January 31, 2025

There are people who say they don’t like horror—and then there are all the rest. In these dark times, some people prefer to keep to the sunny side of the street so far as their entertainment is concerned. Yet the genre of horror, in both books and film, has exploded in popularity since the 1980’s or so, especially if we add in science fiction horror, such as the Alien films and A Quiet Place. In fiction, there is of course the extraordinary phenomenon of Stephen King, one of the best-selling authors of all time, who has spawned not only a horde of literary imitators but a proliferation of films, many of which are of his own novels, such as The Shining. We are currently in the midst of a trend for remaking classic horror films, such as Wolf Man, and I have just seen Nosferatu, which re-imagines F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film classic of that title. The director of this remake is Robert Eggers, who directed The Northman, a version of the medieval revenge tale by Saxo Grammaticus that was the several-times-removed basis of Hamlet. Eggers is a serious and very interesting filmmaker, not just an entertainer, and The Northman was the subject of an early newsletter. I admire and recommend his Nosferatu, although I caution that it is not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach.

Murnau’s original silent film is a much-modified version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), some of the modifications, such as changing the characters’ names, being due to the fact that Murnau did not really have the rights to make a film from Dracula, which resulted in his film company later being sued. Dealing with the enormous proliferation of vampire stories spawned by Dracula would take a very large book, but what I would like to do is compare four remakes by artfilm directors, people who are aiming at more than commercial entertainment. In addition to Murnau’s Nosferatu, these include Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), by Werner Herzog; Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), by Frances Ford Coppola; plus Eggers’ version, glancing intermittently at the most famous version of all, Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, with Bela Lugosi playing the vampire. The object of the inquiry is to understand why people are drawn to vampires—by which I mean both the characters in the stories and the readers or viewers who never seem to tire of new renditions of them. The reason for dealing with five variants is that each gives a different answer to this question—they are in fact remarkably different.

Demonic creatures who prey on human beings are common enough in world mythology, but vampires are a specifically European type of supernatural predator, and a relatively recent one, apparently dating from the early 18^th century in the area of southeastern Europe, exactly where Stoker located Count Dracula: Transylvania is part of modern Romania, close to the Carpathian mountains. There was in fact a hysterical epidemic of vampire reports around that time, with some resemblance to the witchcraft hysteria elsewhere not that many years previously. There are two types of human fear. We may fear real human evil, such as crime and war. But why is there also a pervasive fear of an inhuman Other, of which vampires are one manifestation? In a past newsletter on monsters, I asked the commonsense question, why do we fear monsters, given that monsters do not really exist? Yet we are sure somehow that they do. Science tells us that monsters do not and cannot exist. But the expert on the demonic in Eggers’ Nosferatu, the counterpart of Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, gives the standard speech about the arrogance of science, its blindness to realities beyond the reach of its empiricism.

Vampires are supernatural, and the only power able to oppose them is, or at least once was, the counter-supernaturalism of Christianity. It is plausible that the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries saw an outbreak of hysteria about witches and vampires precisely because Enlightenment rationalism and its dismissal of “superstition” weakened the hold of Christianity on European and American culture. If Christianity was only an illusion, what would protect people from dark powers that, in the view of many common people, had existed long before Europe was Christianized, so that the forces of darkness were beginning to rouse themselves, scenting that their time had come? However, Christianity had its own arrogance, dismissing the dark powers as “pagan” and therefore mere superstition. Nevertheless, the common people felt they knew better. The dark powers were the old powers of nature, and they dwelt in the land long before the missionaries. Around the time of Stoker’s Dracula, Arthur Machen was inspired to write one of the definitive horror stories, The Great God Pan (1894), by his visit to the excavation of a pagan temple in rural Wales. Satan, supposedly worshipped by witches, was really a Christianized nature spirit of this sort, as his horns and cloven goat-hooves show.

Human beings could unleash these nature spirits, either inadvertently or by a deliberate summons. Eggers’ main female character, called Ellen, his equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harkness, has done so. The vampire expert and Van Helsing equivelent, played by Willem Dafoe, tells her that in another age she could have been a priestess of Isis—in other words, of a pagan nature deity. But the crucifix is not a protection against the vampire here, as it is against Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Nosferatu, or Count Orlok, as he is called, following Murnau, is vulnerable only to the natural weapons of sharpened stakes, fire, and sunlight.

The paradox of vampires is that they are objects of sheer terror, the terror of the alien and unfathomable Other, and yet they tempt people, draw them to their doom. Individual vampire stories may lay greater stress on one or the other source of both the terror and the temptation—death or sex. Vampires are in one way the epitome of death: they drain people of blood, the substance of life. Yet at the same time they represent immortality—at a terrible price, but one which some people may be willing to pay. If you become a vampire, you never have to die. However, the price is that you will never live, for the existence of the “undead” is not really life. It is rather what Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner had to endure: life-in-death. Life-in-death is the desiccation of the heart, the numbness of the spirit. Like the Ancient Mariner, you can suffer from it without becoming a vampire. This is Stephen King’s point about the small town in Salem’s Lot (1975), his second novel (and, he says, his favorite): the mean-spirited and corrupt inhabitants of the town were already undead before the vampires arrived. King has said dryly that he will always have a cold spot in his heart for such small-town people, a remark that takes on new resonance in the age of Trump triumphalism. Such people make common cause these days with billionaires who plan to become undead by having themselves cryogenically frozen.

Still, we long for immortality: Anne Rice wrote Interview with a Vampire (1976) in an extreme state of grief, depression, alcoholism, and OCD after the death of her daughter. It is about a man who experiences immortality as a curse, but whose story ironically inspires a boy to seek that immortality himself. Craig Stephenson, a Jungian analyst whose book Possession (2017) has taught me many things, has a lengthy analysis of John Cassavetes’ film Opening Night (1977), about a middle-aged woman actor afflicted with fears of aging who becomes so obsessed with the death of a 17-year-old girl who was hit by a car outside the theatre that the girl’s spirit possesses her and sucks the life out of her vampirically. Vampires are often aristocrats, like Count Dracula or Count Orlok, and live in isolated places, like Transylvania or small-town Maine, that time has passed by, a stasis that is a collective life-in-death. Aristocratic vampires are impossibly arrogant, feeling godlike because they are beyond death.

The other source of terror and temptation in vampire tales is eroticism, especially female eroticism. Vampires may feed off of men, but they prey upon women, and in a way that is horrifyingly paradoxical. On the one hand, they are the ultimate #MeToo predator, terrifying, controlling, yet too strong to resist. On the other hand, they represent a lure of forbidden sexuality—which, when Dracula was published, meant any sexuality not dedicated to producing a family. The thematic center of all the versions of the story we are considering is the relationship of Dracula/Orlok to a female protagonist. And in every case, that relationship is different—which is striking, given that the later versions are not sequels or offshoots but attempts to recreate the original story. As we have seen so often, that is how the imagination works. It never simply repeats a type or form, but always produces something different. In this, it is like life itself, which reproduces one human pattern, with two arms, two legs, a face, and so on, but never produces the same human being twice, even in the case of identical twins. And in art, it is the differences that are what is meaningful, although of course you have to know the original theme in order to distinguish the variations.

As we run through the versions, we will try to keep plot summary to the minimum required in order to distinguish the thematic differences. In Dracula itself, the woman is Mina Harker, wife of Jonathan Harker, who travels to Dracula’s castle in order to sell Dracula property that he wishes to purchase in England. Harker has with him a picture of his wife, with whom Dracula immediately becomes obsessed.

When Dracula arrives in England, however, he finds that there are two women, for Mina has a friend named Lucy. Dracula actually goes after Lucy first, turns her into a vampire by biting her so that so that the good guys have to kill her in an appalling way, which includes cutting off her head. He bites Mina repeatedly, which means that she too would become a vampire whenever she dies, but when Dracula is killed, she is freed from her curse. What is happening here is a version of the well-known Romantic and Victorian pattern of the light and dark heroines which goes back to the novels of Sir Walter Scott. One heroine is dark, intense, interesting, and tragic; the other is fair, conventional, and gets the happy ending, while the dark heroine usually dies. As Mina does here: an appended note by Jonathan Harker, her husband, announces that they have had a child 7 years later. But there is a striking reversal, because it is Mina who is the dark heroine, whereas Lucy’s name means “light.” Eggers follows up on this: his version of the secondary female character, called Anna, is blond, and her two cherubic kids are killed along with her. It happens: not all Victorian novels play out the conventional pattern of a comic ending with the light heroine. Maggie Tulliver, in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, identifies from a young age with the dark heroines in Walter Scott novels, and drowns in a flood with the person she loves most, her brother.

Stoker’s Mina Harker is not attracted to Dracula. She is often characterized as the Victorian ideal woman, pure and faithful, while Lucy is more vivacious and what at the time was called a New Woman. Her counterpart in Murnau’s Nosferatu, named Ellen Hutter instead of Mina Harker, is similarly pure-hearted and virtuous, attracting Orlok’s attention only by bad luck. She is so virtuous, indeed, that she makes herself a selflessly sacrificial victim in order to destroy Orlok, offering him her blood, which distracts him so much that he fails to get away before the dawn and vanishes in smoke. Ellen lingers just long enough to comfort her husband, and dies. There is no second woman, and the bite does not make her a vampire.

Murnau’s version does add a new element, however: rats and the plague. Orlok travels in his coffin by ship to the new abode he has purchased. Nosferatu being a German film, however, the location for its second part is the German port city of Wismar, renamed Wisborg in the film. This is a nightmare passage, which Eggers reproduces. Orlok spreads terror by preying upon the crew members one by one, and when the ship finally crashes ashore, with Orlok the sole “survivor,” hundreds of rats pour out of the boat and into the city, spreading plague wherever they go. The sea sea passage is in all versions of the story. The Transylvanian castle of Dracula or Orlok is a dark version of what I have elsewhere called the Otherworld, another reality on the other side of ordinary life. Last week’s newsletter talked about “portals,” methods of passage between the Otherworld and our reality, and the boundary marked by the portal is a “liminal” space marked by strange and paradoxical conditions. In the Dracula story, the sea passage is the liminal journey from one reality to the other. In Stoker’s original novel, the name of the ship that Dracula traveled in was the Demeter, which indicates clearly that Dracula is a lord of the underworld come to kidnap a bride, as Hades did in the Greek myth, ravishing Demeter’s daughter Persephone. In the Tod Browning Dracula film with Bela Lugosi, the ship is named the Vesta, after the goddess of hearth and home, hinting that Dracula is a violator of the domestic threshold. But Stoker’s novel does not have the rats or the plague. These were introduced by Murnau, and are said by some critics to hint at the rat-infested trenches of World War I, recently ended.

But the rats signify something else: contagion. The invasion of Orlok is not just a private, domestic catastrophe. In the 70’s, there was a saying, “The personal is the political.” In the end, we cannot separate the private and public spheres because they are intimately connected. What happens to one family spreads out like waves on a pond, as people’s intimate relationships end up drawing in friends and family members, whose emotions in turn may catalyze the larger community. Emotions are contagious, especially irrational ones, which is why such things as eating disorders and sexual abuse end by involving the whole family in therapy. As the plague progresses, Eggers’ film shows the streets of the town turned into a complete chaos of ill, hysterical, wandering, raving crowds of people. We are enduring a version of this in the United States right now, as the dysfunctionality of American lives on a grass-roots level has infected the whole society, with a plague of two-legged rats now pouring through and overrunning the federal government, spreading even further into international affairs. The Tod Browning Dracula omits the rats, reverting to the bats that are associated with Dracula throughout Stoker’s original (even though vampire bats are native to South America, not England).

Taking the film recreations in chronological order, the next is Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre of 1979. Anyone who knows anything about Werner Herzog would expect wild goings on in the making of the film. This is a man who hypnotized the entire cast for his film Heart of Glass, and had his film crew hack through South American jungles to make Aguirre, or the Wrath of God. So for Nosferatu the Vampyre, Herzog asked to introduce 10,000 rats into the city of Delft where he shot the plague episodes. He was, understandably, refused permission, so he took his rats to another town and shot the scenes there. According to a New York Times article from July 30, 1978, archived online, Herzog not only understands the rats in a way close to what I have described above, but gives them a radical political interpretation:

Mr. Herzog sees his film as a parable about the fragility of order in a staid, bourgeois town. Though “The Undead — Nosferatu” is a film full of horrors, “It is more than a horror film,” he says. “Nosferatu is not a monster, but an ambivalent, masterful force of change. When the plague threatens, people throw their property into the streets, they discard their bourgeois trappings. A re‐evaluation of life and its meaning takes place.”

Which is evidently why Herzog adds an eye-opening revisionist ending to the story, in which, although Dracula dies, Jonathan Harker becomes a vampire, has Van Helsing arrested for Dracula’s murder, and rides away saying he has much to do, apparently having decided that he must become the next “ambivalent masterful force of change,” forcing the bourgeois to reconsider their lives. Horror films, like mystery stories, typically end in a restoration of order, but Herzog’s Nosferatu sides with the agent of chaos. One wonders what Herzog presently thinks of Donald Trump. Herzog also, by the way, calls Harker’s wife Lucy, reversing all the other versions, but it does mean that he understands the symbolic import of the name. The woman whose name means “light” kills Dracula with the weapon of sunlight.

Herzog is just as audacious in his handling of the theme of erotic temptation. The audacity lies in affirming that there is an erotic temptation. At least according to a statement by his actor Klaus Kinski, who worked closely with Herzog on most of his famous films, Nosferatu the Vampyre is as radically anti-bourgeois sexually as it is socially, breaking with the tradition of making the object of Orlok’s obsession a virtuous Victorian housewife who would not dream of being tempted away from her husband:

Lucy is a complete departure from previous heroines in vampire films. There's a sexual element. She is gradually attracted towards Nosferatu. She feels a fascination — as we all would, I think. First, she hopes to save the people of the town by sacrificing herself. But then, there is a moment of transition. There is a scene when he is sucking her blood — sucking and sucking like an animal—and suddenly her face takes on a new expression, a sexual one, and she will not let him go away any more. There is a desire that has been born. A moment like this has never been seen in a vampire picture.

Whether that is true or not, it is at least true that the films from this point forward portray the woman who is the object of Dracula or Orlok’s attentions as feeling simultaneously threatened and attracted by him erotically. No longer is she the pure, self-sacrificing ideal Victorian woman.

There are more questions than answers about Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). One question is why a man who has made vehement public statements denouncing superhero movies for their lack of realism should be making a supernatural Gothic, and a wildly eccentric one at that, both visually and narratively. Visually, it is a bizarre extravaganza: film critic Roger Ebert called called it “grand opera run riot” and “an exercise in feverish excess.” Dracula’s appearance is over the top, like something out of Tim Burton. Narratively, the film is the opposite of its title (which Ebert claims exists merely because another company owned the rights to plain old Dracula). Instead of a renewed fidelity to Bram Stoker’s original in contrast to a plethora of Nosferatus, it gives Dracula a back history that is for all the world like a comic-book origin story. In it, when Dracula’s wife Elisabeta committed suicide a few centuries ago, a priest told Dracula that she was damned. Enraged, Dracula renounces God, vows revenge, and turns himself into a vampire in order to extract it. Dracula is drawn to Mina because she is a reincarnation of Elisabeta, though that does not keep him from doing in Lucy as a side job. Dracula is able to appear young and good looking, and Mina finds herself attracted to him. Eventually, in a big showdown, he is defeated, however, and, as he lays dying, Mina kisses him, stabs a knife through his heart, and decapitates him in a loving way. She then looks up to see, somehow, a fresco of Dracula and Elisabeta ascending to heaven.

Why Coppola felt impelled to rewrite the story this way is uncertain. Winona Ryder, who played Mina, said she was attracted to the role because, like all women of her time, Mina had a lot of repressed sexuality. But it turns out that what is driving Mina is, or possibly is, not her own desire but another woman’s. She has simply been used as a clearing house where Dracula and his wife can get together. Is this Mina’s way of dissociating, of denying her own desire by saying, “Oh, it wasn’t really my desire but another woman’s”? It all seems just baffling.

We are brought full circle back to Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, which is not just a remake but an original interpretation, dependent upon its daring and original reading of the female lead, here again named Ellen Hutter, as in Murnau. The first thing we see in the film is a close-up of Ellen’s face when she was young, and the first thing we hear is a voiceover of her begging the powers that be for someone to end her terrible loneliness and isolation. Note that it is only secondarily a sexual yearning. Rather, it is not good for woman to be alone. We are never given any reason for this longing, and do not know whether she is truly isolated or just feels so. Yet the yearning is powerful enough for her to call upon forbidden powers, clearly willing to pay any price. The implications are startling. Ellen does not merely respond to Orlok’s overtures. She, when still very young, was the initiator of their relationship. There is a later moment in which Orlok accuses her of having stalked him, bound him to her. What is the nature of that bond? We cannot say it is not sexual: Orlok dies lying on top of Ellen in a sexual pose. But it is anything but erotic in the way of Coppola’s version, in which Dracula is the irresistible Gary Oldman while he is seducing and the atmosphere is, as Coppola said, that of an erotic dream. Of course, his heroine finds out the hard way that Dracula is really a very, very old man with a weird swelled head. I wonder whether Coppola added the business about Mina being the reincarnation of Dracula’s wife in order to reroute the plot away from the conventional conservative theme, similar to that of Child ballad 243, titled “The Daemon Lover” or sometimes “House Carpenter,” in which a woman yields to temptation and flees from her marriage with a mere house carpenter, only to find out, too late, that her lover is a demon or even the devil himself.

But the desire of Eggers’ character Ellen reaches down to a deeper level in which sex is contaminated with death. She is not aiming to achieve the immortality of being “undead”: something else is going on. A glancing remark in the dialogue says something about her affinity for the lower, animal level of nature, but no moralizing will work here. She does not desire Orlok in any ordinary sense: he never appears as anything but a grotesquely old nonhuman being with a voice below the normal vocal register. Bill Skarsgard studied Mongolian throat singing in order to produce this unnatural voice. And yet it is a relationship of some kind of desire, and there is a rivalry between Orlok and Ellen’s husband, Thomas Hutter—for most of the film a very unequal rivalry. Orlok may be old, but he is tremendously strong, and Hutter, with his willowy build, is portrayed in the early scenes in Orlok’s castle as a weak, terrified wimp, anything but manly. He grows out of this kind of near-effeminacy as the film goes on, and when Ellen finally confesses the truth of her lifelong relationship to Orlok, he responds by jumping on top of her and taking her sexually, and she appears to respond in kind, which is what enrages Orlok into killing Lucy and her children. But Ellen dedicated herself early in life to something deeper than this level of normal sexuality and marriage.

I can imagine some feminists being uncomfortable with the view of women implied by Eggers’ film. It is the view of women as “mermaids” as defined by Dorothy Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976), the sexist view that women are human only from the waist up, and that the figurative lower half of their nature plunges into nonhuman depths. Ellen has a special affinity for this lower level, but presumably the dual identity is an attribute of all women. This can be just a fancy mythological excuse for male fear of women’s emotional power over them, and be used to justify patriarchal control. On the other hand, a merely rational feminism reduces women merely to their social persona and their egos, and from the point of view of depth psychology this is a denial and a reduction. In the perspective of depth psychology, in particular Jungian psychology, all human psyches descend to a level lower than the personal unconscious, to a level that is not strictly individual, not even strictly human. Moods, desires, images, and even whole other psychic identities—called “complexes” by Jung—rise up when we least expect it and, if we are unaware of them, may be either projected upon other people or may take us over—possess us.

Ellen Hutter is a woman possessed. What is she possessed by? (Mind you, I am not a Jungian analyst, so what follows is an adaptation of Jungian symbolism for my own purposes as a literary critic). Orlok, interpreted psychologically, is a “complex,” a portion of her larger, transpersonal psyche that is split off, so that her yearning for him is a desire for re-connection. In the standard Jungian vocabulary, he is an animus figure, darkened by contamination with a chthonic, underworld energy. Even in ordinary relationships, men are always to some extent in rivalry with another male figure who exists in the woman’s mind, although the animus can be projected upon some other man in the outside world. Jungian psychology is not strictly, or at least not necessarily, heterosexual. Instead, every human being embodies both genders. Conventional upbringing conditions us to identify with our biological gender, but the opposite gender exists in a more or less unconscious state. Repression tends to make this second identity split off and become a “complex,” one that can be personified in dreams and fantasies, which have their counterparts in myths, fairy tales, and literature. A heterosexual man’s feminine identity takes form as an inner woman, the anima, Latin for “soul.” A heterosexual woman’s masculine identity becomes an inner male, the animus. The more split-off and rejected the anima or animus, the more its representation takes a dark and ambiguous form.

The dark animus is hardly an unknown type: even relatively conventional women understand the attraction of the “bad boy,” the male who is not approved of but who is more exciting than the “nice guy.” In some literary scenarios, the woman will choose the bad boy, but only after she has accomplished the task of taming him, as in The Beauty and the Beast or in Jane Eyre, where Rochester’s power has to be reduced by injury and blindness. Wuthering Heights has a unique, double-mirror structure. In its second half, the younger generation plays out the beauty-and-beast pattern, as young Cathy civilizes the savage Hareston Earnshaw. But the older-generation Catherine Earnshaw chooses the ferocious Heathcliff and does not want him to be tamed, nor will she be tamed herself. The plot comes fairly close to a vampire plot when Heathcliff actually digs up Catherine’s corpse after she dies and holds it all night. In the end, they are said to be undead in the sense of being ghosts that roam the moors, free and untamed.

In addition to this kind of projection of the animus, the woman may alternatively become animus-possessed, the dark energy taking her over, so that she herself becomes demonic. This is in danger of happening when the woman feels slighted, neglected, or abandoned, in which case hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Some women are content with writing furious break-up songs, but the film Fatal Attraction shows what can happen in an extreme case. The classic story of a rejected woman’s rage is Euripides’ Medea. When Medea is cast off, she kills both her rival and her own two sons by her lover Theseus. All this goes beyond the situation in Eggers’ Nosferatu, but maybe not so far as all that. Willem Dafoe’s vampire expert, the film’s version of Stoker’s Abraham Van Helsing, is named Albin Eberhart Von Franz. Eggers has confirmed that this name is a compound of two real-life names. One is Albin Grau, the producer and set designer of Murnau’s Nosferatu, who was an actual occultist. The Internet talks much of him, but does not seem to know what to do with the second name, Marie-Louise von Franz, a member of the original Jungian inner circle, who has done extensive scholarly work on fairy tales. The identification is confirmed by the fact that the film’s Von Franz is Swiss, like Jung himself. I have not found any place in which von Franz mentions vampires, but she has written extensively on animus symbolism in fairy tales, and literary vampires are clearly animius figures.

This is obvious with the alluring and attractive kind of vampire, who is forbidden fruit, an irresistible tragic hero, essentially a “Byronic hero.” In fact, the first literary vampire was quite literally a Byronic hero. Strange to say, the literary contest among friends for which Mary Shelley’s entry was Frankenstein also produced The Vampyre (1819), by John Polidori—and Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, was modeled on Byron himself. From him descends the whole line of darkly alluring male vampires, played by handsome men like Gary Oldman and Tom Cruise (in the film version of Interview with a Vampire). So too are the fanged but handsome dramatic male leads in Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight books. Even Bela Lugosi qualifies, by reason of his aristocratic pedigree and high-class wit and charm. So too does Christian in 50 Shades of Gray, for a lot of BDSM is close in spirit, shall we say, to the vampire phenomenon. Christian’s attraction is that his good looks are bundled as a complete package with high intelligence and a lot of money. But his portrayal actually horrified the BDSM community, because he represents the dom-sub relationship gone wrong in a characteristic way, when the dominant male succumbs to the temptation of the will to power and stops asking for consent, thus becoming a real predator, a real vampire. The current allegation is that this is what happened to fantasist Neil Gaiman, accused of sexual abuse in BDSM fantasy roleplaying by several women. This would be a terribly ironic comedown for a writer whose first success, the comic series The Sandman, was about a character, Morpheus, who is Lord of the Dreaming, in other words of a psychic version of the dark Otherworld.

The erotic may be regarded as taboo for moral, often religious reasons. But as erotic desire descends to the deeper levels of the unconscious, it becomes taboo for quite a different reason. On its lower levels, sexuality becomes anxious and ambivalent because of its relationship with death. In a controversial book, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud argued that Eros, with its pleasure principle, has a counterpart, the “death drive.” He did not call it Thanatos, but others did. We have, in popular parlance, a deathwish. We are terrified of death—yet, as Keats put it, we are at the same time “half in love with easeful death.” The word “easeful” is the key: life is active struggle, and something in us wants to give up, relax, and lapse into a blissful oblivion. Life and death are opposites, yet from another point of view they are two aspects of one thing. Ernest Becker speaks of the denial of death in his book of that title. Yet we do protest too much. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech expresses his longing for death, which he speaks of in sexual terms as “a consummation devoutly to be wished.” In the graveyard scene of the fifth act of Hamlet, Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull to represent how all life ends. A work of literature that expands the theme of the deathwish into a kind of epic drama on the order of Goethe’s Faust is Thomas Lovell Beddoes’ Death’s Jest Book (1850), which was a favorite of that death-haunted poet Dylan Thomas. Northrop Frye, who shares the enthusiasm for this great and neglected work, devotes a whole chapter to it in A Study of English Romanticism (1968). Some of his description of it sounds almost as if he is speaking of Eggers’ Nosferatu:

From the beginning Beddoes was possessed, not so much by death, as by the idea of the identity of death and love, Thanatos and Eros. Both states are themselves identifications of an isolated and conscious being with something else not itself. The imagery of such songs as “Dirge and Hymeneal” and “The Two Archers” tells us that the darts of love and death are aimed at the same target, that all lovers are demon-lovers, all brides incarnations of Mother Earth. Frustration in love…is very apt to turn into a death-wish. Thus the highest and most intense aspects of life, which love represents, are not the opposite of death, but part of the drive toward death which is the momentum of life itself. The complete identity with nature, which is the fulfillment of life, is achieved visibly only by death; hence death is the most accurate symbol of the ultimate meaning of life. (52)

A bit later, he adds: “The demon-lover theme is thus, in his work, the symbol of a life-death identity which he calls eternity” (53). I have been trying to understand this paradoxical theme since writing my doctoral dissertation on Dylan Thomas, whose early poetry is full of lines such as, “I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail / Wearing the quick away.” Is this just nihilism, just negation? But it is just such a dismissive attitude that would be neurotic, an anxious evasion. Neither Beddoes nor Thomas are saying that only death is real, that life is a mere mask over the grinning skull, an attitude dramatized in Poe’s “Masque of the Red Death.” Thomas puts such lines as the above in counterpoint with other passages, and whole poems, which affirm the equally true opposite, namely, that death is always and everywhere a mask for life. In “And death shall have no dominion,” he says that “Heads of the characters hammer through daisies, / Break in the sun till the sun breaks down.” The ego sees only life against death; the imagination sees life and death, metaphorically identified, A is B. The ego is right not to go gentle into that good night, even though “dark is right” and the night is good. The ego’s job is to affirm life, through love, through struggle, through the writing of poetry. The ego wrestles, like Jacob, against a spirit in the dark. That spirit is God. But it is also death. Out of that comes the imagination’s blessing.

In Eggers’ film, Orlok is Ellen’s dark animus, but, as such, he is Death itself, as she explicitly says at one point. Orlok is hideous: he is nobody’s example of “aging well.” The film’s final tableau is disgusting, with the dead Orlok lying in a sexual pose atop Ellen, now even more repulsive as a corpse already beginning to decay, a grotesque liebestod. Yes, Ellen dies. But Death dies too. She has conquered death by dying. Which makes her parallel to Christ. Seen in a Beddoes sort of mood, which T.S. Eliot called “the grotesque,” the Cross, with its biting nail holes, is Christ’s vampire, his demon-lover. There is a difference, however. Christ resurrects into the spirit, a realm that transcends the life-and-death of nature. Dylan Thomas’s later poetry tries to see eternity as immanent within the life-death cycle rather than as a neo-Platonic kind of escape from it, leading him towards what Frye, in his last book, called a “double vision,” following Blake. Those Shakespearean tragic heroes who are led into the liminal realm of death-in-life and life-in-death may have a momentary flash of such a double vision, as when Hamlet, who has spent the length of an enormous play expressing existential nausea, suddenly decides just before he dies that there’a a divinity that shapes our ends. Lear for one heartbreaking moment thinks he sees the dead body of Cordelia breathe, come alive again. But it may be that one has to dare to go out to the liminal borderline to have such visions. And such visions just might kill you, or at least be bought with the price of your death. Eggers’ previous film, The Northman, based on the Hamlet source material, ends with the violent death of its hero—who is, however, in a quick, final tableau seen riding into what is clearly Valhalla. Whether we credit such intimations of immortality is the viewers’ or readers’ choice.

But Ellen is an admirable role model in a way that does not depend on believing in anything beyond the cycle of life and death. She is heroic, not because she is a noble, self-sacrificing angel, but because, in street language, she takes responsibility for her own shit. She acknowledges that her early-life summoning of her demon-lover Orlok has had tragic consequences, invading and sabotoging her marriage, killing her woman friend, devastating the whole town with plague. a

Even Orlok is in a certain sense her victim, because she summoned him, not vice versa. And she takes responsibility rather than trying to say, “Well, I’m sorry that some people have been caught up in my train wreck. But I had a hard life, so it’s not my fault, and I had a right to do what I did.” Her acceptance of responsibility for her decision is to me inspiring. In this way, Ellen is greater than Hamlet, who makes excuses all the way to the end, greater than those who say mea culpa but passively wallow in a self-indulgent guilt. Thus, Ellen resembles a tragic hero like Samson in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, who admits the damage his bad relationship choices have brought upon his people, but ultimately shrugs off his passive despair, and by that shrug brings down the Philistine temple. Moral perfection is beyond us. We cannot avoid making mistakes and wrong choices, but what we can do is confront the demons we have summoned, and do what we can to deal with the consequences.

References

Frye, Northrop. A Study of English Romanticism. Chicago, 1968. Also published in Northrop Frye’s Writings on the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Edited by Imre Salusinszky. Volume 17 of The Colllected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2005. 76-205.

Stephenson, Craig E. Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche. Revised edition. Routledge, 2017.