with “melancholy” (depression).

However, that’s not what’s happening here, because Orlok is a servant of the Devil, and a literally un-dead “warlock”. So, what is Ellen pledging herself to here, exactly? Her covenant with Orlok has nothing to do with God or Jupiter, for these are forces of good, when Orlok is a force of evil and darkness.

Ellen also fulfills her role as “priestess of Isis” at the end, as she guides the un-dead Orlok to his physical death; like Isis, she resurrected him, and is now taking him into the Underworld with her. Because, like Orlok also told her, she’s “not for the living”, that’s her fate, the destiny she accepts at the end; she’s meant for Death, as Isis for Osiris.

“Our covenant is fulfilled. Your oath re-pledged.” Orlok tells her. But what was Ellen’s oath? We have to look into the prologue scene “You shall be one with me ever-eternally. Do you swear it?” And in the ending “As our spirits are one, so shall be our flesh. You are mine.” They fulfill their pact both in the physical and the spiritual worlds, and both make the ultimate blood sacrifice, by physically dying for “self-renunciation” is essential for blood covenants.

And a deity is always summoned to bless such a pact… but who was blessing this one? Ellen and Orlok indeed, died in the physical world, but are joined in the spiritual world forever, as decreed by their covenant, so where did their spirits go?

They are also surrounded by lilacs, their signature flower throughout the narrative, which symbolizes first love, yes, but also renewal and rebirth. Orlok conquered Death and immortality once before, because the Devil kept his soul. Now that Ellen is joined with him in spirit, what does this mean for her, and for them both?

#nosferatu 2024 #Ellen Hutter 2024 #friedrich harding #anna harding #Thomas Hutter 2024 #Count Orlok 2024 #von franz #lily rose depp #bill skargard #bill skarsgård #nicholas hoult #emma corrin #aaron taylor johnson #willem dafoe #ellen x orlok #orlok x ellen #robert eggers

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gatorbites-imagines · 19 days ago

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Uhhh maybe something something with werewolf!mreader and count orlok?🥰

Count Byron Orlok x Werewolf male reader

Ficlet

I spent way too long reading about old werewolf mythos to write this. Reader’s kind of a mix of the different myths I found, and my own cooking. I took mild inspo from the Neuri people, and the myth of Lycaon, and what I could find about Mount Lykaion.

Lil bit of Thomas x reader, but its not really important.

Nosferatu 2024 spoilers ig?

For many years you have wandered and existed, whether you could claim to be alive or not was something you had dismissed many years ago. You remembered being born to a nomadic people who wandered from one place to another, passing their tales verbally and through song, never staying in one place for long. You remember the older men leaving for days at a time, only to return to your people, battered, bruised and exhausted, but the usual hunger in their eyes sated.

Memories of your first transformation were blurry at best, only weak memories of pain, blood, hunger, hopelessness. There wasn’t much need to remember your younger years, just that your father had been a beast amongst beasts, and so had you. When you came too after the first shift, you awoke naked and bloody, the camp of the people that were yours, destroyed.

Mixtures of flesh, fur and gore lay scattered, the tents and makeshift homes torn apart, from what looked like a wild animal trying to break in to devour whoever was inside. The taste of blood in your mouth and meat stuck between your teeth, was all you needed to know. You were that beast, and you had devoured them all. Man, woman, child and wolf, all torn apart by your hunger.

You remember stumbling away from what remained of your family, friends and near, naked as the day you were born. The cold feeling of falling into a stream, of all the blood washing off your body, washing away your sins. Memories of stumbling along, uncaring of your naked nature, so full of regret and horror of yourself and what you were.

Not much could be remembered from that time, only flashes of pain as you transformed once more, and devoured, be it human or animal. Everything only became clear in a mountain, where a cult worshipping wolves and those who could transform had found you. You learned that they were cursed by a god to be what they were, but you? You were born this way, gifted.

Their chants and magic taught you control of your inner beast. Where before there had been two beings inside you, wolf and man, there now was one. In the end you wandered from this group, leaving them to their whims of cannibalism and human sacrifice.

With control of your inner hunger, of your lack of humanity and beastly desires, you wandered. You slept when you needed to, and ate when you were hungry. You could even take part in humanity at times, joining celebrations, or sleeping in a real bed every now and then. Where raw flesh and blood tasted divine, their dishes and spices were enough to keep you sated for longer.

You never kept track of your age, but you watched as the old gods fell, and was replaced by another. A pantheon of gods, with so many duties and whims, replaced by one who became three, yet were still one. You watched as their influence grew, as their one god became the one most worshipped.

You watched as many were killed in cold blood for not worshipping their one god, or were tortured for going against the word of their holy book. It was during this holy period that you discovered your weakness to silver as well, but you being naturally born this way, let you survive it, unlike those cursed to be like you.

Your long wandering took you to somewhere in the Romanian mountains, where superstition and beliefs were as strong as ever, where a count ruled over the land, a count who yearned for immortality. Maybe it was the way you dressed when he saw you for the first time that caught his interest. He wore a cape of sheepskin, where yours was that of a wolf, the head thrown over your own almost like a mask or a hood.

Byron Orlok was his name. And he was handsome, as handsome as the men of this era could be, even if his eyes were dark and hungered for something beyond mortality, even as he buried himself in the occult to seek it. The tales of your own long life, what little you told him, only fueled him. If you could live from before the very creation of Christianity, then he too could become immortal. Unageing.

Your wolf form lingered around his home, a large building far beyond anything you could have ever seen in your youth. The sounds of his transformation, the reek of sulfur and acid, like the bile of a stomach, was so powerful that you felt that even the wandering natives would smell it. and yet as he screamed and wailed, you lay still, your massive wolf head resting on top of your paws. It was not your duty to save him or stop him, his demons and gods were not connected to you.

In his death, Byron Orlok did not cease moving. His corpse and body still moved and spoke during the night, before the sun rose and the first rooster’s crow. and you, you stayed. Over your many years of life you had met many beasts and monsters like yourself, or warlocks and alchemists who were bound to the otherworld, even priests and priestesses who could communicate with their gods of choice. But none intrigued you like Byron.

As something beyond human, the idea that only a man and a woman could bond was beyond you. It was a belief that had never existed in you, as the people you had been around in your youth never carried it, but for Byron it was new and strange. Even as his body changed and altered, looking more like a corpse than a man, his passion persisted.

The locals built temples or stands to keep him away, filling them with crosses and hunting others like him, Nosferatu. You, they feared, less than Byron, but feared, nonetheless. Where Byron devoured human flesh and blood to keep moving, you had persisted on nothing but will for many years, and only devoured when you needed too.

Byron was not the most physically affectionate, you had a feeling he simply couldn’t be. But his possessive nature and yearning for you, spoke of his innermost feelings. His kisses would have made any normal human vomit from the taste of blood, gore, and corpse, but you were no human. Anyone else would have died from being fed on by him, but you lived. Your heart beat and would beat on, for how long you did not know.

Your inhuman blood and flesh, which regenerated like the leaves of a tree, kept Byron fed when the human flesh could not. It wasn’t what he was meant to eat, that much was clear, as you were not human and that was what he needed, but it changed him. He still was death itself, but your wolflike insides made him at least a little more pleasant to look at.

What you two were, was not a married couple, but he was yours and you were his, though he yours more than you his. Being older, stronger, able to go where and when you pleased, made you the more dangerous of you two. The most powerful, but you had no need to use this against him.

Until he bonded with that human, one you would learn was named Ellen who begged for company from anything, anyone. You were tempted to tear Byrons head off his body when you learned of this, having only been gone for two years which was nothing in your shared centuries, and here he went, finding another.

After this betrayal, you left once more, after tearing apart the wolves you had given him as servants. He would not thrive off your gifts and flesh if he could not respect you. It was not that he had bonded with a human girl, but more the dismissal of you and disregard of what you wanted. What if you had wanted a little human plaything as well?

When you returned once more, years later, you observed a man on his way towards Byron Orloks home, which looked as decrepit as you were used too. He was almost adorable, in his modern clothing and satchel bag. So intriguing was he, that you followed him from the shadows in your wolf form, observed as he rested with the locals, saw their execution of a Nosferatu, and how the locals left him behind.

Byron must have felt your presence, as the carriage that picked the human man up had the motif of a wolf on the side. You could feel his magic reach for you, but yours was stronger, and still being mad at him, you turned it away.

Your lover, partner, other being, was enraged, you could tell, when he smelled your interest in this man, Thomas Hutter, but he could not say anything, as he was drawn to this Thomas Hutters wife. Thomas Hutter was tormented and haunted as he slept and was awake in the old castle, he almost passed out when he saw you in your wolf form for the first time.

Maybe it was more that you wanted to make Byron feel what you felt, when he bonded to that girl, and it didn’t hurt that Thomas Hutter was as adorable as a rabbit, with his frightened eyes and heady scent. The lack of sleep drove him mad enough to sleep curled up against your furry side, and your hairy chest when you transformed back into a man.

It was enough to make Byron gnash his teeth and growl, his magic attempting to squeeze the very life out of Thomas only to be blocked by your own. There was no reason for you to stop his plans, you were much too old to involve yourself in such things, but you did make sure Thomas survived long enough to be found by the nun and for him to return to Wisborg.

Your massive paws dragged groves in the first as you followed the scent of Thomas, as Byron you could sense was across the sea where you could not follow without spending unnecessary magic.

Your maw salivated at the sight of Ellen, not from the same desire that Thomas or Byron carried for her which was carnal in the way animals in spring desired, but from a long-forgotten hunger for human flesh. To rip and tear, to destroy and break. You wanted to kill her, for taking your Orlok’s attention, the same hate Byron felt for Thomas, even if your attention was nothing more than a mild interest.

Time would tell, as the first night fell and the rats invaded the city. When Byron would end up tricked by these mortals, you would step in and scold him. He was so young compared to you, centuries compared to your millennia. Punish him, you must, make him weep and beg for your forgiveness for betraying you so. But for now, you would gobble up the corpses of the citizens as they piled up, to satisfy your growing hunger for Ellen and her putrid flesh.

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