'The Women Are the Problem': The Enduring Mistake of 'Nosferatu' and Misogyny

A while back, I wrote about Robert Eggers’ witchy, dangerous women: Even in historically faithful environments where women aren’t technically accounted for as full people — the Viking sea kingdoms, the dark paranoia of Puritan New England, the heavily patriarchal society of nineteenth century Germany — the women of these movies retain a level of autonomy and of what I called “witchy goodness.” Not to say that the characters are good, but that they possess a serious and dangerous weight in a story whose setting feels designed to erase them.

I was already thinking about that when I ran into an all-knowing undergraduate at a bar on New Year’s, who confidently informed me that Eggers is a deeply misogynistic director because The women are always the problem.

Leaving aside how The VVitch features a literal witch hunt that targets and vilifies a young woman and sculpts her into the thing that her society fears most, and that The Lighthouse’s terrifying mermaids belong to the same realm of cosmic horror as the Lovecraftian terror at the top of the light … but I digress.

That encounter got me thinking about Eggers’ newest endeavor, Nosferatu. (The law of cinema apparently demands that Nosferatu must be remade about once every fifty years by an iconic director). Nosferatu goes as hard into its genre and setting as all Eggers’ deeply divergent projects: it’s profoundly gothic and melodramatic, its characters emblematic rather than deep, its language a roil of fifty-cent words and elegant metaphor.

Back in the 1920s, Murnau failed to get permission to adapt Dracula. Thus the story of Jonathan and Mina Harker and the Transylvanian vampire count who wants to buy a house in London was transformed into the royalty-free story of … Thomas and Ellen Hutter and the vampire Count Orlok who wants to buy a house in Germany. Its most extensive change from the novel is in its ending: the virtuous and devoted young wife sacrifices her life and her “virtue” to the beast, distracting him until the sun rises and destroys him.

In Werner Herzog’s version, Lucy (the wonderful Isabelle Adjani, in the role of Ellen in the role of Mina…) is a woman at the heart of a society that loses its collective mind, a terror of the modern world untethered and dismantled by the primordial, mythic terror of the past embodied by the titular vampire. Lucy’s power in the 1979 movie is in her will, her clarity of vision, and her determination against every escalating and overwhelming disaster. The monster desires her, but she’s only connected to him through the accident of her husband’s job. Lucy is a bright star of sanity and clarity within the whirl of her madhouse city — in other words, she isn’t the problem, but she’s certainly the hero.

Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) of the new Nosferatu follows the same path, but within a reinvented story that expands her power and agency to drive the story — she is not hunted by a terrible appetite of the mythic past, but by her own repression and shame. She, like Vanessa Ives of Penny Dreadful, is a “problem” in the sense that she is immensely psychically and spiritually powerful, a woman whose spirit slides back and forth between the world of the living and the supernatural. She horrifies the men with her sexual movements and ravings while wandering the spirit world; her “condition” is desire and hatred of that desire. That power is what summons the monster at all.

The supernatural in Nosferatu (2024) emanates from her — she catalyzes it and ultimately comes to understand and control it, rescuing herself from the repression and self-hatred that she internalized from her upbringing. It’s not quite so simple in the telling and nuance of the movie, but that’s my reading. It’s the most agency and authority within the well-worn story that the Mina Harker/Lucy Harker/Ellen Hutter character has ever had, in my opinion (not that it makes the character’s life any less horrific). It’s not an ancient evil she’s battling but a repressed aspect of herself that she cannot look at directly, until she can.

Mina Harker of the original novel is a thoroughly capable and modern woman (as Van Helsing comments: with the mind of a man! Imagine!). She endeavors to serve and support her husband in all things, and her most vital role is to give heart and courage to the good men who must eventually rescue her from the count’s unholy influence. Meanwhile, her friend Lucy (a woman who has to choose between her suitors and despairs at not being able to marry all of them) is easily corrupted and destroyed by the appetites of the vampire. Mina’s faithfulness, dutifulness, and essential feminine goodness defeats the beast that desires her. That’s a fairly easy reading, and one with plenty of voices who agree with it.

Nosferatu (2024) could easily fall prey to a similar surface-level reading-woman bad, horny woman very bad. But I think it’s more apt to look at Brooke Allen’s introduction to the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Dracula:

“Some feminist scholars have found Stoker’s attitude to be incurably sexist. Phyllis A. Roth, for example, has written ‘I would emphasize that for both the Victorians and twentieth century readers, much of the novel’s great appeal derives from its hostility toward female sexuality.’ This seems like an overly simplistic way of looking at this not entirely simple tale.”

She goes on to point out that Mina — though laughing at the concept of the emancipated New Woman of her era — could hardly embody the ideal more if she tried. “She [Mina], the New Woman-also, by the way, married and sexually experienced-is able to defeat the vampire, while the pure, sweet, and still virginal Lucy is not.” Mina may not drive the story through her own decisions and agency, but she’s the most complex and heroic of the characters in the end, beside the “conventional and interchangeable men,” as Allen puts it.

Female sexuality has a tricky and nuanced role to play in this monster story habitually told by men, but to my mind Allen has the right track: It’s always treated as powerful and dangerous, and often most dangerous in its repression. Nosferatu’s overtly sexual conclusion takes that danger to a new level, shedding metaphor while focusing on Ellen’s psychology — her sense of herself. As our cheerfully unhinged Van Helsing screams while burning down the count’s house: Salvation! He means for the city, I think, but there’s the obvious parallel that Ellen is saving herself from her shame and self-hatred.

Plenty of much more able and dedicated scholars of vampire lore and literature have delved into the topics of vampires and female sexuality, as well as queerness and homoeroticism, so I’ll go ahead and point you toward some of my favorites: Haunted: On Ghosts, Witches, Vampires, and Other Monsters of the Natural and Supernatural Worlds by Leo Braudy and Vampyres: Genesis and Resurrection from Count Dracula to Vampirella by Christopher Frayling.

Anyway, that’s all to say: I think Eggers once again made a very good movie with a dangerous and complex woman at its core.

Nosferatu is currently haunting theaters.