Death Becomes Her
Notes on Egger’s Revamped Nosferatu
Vamp : a woman who uses her charm or wiles to seduce and exploit men.
Vampire: a mythical creature that subsists by feeding on the vital essence of the living.
The ‘death and the maiden’ motif originated in Renaissance art1 and traces changing attitudes towards human sexuality and mortality.2 The visual motif makes a dramatic reappearance in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024). Say what you will about the film – that is either “hypnotically scary” or “tedious and overwrought” – but many viewers are likely to agree on one thing. Nosferatu climaxes with a tableaux so ravishingly beautiful – as exquisite as it is horrifying – that the final image belongs in an art gallery.
The motif is notable for its coupling of seemingly opposing forces: young naked women (female fertility or carnality) forcibly taken by a masculine embodiment of death.3 The images are frequently erotically charged, and depict life and death locked in an inescapable embrace or engaged in a macabre dance.
The ‘death and maiden’ motif was primarily restricted to German speaking cultures, and found its way across various media (drawings, woodcuts, paintings, prints and sculptures).4 Although the relationship between ‘sex and death’ remained in a dynamic state of tension, the motif has, of course, changed over time.5 The feminised life force was originally overcome by death but she would invariably get the upper hand or they might come to embrace each other. Consequently, their dynamic remained fluid and was subject to attenuations – the maiden’s dance with death often found itself caught in continual alternating rhythmic movements.
Life and death would therefore remain in a constant state of tension, and their relationship would come in cycles. Given their everchanging power dynamic, the ‘death and maiden’ motif can be readily contextualised: its rise and fall moved with the waves of death brought on by the plague.6
Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) revamps the motif in the post Covid era. The film makes explicit references to the plague, and continues the longstanding tradition of linking the arrival of a ship with the spread of death.7 Rats, however, are not the true source of this pestilence: the vampire on board is the real contagion. Egger’s film is, of course, a modern retelling of F. W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922). Murnau’s silent film remains famous for a number of reasons – including being an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, for being a prime example of German Expressionist cinema and for laying the groundwork for an entire genre (horror) in cinema’s sound era.
Although Murnau’s silent film might be entombed in a distant past, Nosferatu has nonetheless continued to live on in popular culture – most notably as a running joke on Spongebob Squarepants. Egger’s film, however, is no comedy, and tries to put the symphonic back into the horror. Egger manages to do this by locating the horror in sexual trauma. Consequently, there are three main differences between the original film and his retelling.
The first is that the maiden unknowingly enters into a “covenant” with Death when she attempts to summon a “guardian angel” from the “celestial sphere” as a distressed young girl. “Come to me” are the film’s first words, and Ellen’s (Lily-Rose Depp) call for a “spirit of comfort” coincides with her sexual awakening. Ellen’s invocation results in a “pact” with a supernatural force (Bill Skarsgård) when Nosferatu enters (or emerges from) her subconscious during a pubescent dream. An out of body experience – where Ellen’s consciousness appears to leave her physical body and communes with a spirit on the astral plane – culminates in her violent rape there. Egger’s version of Ellen is more than just a human sacrifice at the end (1922) or the inadvertent victim of Nosferatu’s one-sided obsession with a pure-hearted woman (“lovely neck”). Egger’s Ellen instigates a psychosexual relationship from the outset: she invites death into her bed chamber and becomes troubled by increasingly impure and/or traumatic thoughts. Nosferatu can therefore be seen as Ellen’s shadow – as either an unconscious aspect of her personality not reflecting an ideal self or as an inseparable and idealised companion following her lead into darkness and the light.
The second main difference is that the revamped version is a tale of obsession and/or possession. Viewers may find themselves questioning the nature of their relationship: who is really obsessed and/or possessed here? It is a mute question of course: death and the maiden are so inextricably intertwined that they cannot let go of each other. Given the nature of their “romantic” entanglement, we also witness startling inversions of their power dynamic: our feminised life force has a clear death wish while the male embodiment of death has never felt more alive at the mere thought of her vital essence. Count Orlok is no longer an antisemitic trope – a scuttling rat in human form – but a nobleman trapped in the body of a living corpse. Orlok might have been reduced to an unholy “appetite” but he clearly longs for something more spiritually nourishing or life sustaining. He is looking for a kindred spirit to help him endure (and possibly escape) the curse of immorality. Ellen, on the other hand, is a simple mortal accursed by her own appetites and emotions and desires self-destruction or self-abnegation. From the moment Ellen summons Nosferatu they develop a telepathic bond that transcends space and time, and are “destined” to be together forever. While both are plagued by thoughts of each other, Nosferatu primarily focusses on Ellen’s torment.
The third main difference is that Egger’s Nosferatu chronicles a love triangle between husband, wife and demon lover. The maiden is caught between world’s – between the land of the living (or social strictures such as the temporal bonds of marriage and child rearing) and the land of the undead (or the allure of forbidden and/or eternal love). Ellen’s husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) is not the main protagonist in the remake and ironically acts as mere go between. He unknowingly brings his young wife and death physically together when he sells the mysterious Transylvanian Count a manor closer to them in Germany. Despite her husband’s best efforts, he cannot really come between them – he can only be the mid-wife delivering them in each’s arms. Consequently, the original film’s horror – social anxieties related to an encroaching Other – is displaced in favour of the relationship between a tormented soul and the supernatural entity coming for her. Particularly striking is the way Nosferatu navigates Ellen’s passage between worlds – the maiden will invariably weaponize her sexuality to resolve the trauma of an original violation.
Sex and death have become (con)fused in Ellen's mind. Specifically, Ellen was struck by grief during a turbulent period in her life – her mother died as she was developing into a young woman. Ellen’s seizures (“spells” or ‘falling sickness’) were traditionally thought to be caused by evil spirits invading her body during a sexually repressed era. Ellen does, of course, fall under a demon’s ‘spell’ once it seizes her by the throat and has its wicked way with her on a celestial plane. Sex, sin and (mental) illness were further entangled when her father finds her naked body lying unconscious on the family grounds: the “shame!” Shame spirals course through Ellen’s very veins: she cannot escape a self-loathing loop and keeps reliving experiences that confuse, excite and frighten her. By the time Ellen finally accepts that death is approaching her, Ellen’s proclamation – “he is coming” – is filled with excitement and dread. The scene is imbued with sexual and dramatic tension as she writhes and convulses at the prospect of death coming for her. Death is not just coming for her of course – it casts a long shadow over the whole city and it is also about to be caught in its vice like grip. Nonetheless, Ellen instinctively understands that sex is the antidote to death and seizes the opportunity to release them all. She decides to renew her marriage vows to the demon that has taken possession of her, and consumates their relationship in the physical realm.
Ellen is no vamp though – she is too traumatised by her own sexuality and/or mortality to want to manipulate or exploit men. During their renewed pledge to each other, however, she will seduce the vampire to manipulate him for her own ends: she will save the world through mutual assured destruction. Luring the Count to what will be their deathbed is not so much an act of self-sacrifice or moral redemption but a mutually beneficial situation: pleasurable sex will help put everyone out of their misery. As Orlok feasts on Ellen’s naked body, he is too ecstatic to notice (or care) that daylight has also come. A similarly enraptured Ellen – ‘more, more’ she moans – insists that he continues. Once the cock crows, though, Orlok realises that he has been tricked and sees Ellen smirking at him with complete satisfaction. By this point he has resigned himself to his fate and becomes transfixed by the sunlight. Death doesn’t try to break free from the maiden or disappear into a puff of smoke. The vampire wants to see the sun one last time, and allows Ellen to bind herself to him in a loving embrace. The Count dies shrieking at the sun as a dying Ellen pulls him back on top of her. The image of them lying in repose is designed to take our breath away.
Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Niklaus Manuel Deutsch and Hans Baldung Grien are the German pioneers of the ‘death and the maiden’ motif.
Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death: The Classic History of Western Attitudes Toward Death Over the Last One Thousand Years ,Berlin, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2013.
It is important to distinguish between the dramatic theme of ‘death and the maiden’ and the subsequent visual motif. If we make the distinction, the dramatic theme precedes the visual motif by many centuries and can be found in the story of Hades and Persephone in Greek mythology (which has been represented in art and literature throughout the ages). The myth, of course, tells the story of Persephone (goddess of spring) being kidnapped and forced into marriage with Hades (the god of the underworld). It is generally seen as a story about the duality between life and death and chronicles the cyclic nature of their relationship in narrative terms. The visual motif, however, is more culturally and/or temporally specific: it does not depict a relationship between divine entities but between opposing forces during a dark period in history – human sexuality and mortality caught in a spiral during the plague years.
Stefanie Knoll, ‘Death and the Maiden: A German Topic?’ in Anna Linton and Helen Fronius (eds.) Women and Death: Representations of Female Victims and Perpetrators in German Culture 1500-2000, New York: Camden House Publishing, 2008, pp.9-27. Although the motif was primarily a geographical phenomenon that originated in German speaking cultures around 1500, it has appeared in art beyond Germany throughout the centuries. Edvard Munch (Norway), Salvador Dali (Spain) and Henry Lévy (France), amongst others, have also produced versions of the motif in their own art.
Karl S. Guthke, The Gender of Death: A Cultural History in Art and Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 82-127.
Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death, Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2021. As Benedictow’s history documents, there were three main waves that occurred via trade routes between the 1300s to the 1900s. Specifically, the first wave occurred between 1347 to 1351, the second wave occurred during the 1500’s and the last wave occurred towards the end of the 1800’s and early twentieth century. Note that the motif originates in Renaissance art during the second main wave (1500 onwards).
The thematic link between the arrival of a foreign ship and the spread of death via a vampire – originating in the story of Dracula’s voyage from Transylvania to Britain on the Demeter – has its roots in historical fact (although its interesting to note that Demeter was Persephone’s mother in Greek mythology). As the Encyclopædia Britannica notes
Having originated in China and Inner Asia, the Black Death decimated the army of the Kipchak khan Janibeg while he was besieging the Genoese trading port of Kaffa (now Feodosiya) in Crimea (1347). With his forces disintegrating, Janibeg used trebuchets to catapult plague-infested corpses into the town in an effort to infect his enemies. From Kaffa, Genoese ships carried the epidemic westward to Mediterranean ports, whence it spread inland, affecting Sicily (1347); North Africa, mainland Italy, Spain, and France (1348); and Austria, Hungary, Switzerland, Germany, and the Low Countries (1349). A ship from Calais carried the plague to Melcombe Regis, Dorset, in August 1348. It reached Bristol almost immediately and spread rapidly throughout the southwestern counties of England. London suffered most violently between February and May 1349, East Anglia and Yorkshire during that summer. The Black Death reached the extreme north of England, Scotland, Scandinavia, and the Baltic countries in 1350. There were recurrences of the plague in 1361–63, 1369–71, 1374–75, 1390, and 1400. Modern research has suggested that, over that period of time, plague was introduced into Europe multiple times, coming along trade routes in waves from Central Asia as a result of climate fluctuations that affected populations of rodents infested with plague-carrying fleas.