#you thought I wasn't going to ramble ad infinitum about this nightmare polycule??

[see-arcane]

Examining the Nosfertrio

I must uphold my position as Words Georg and yammer about the Nosferatu Trio (Nosfertrio) that makes up the core of Nosferatu (2024). Specifically in terms of the love triangle and their roles within it.

Spoilers and a massive monolith of text below.

Ellen and Orlok

I’ve already seen a handful of posts going into the metaphors inherent to their relationship. Orlok as Ellen’s id, as the repressed darkness and fey nature she must keep bottled up for the sake of her era and society, as brutality and sensuality, et cetera. And there’s definitely truth in that. Just as it can be found in a lot of horror-attraction (I hesitate to give all of them the blanket of ‘romance’ but attraction is key on one or both sides for hero and antagonist) stories in various degrees from bodice ripper to outright nightmare. There is a definite cathartic itch that’s scratched in everything from Labyrinth’s Jareth to The Phantom of the Opera’s Erik all the way to this, Orlok at his most cadaverous and insidious.

People want to be wanted. On some level, we want to express the repressed depths of ourselves, be they perverse and violent or weird and whimsical. 99 times out of 100, we still restrain ourselves from doing the Immediate Gratification action—anything from snatching the last piece of cake because we know someone else is looking forward to it or taking a hammer to an annoying customer’s skull—because appeasing that kneejerk urge will have consequences. We will feel bad about having done it or else outside forces will punish us. Repression is a fact of life, with some forced to constrict themselves more than others. Not always for good reason. Case in point, poor Ellen stuck in period piece hell.

Ellen was suffering as a young girl. Her clairvoyance and supernatural susceptibility made her an early outcast and the death of her mother left her alone with a father who we learn had a period where he seriously considered sending her to an asylum. A period we also learn came after Orlok began either causing or infinitely worsening her epileptic fits. The one Ellen describes to Von Franz involves her being found naked mid-spasm. Something to do with her flesh.

Was she found orgasming? Had she clawed at herself, perhaps at her breast where Orlok couldn’t yet feed and bleed her? Maybe she was caught in a masturbatory act that Orlok played puppeteer to. We don’t know because we’re only meant to conjure something mortifying for Ellen to be caught at; just as her other public fits have been. Her father is disgusted by it, whatever it is.

Sometime in this miserable window, Thomas enters her life.

Thomas Hutter who is in every way Count Orlok’s antithesis. He loves where Orlok only wants. He wishes only to give to Ellen, to make himself and their life a thing worthy of her—note, she lived in a stunning mansion as a girl and Thomas needed a loan from Friedrich Harding to afford their tiny home; Ellen married down to be with him and he knows it. If Ellen is an owed piece of property in Orlok’s view, Ellen is precious beyond words to Thomas, who even in his terror and ailment, loves her more than he fears anything.

Then comes Orlok in person, slapping Wisborg with plague and murdering friends and children and threatening to go after Thomas if Ellen does not ‘willingly’ submit to him. A big bloodstained temper tantrum is needed before Ellen dons her wedding dress again and gives herself to Orlok for the sake of being the Judith to his Holofernes. When Orlok’s time comes it is an agonizing thing. A final dose of pain for him to suffer in recompense for years of violation inflicted on a girl since puberty.

Ellen kills him. Ellen dies for the sake of killing him and guarding Thomas. In pure emotional math, she is true to what she told Orlok outright:

No. I love Thomas.

I care nothing for your affliction.

I abhor you.

You revel in my torture.

Nothing but truth here. She loves Thomas. She doesn’t give a shit how ‘afflicted’ Orlok is by him wanting her. She abhors him. And, with almost a lifetime of evidence on her side, yes, Orlok appears to get off on casually, repeatedly, flashily subjecting Ellen to her spasms, however pleasurable or painful they might be, to say nothing of her embarrassment and being ‘helped’ by the era’s dehumanizing quackery.

And yet.

Ellen has two visuals and two lines that suggest that buried in her hate and horror at Orlok and all he does, there is still one wisp of…I really hesitate to call it love. Attraction might be in it. ‘Affliction.’ Whatever it is, it is the tiny buried stretch of spiritual ore that I imagine brought Orlok sniffing in the first place. Ore that has been honed by years of abuse and the hopeless inescapability of his attentions into something that Ellen shelves with the rest of her shame and fear, but cannot let go because it is a part of her and part of what kept her from succumbing to total despair in her time before Thomas.

Because Ellen was lonely once upon a time. Did she know Anna as a young girl? Or did that come later, after Thomas? Either way, she prayed for a companion. For comfort. She felt alien and alone and wrong. Which Orlok scented as she called out blindly—a familiar essence he could take advantage of. Because he is a tyrant. A monster. And he is alone too. 

You are not for the living. You are not for humankind.

The visuals:

Ellen meets him in Anna’s room. Comes close close close to kissing him—and reverses (I abhor you).

Ellen stays with him in the bed, lightly cradling Orlok as the sunrise kills him; and he does not claw or tear at her in his death throes, even knowing her betrayal. Only lays a gentle grasp on her shoulder. They recline again as they die, Ellen letting him lay rather than letting him fall off.

The lines:

Before Orlok strikes her mind: He took me for his lover! (Not victim. Lover. She believes it.)

While Orlok has reached out and pressed his influence on her again, her words possibly not wholly her own: You could not please me so well as him. (Is it Orlok goading? Is it Ellen telling a truth or a lie to prod Thomas into sex? Is it a jumble?)

Ellen loves Thomas more than Orlok or her own life. But there is a grain of care for the monster who obsessed over and menaced her for so long. It’s the grim and heady little whisper under all the trappings of horror-attraction, why fiction loves a demonic dom or a pining terror.

I was never alone with them infecting my life. I was the focus of all their attention and passion. I saw so much violence done for the sake of them coercing me to their side. I had these throes forced on me and in being forced to endure their darkness I was absolved of any guilt in moments of pleasure from it. I held hands with Death in a dream and I was so happy when everyone I knew—everyone I smother myself to accommodate—was dead.

It’s there. Of course it’s there.

But what else is there with it?

Ellen and Thomas

Enter the newlyweds who didn’t deserve Any of That Shit.

We don’t really get much time with these two beyond establishing that they are very genuinely in love, have been thoroughly enjoying a too-short honeymoon, and are each prepared to kill and die for each other.

But something I’m seeing around the edges of post-film analyses is a phenomenon that I recognize from certain unfortunate reads of Jonathan Harker’s character, both from Dracula’s book canon and almost 130 years’ worth of trash adaptations. Already this boy is teetering on the precipice of being done dirty the exact same way Jonathan was via sanding down his full role and character in the story. I’ve seen takes that reduce him to the Normal Guy Your Weird Ex Hates, the Guy Who Doesn’t Listen to His Wife, the Useless Guy, the Boring Normie Guy, the Connecticut Clark to Ellen’s Malfina, et cetera et cetera.  

But like. You have to miss a mountain of context clues to land on any of these statuses as Thomas’ deal.

Let’s look at the chief offense: Thomas disregards and/or shuts down Ellen.

First:

Thomas tries to shush Ellen about her nightmare(s). For a moment. But Ellen insists, and so he listens to the dream of wedding Death. He does shush her then, but in the way of soothing. It was just a dream, not a portent. All will be well. What is he supposed to say otherwise? Yes, I believe you. Yes, something horrible is about to happen. Worry, fear, fret. It’s the best course of action.

As for him leaving the bedside and ultimately going out to Orlok’s castle despite Ellen’s pleading? Again, what else is he logically meant to do? This boy does not know what genre he’s in. Ellen does because she’s Ellen. Thomas thinks he’s in a period piece romance with a happy ending and his moneyed best friend repaid for his loan and his beloved back to living in the luxury he knows she left behind to be with him. To do that, he must work for it. He must jump through whatever hoop Herr Knock tells him to. Between the latter and the bait of the commission he and Orlok dangle in front of him—Friedrich paid back, a step toward a plush future to gift to Ellen—and the fact that Ellen’s warning plea comes from dreamt vapor, it’d make no sense for him to just kick off his shoes, endanger his job and roll back in bed with her because his permission slip would read:

‘My wife said no :)’

Even if he wanted to, and it’s hard to think he doesn’t want to going by how uneasy he was the moment Knock put the job in his hands, Thomas had no real room to refuse without putting himself and Ellen in real economic and interpersonal trouble. At best he might have feigned illness, but even that would be a gamble. All the things Ellen wanted him to do—stay longer with her, heed her premonition, don’t go on the journey—Thomas did want to do. But couldn’t.

Second offense:

Thomas ignores Ellen when she says their petite home (and ohhh doesn’t that sting in the 21st century to think that a place like theirs was considered ‘small’ or lower class once upon a time) is fine and Thomas need not push himself to extremes to finance a bigger better household with a maidservant and other bells and whistles to satisfy her. True! No denying it! Just as there is no denying that, out of the entire ensemble, Thomas Hutter is from the lowest class out of everyone.

Friedrich is his friend, a wealthy inheritor to a father’s shipping company who lent Thomas the money needed to pay for the little home and possibly his and Ellen’s wedding. Anna is Ellen’s friend, two girls with a friendly and possibly amorous history from what we can infer is a similarly well-off social level. Thomas is only in their circle by dint of somehow crossing paths with Friedrich and being charming enough to win an otherwise Classically Masculine and Rich Man’s regard.

And Ellen, again, stepped out of the wealthy life to be with him out of love. In her dream her father was there, one of the dead, but he is absent for the entire film. Considering her only other mentions of him were a childhood of his calling her a changeling girl or an unclean thing meant for a madhouse, we can assume the man did not empty his pockets for or applaud her choice of husband. Hence Friedrich’s loan. But for all the discomfort of her family life, Ellen did live a far more polished life than the one Thomas can give her as-is.

(I envy you, said to Friedrich outright.)

This is Thomas’ most standout flaw in my opinion, one that amounts to a single facet of a wider issue: Thomas Hutter feels inadequate on multiple fronts.

He is not wealthy enough to give Ellen the lifestyle he wants to return to her. He has not made up enough savings to repay a man he wishes were only a friend rather than an all-but-in-name sugar daddy. He’s unequivocally not within spitting distance of any other male character’s classic forms of manliness. Just an ongoing mantra of ‘not X enough,’ and that’s before Orlok gets in his head. More on that later.

He’s not shutting out Ellen’s insistence that she’s happy with their simple surroundings because he doesn’t care about her opinion. He’s shutting it out because he can’t get out of his own head about how much lesser he feels compared to her and their friends, feeling as if he has to make up for not coming from where they do and for basically taking his princess away from her metaphorical castle. Fittingly, it’s the complete reverse of Orlok’s treatment.

If Ellen is the prize to be conquered for Orlok, she is the undeserved prize on a pedestal to Thomas. One who needs precious things foisted on her to make him worthy of her loving him despite her saying otherwise. The guy can’t see past his own low view of himself to accept that she is sincere in his insistence that he is enough.

And that brings us to the third issue:

Ellen says she wants to come Orlok-hunting. Thomas shoots her down.

Bit of an echo from Dracula there, with Jonathan and the rest of the Drac Attack Pack unanimously deciding Mina has to be kept out of the villain’s reach while they go a-hunting..! Only for that very move to be what puts her in an unprotected position when said villain comes skulking up to her. It is a very old school Protect the Fair Maiden! move. Fitting for the genre and the time period and so on.

But unlike in Dracula, Thomas and Ellen’s playing of the scene makes much more sense.

They are not dealing with Dracula the Conqueror. They are dealing with Orlok the Repeat Rapist and Tantrum-Murderer Obsessed with Ellen. If there was one person in the entire ensemble not to bring into closer proximity to Orlok, even if she were at maximum anachronistic girlboss badass levels, or even just armed with her own stake and pistol, it would still very much be Ellen. Orlok’s been making her life hell at a distance. Willingly putting her in arm’s reach would make me blue screen too if I were Thomas. This isn’t Jonathan fearing the chance that Dracula might go after Mina out of convenience. This is Thomas rightfully clocking that Orlok will 110% go directly after Ellen. Obviously he says Ellen shouldn’t be on the hunt.

Which was just as obvious to Ellen before she even suggested it.

Because with or without Von Franz promising to lead Thomas and Sievers on the wild goose chase for the sarcophagus, Ellen was already planning to barter herself in exchange for protecting Thomas and Wisborg. Which Thomas would also 110% slam the brakes on if he knew what she was up to. She didn’t suggest her joining the hunt because she had any intention or expectation of them agreeing. It was to make sure that the suggestion was shut down and that Thomas and the others would be far away when she baited Orlok to her.

Both Hutters are terrified for the safety of one another and would rather face Orlok themselves and risk dying than put their beloved in danger. They are too alike in that regard, just as the Harkers are, and that love and desire to protect is abused by both versions of the Count to get what they want. It’s just that Ellen knew exactly how to ensure Thomas would do what she wanted by nettling him with the concept of her coming along and risking proximity to Orlok; perhaps intentionally implying she meant to put herself between him and Thomas as a shield. Cue him declaring absolutely not. Irony of ironies.

But alllll this is just window dressing compared to my main nitpick when it comes to some folks’ view of Thomas paired with Ellen. And that’s that he is the milquetoast nothingburger ignorant could never truly understand or please her! husband.

Shut the hell your mouth. I am a proud monsterfucker. I am all for the dark gothic fuckeduppedness of Orlok and Ellen’s whole dynamic. But as Stoker and Murnau are my witness, You Shall NOT Slander This Lad as Jonathan Harker was Before Him.

Ellen was the one wheedling Thomas to stay home and roll around in bed while he was late for work, wanting more of whatever he was dishing out. They were left unsupervised in someone else’s foyer for 0.5 seconds and immediately started tongue wrestling while sinking to their knees and cutting away to [REDACTED INTIMACY WHILE STILL VERY VISIBLE IN THEIR FRIENDS’ HOUSE]. Thomas jumped into a river, dragged himself from the brink of undeath, and rode half-dead all the way home to reach Ellen and try to get her out of Orlok’s range. Thomas, who was terrified of Orlok, still put that horror aside because he learned of Orlok’s torturing of Ellen and intended to kill the fucker for it to keep her safe.

Before all of that, Thomas earned Ellen’s love in their even greener youth.

Ellen, the girl who was strange and Other and tormented by Orlok’s spells and despondently alone with her monster? That was the Ellen who Thomas met. Who Thomas fell in love with. Who fell in love with him. And it was a love intense enough to blot Orlok’s shadow. When that shadow came back—

I am become a demon! I am unclean!

—Thomas stayed in the dark with her—

I love you! I love you!

—resolving to either kill the thing that had preyed on her or die trying.

Even if we knew none of this, Ellen’s final act is its own proof of what he was to her. We saw what she’s like with someone she clocks as an asshole when she confronts Friedrich for his actual ignorance and actual callousness. If any character is the starched ‘refuses to believe the supernatural reality/adheres to patriarchal bullshit’ figure, it’s him, not Thomas. (Hello echoes of Jonathan Harker versus John Seward, but I digress.) Ellen calls that shit out.

Why do you hate me? How can you be so stupid? So cruel?

She feels what she feels and says what she means and is the most observant character in the entire story.

And in the end, she deems whole fucking murder-suicide as a price she’s willing to pay to protect Thomas. Whatever we could not see before the film began, whatever romance the Hutters shared, it was true and powerful enough for her to do this.

Which leaves Thomas behind, her cold hand in his, all tears and grief at this—his last failure to tally on his internal chalkboard. He was not the Hero, but the Damsel unaware. He could not protect Ellen because she and Von Franz tricked him into safety as the latter schemed and the former gave herself up to the martyr role. Thomas was too trusting and too late and too much himself rather than the Man ™ who should have saved her from throwing herself on Providence’s pyre.

On that note.

We have to address the mess in the castle.

Thomas and Orlok

Eggers added a lot of meat to the very trimmed-down characters of the 1922 Hutters and Count. Original concepts and harvested bits from Dracula were all applied. The way he composed them served to fix what I still consider to be a barely-concealed plot hole.  

In 1922 and 1979, the Count sees a girl in a locket and immediately becomes obsessed with her. That’s it. That is the entire bulk of his awareness of her before Thomas arrives at his castle. An arrival that was very much based in the original Dracula’s desire to move himself and his deadly presence away to a new place. Original 1922 Orlok seems to just be in it for mysterious plague harbinger reasons. 1979 Dracuorlok seems to be genuinely distraught and resigned to some kind of irresistible condition that says He Must Go Bring Death. But Orlok 2024?

According to Von Franz and his reading, Orlok wants to kill the whole world with his plague..! But has just been chilling for a few centuries I guess. No rush. Not until Ellen happens. She and her covenant and—gasp!—marrying another man!? Barely a man at that.

Ellen Hutter and her new marriage is Orlok’s impetus in coming out of the castle and planting himself in Wisborg. Him stealing the locket and being obsessed with her now makes far more sense than it did in any preceding film because we get the new context of him preying on her since she was a teenager…

…which was interrupted because of Thomas.

The other man. The boy. The laughable gentle meek shivering rival who Knock sends to his door and into his power.

Where 1922 Count was rigid and awkward to the point of seeming like he had to fight rigor mortis with every step and 1979 Count was glassy-eyed and frantically grasping with lonesome eagerness, 2024 Count is stewing over jealousy and disbelief and derision and only the flimsiest attempt at playing client to fool the young man into signing his status as Ellen’s husband away. A farce, a farce. But the covenant demands he cannot kill him outright. That would be theft, not Ellen ‘giving herself freely.’

But after? After the signing, surely he could wring the boy’s neck. Could sit and watch as the wolves tear him to pieces. He could fill him up with plague or snap him in half or drown him like the Pied Piper with a rat… All these things he could have done after he tricked Thomas’ signature out of him on the occult document.

And didn’t.

Let’s retreat to that first strange night together.

Thomas gets subjected to Orlok’s trance the second he reaches the crossroads that leads to the castle. He does not walk as much as float into the coach that has no driver, his next scene showing him abruptly on his feet with his eyes shut in sleep. The doors open to him without hands, leaving him to trail after the Count as if on a string. Orlok gives Thomas two orders the moment they reach the dining room.

One, get out the paperwork. Two, Thomas will address Orlok as his Lord.

“Pardon, sir—?”

“Your. Lord.”

“yesmylordforgivememylord”

Thomas takes his seat and gets treated to Orlok very obviously flexing his powers by doing his little teleportation trick around the table, getting right up in Thomas’ space to pour him his wine, his hand nearly brushing Thomas’ face before retreating.

Thomas asks about the vampire hunting scene he saw in the graveyard and—

“SPEAK NOT OF IT AGAIN!”

Thomas speaks not of it again. Orlok tells him to eat. Cue the mishap with the bread knife and the bleeding thumb. Orlok sounds caught between snarling like an animal or climaxing at the table at the sight of the blood and insists Thomas go sit by the fire where Orlok can see to the wound. Thomas blinks and has lost time again: Somehow he’s been moved to the chair by the fire, fully paralyzed and in tears as Orlok closes in on him, locked in a waking nightmare as the innkeeper woman warned him. This is where Eggers cuts away. All we know for certain is that Orlok fed at Thomas’ breast at least once in the night.

And that he went out of his way to leave Thomas laying face down on the floor come daylight.

The reveal shot is posed as almost comical when coming straight after Ellen’s pining comment about him. I heard some people laugh in the theater. But combining this visual with others to come makes it one of the most awful scenes in hindsight. Because I believe it’s the clearest sign that Orlok outright raped Thomas.

No jokes, no implications, no metaphors. I think he performed the literal act. The only way it could stop short of that in my mind is if Orlok abused his trance state to force Thomas to his knees before or after feeding on him for some emasculating puppeteer work. But no. I think it was genuine rape. It may have happened again in the next feeding night, where Orlok is shown wholly naked as he feeds on Thomas’ breast again. Both times Thomas wakes up dressed. Both times Thomas was preyed on in the exact same way Orlok preys on Ellen.  

And notably, not in the same way as Anna Harding, who immediately got whacked with a dose of plague. Her children had their throats torn out. Ditto the ship’s sailors. Everyone else just sickens and rots and blood-vomits to death.

Thomas and Ellen are the only ones Orlok goes out of his way to prey on in an erotically posed way that results in trauma and ailment, but not the plague or raw slaughter Orlok’s throwaway victims get. Ellen makes sense because she’s ‘his enchantress.’ Thomas because..?

Hm. How does jealousy really fit in here as a reason, Count? Why is it that Thomas is the only man in the film you go out of your way to target by mounting and suckling on him? Why is it that you put words in Ellen’s mouth to describe him as a swooning lily of a woman who fell into your arms? Why is it that you still have your feelers in Thomas’ head to airdrop visions of yourself and your last assault on him? And—big big question here—how much influence did you have on Thomas and Ellen during their spontaneous lovemaking scene? Were you watching like Ellen implied? Did you want to?

Last and certainly not least:

You say you couldn’t kill Thomas or it would spoil the covenant. Yet you were surprised that he was still alive. And you reacted Violently+ when Knock suggested he be ordered to go out and kill the young man in your service. Why is that?

(Who made that vampire in the graveyard?)

((Which of those coffins in the crypt was going to be Thomas’?))

This is dancing around the subject, I know. The gist is this: Orlok wasn’t just angry at Thomas for stealing Ellen from him. He was incensed at Thomas being just as out of place as Ellen herself was. Ellen is not a classic fair maiden. Thomas is not a classic manly man. Thomas is, to Orlok’s surprise, making him pissed and horny. And that opens the door to the Count attacking Thomas in a way that seems to be a warmup for his future laying with Ellen. He wants to ‘make a woman’ of Thomas, the lesser, weaker, kinder, prettier, chosen man.

See? See? She has no husband to thwart his conquest! This quailing thing under him can be no man, so it must be a woman. Ha. Ha.

Cue him leaving Thomas on the floor, ass up, for Reasons.

Whether Orlok blithely accepts his attraction to Thomas (he is merely an Appetite, after all) or is grimly wrestling with ye olde compulsory heterosexuality and quietly framing all his weird attentions to Thomas as just him humiliating/emasculating the young man, we also have to turn the lens on Thomas himself.

Theories have been passed around that, given the queer elements of the film, Ellen and Anna, Thomas and Friedrich, all had romantic pasts of their own. Or at least friendships as intimate as they could get away with before they paired up with their respective significant others. Ellen and Thomas especially are heavily bi-coded. Ellen has Anna, naturally (Thank you for loving me), but Thomas has beats with Friedrich, with the unnamed and charismatic leader of the vampire hunting party in the graveyard, and, if only due to Orlok’s trance, Orlok himself.

Even if it was magically induced, Thomas saw a vision of Ellen in Orlok’s place as he was fed on. Seeing it, seemingly experiencing it, Thomas looks to be in a heady stupor as Orlok feeds—blearily welcoming the initial attack and whatever might have followed it.

Cut forward to his breaking from his fever in Ellen’s company, still in traumatized shock, unable to speak on everything that happened to him. She’s seen the bite wounds on him. That isn’t a secret. Something else, something worse—I can’t breathe! Get off me! Get off!—is left unspoken, and he cannot bring himself to admit it to Ellen. Not even after she divulges her history with Orlok. Not even after the fight or the sex or the broken spell and their embrace. Orlok did an awful thing to Thomas that he is too afraid and ashamed to speak aloud, at least on screen. Would it be better or worse if there had not been a memory of pleasure to taint it as it taints Ellen’s assaults? 

Ellen calls Orlok her shame. Now he’s a shame for both of them.

…

With all that said. Yes, ‘love triangle’ is the easiest name to pin on this entire hot mess, if not a perfectly accurate one. Ellen and Thomas are in love, but the right words don’t exist to label the lines that connect Ellen and Thomas to Orlok.

tl; dr: Orlok was never going to make this polycule happen and I will not give him kudos for trying.