Nosfer-HOT-tu [deep breathy moaning]

Thoughts on demonic possession on the eve of January 6th

Hi friends,

I’ve been wanting to write to you for a while now. I was planning to start up again right before the election, but that was back when I was convinced she was gonna win the popular vote. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson has ascended to be the chief information officer of Donald Trump’s white nationalist regime — I mean, honestly the guy does not get enough credit. As our president-elect prepares to have a peaceful transition of power in the place where he incited an insurrection and then spun the story into claims of persecution, I would call the whole thing gaslighting, but I think we can all agree that word has become less effective than a used condom. As we brace for a racist rapist criminal being properly elected to office, I’m called to write to you about another pressing issue challenging my sanity, which is to say: Why the fuck is Willem Dafoe in Robert Eggers 2024 remake of Nosferatu… and not playing Nosferatu?

I have always loved the 1922 Nosferatu, a vampire classic in which a young woman is haunted by a demon / vampire also known as Count Orlok. When a friend told me Willem Dafoe was going to be in the 2024 remake, I gasped. “Oh my God, he’s Nosfer-HOT-to.” My friend shook his head like he had to give a child the hard truth about Santa. “Nah, dude, I hate to tell you this, but Willem Dafoe is not playing Nosferatu, he’s playing a doctor or something.” If Willem Dafoe’s face is not immediately springing into your mind, go ahead and picture the world’s hottest goblin. Anyone who has enjoyed the work of the actor Willem Dafoe, who played the Green Goblin to Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man, and, in real life, resembles a very sexy goblin who talks in riddles and lives in a tree. If you’re not feeling the whole real-life goblin aesthetic, just go with me here, okay, try and see it. The point is that Willem Dafoe is maybe one of the most creepy-hot men to ever live, and I will spend the rest of my days mourning the fact that he was not cast as Nosferatu.

In the 2024 remake, Dafoe is cast a ranting old scientist-cum-occultist who is helping us to understand that our leading lady — Eleanora, portrayed with a terrible case of anemia by Lily Rose Depp — is being possessed by Nosferatu, a vampire / demon, appearing as a haggard and decaying old ogre of a man also known as Count Orlok. While fighting nightmares, dreams, and visions with eyes rolling back in her head, there is a part of Eleanora that is drawn to Nosferatu, and when he finally arrives in her bedroom, Depp moans in the embrace of the smelly old corpse. This was a particular standout detail for me, maybe because I saw the movie with subtitles, and so there was a lot of “[moaning], [deep moaning], and [deep, breathy moaning].” And yet, there, on the big screen, was not a single shred of chemistry to be moaning about, nary a flattering angle, or even one singularly compelling back squeeze. In a climactic scene, before the grand finale in which Eleanora consents to have sex with Nosferatu, he stands before her, trying to convince her that she wants him, that she has asked for this. “I am an appetite,” he tells her. “Nothing more, nothing less.” So then I demand to know, Robert Eggers, why can we not have Nosfer-HOT-to?

There are flashes of brilliant cinematography in the beginning of the re-imaging, when the image of Count Orlok haunts the hollow halls of the Romanian castle where Eleanora’s new husband is sent for his big little-red-riding-hood moment (a quivering Nicholas Hoult). The pull of any good horror movie is always the unknown, the space where there’s room for your imagination to fill in the blanks, to ask questions about what you are most afraid of, deep in the corners of your mind. I often find I am disappointed by the monster, no matter how stunningly gory the reveal, it’s always more tantalizing to be afraid of what you might see.

Eggers handled this balance with eerie electricity in The Witch (2015). I interviewed him about his process of researching the folklore that informed the puritanical intensity of the film, and I was interested to see how he might would bring that studious attention to detail to the cultural fears intersecting in the 1922 film. There were a lot of missed opportunities in this remake that I would have expected Eggers to explore, especially public psychosis in the questioning the reality of Nosferatu haunting not only Eleanora, but sucking the blood, and killing, the people closest to her. The arrival of Count Orlok aboard a ship filled with rats and dead sailors causes important men to question whether there is a demon haunting the town, or just a really bad case of the plague. Be it antique COVID or an incarnate succubus, it is strange that fits of illness have Eleanora arcing her back like that, and in any case, my real gripe here is, for heaven’s sake, if we are going to have to watch this woman [moaning], [deep moaning], and [deep, breathy moaning] before literally fucking a demon, can the demon at least be played by Willem Dafoe?

The joke seems to be on me here, because I went to IMDb to see who, in fact, did play Nosferatu, and it is Bill Skarsgård. I’m not even confused right now, I’m angry. If I were to interview Robert Eggers again, the only question I would ask him is, “Why the fuck are you pranking me? Is the collapse of liberal democracy not stressful enough?” After watching this movie, I had no idea that Count Orlok was played by yet another man with striking cheekbones and an equal capacity for make outs and murder. The haunted thing on screen was a rotting ogre with a voice like a drowning answering machine and not even one moment that deserved [moaning], [deep moaning], or [deep, breathy moaning].

Toward the end of the film, Deep’s Eleanora declares of Nosferatu, “He is my misery, he is my melancholy!” This idea of the demon as the darkness of depression is compelling, and so can be the darkness. In spells of struggle and despair, there lies an allure, the strange seduction of rolling around in the thick muck of your deep loneliness, writhing around on the sharp edge of separation, and there’s a thrilling danger to portraying that as sexual, indeed, an appetite, which also creates a sense of compassion for the negativities of addiction or any given evil. Meanwhile, Willem Dafoe is running across the storyboard, looking like a little silver fox snack / daddy goblin. In his role as doctor something or other, he furthers the plot with scientific theories, and, at one point, declares that he has seen things that would make Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb (hilarious, but not worth the loss of Nosfer-hot-to). I’m not saying that Count Orlok should have been entirely sexy, you need horror, ugliness, even gore, but, I long for the version in which the poison is attractive, if only in glimpses, or at certain angles, so that it might be more possible for us to admit the beguiling nature of misery, loneliness, and evil, so that we might better be able to wrap our heads around why Lily Rose Depp, never mind the majority of the American people, might willingly consent to get fucked by a demon.