Nosferat-WHO? The Folkloric Roots of Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024)

Illustration by Connie Piper

Is Gothic horror back? Bursting at the seams with shadows, rats, blood and nightmarish visions, Nosferatu fits the bill. Vampire films are hardly rare, so what is it that the film resurrects, aside from a long-dead Transylvanian Count? For me, a historian and vampire fanatic, it’s Robert Eggers’ use of folklore as much as the film’s powerful cinematography that sets it apart.

 While vampire media has become increasingly oversaturated, Eggers stands apart by grappling with the folkloric roots of the creature. Monsters that feed on human or animal blood, whether reanimated corpses or not, have haunt ed mythologies from Ancient Persia to nineteenth century Britain, where we find Bram Stoker writing his Dracula. Most vampire media picks from this wealth of sources, granting their monsters the seductive draw of the Scottish Baobhan Sith alongside the bat-like attributes of the vetala of Sanskrit folklore. Yet, the effect of this lifts the vampire from its cultural context and limits its distinctive threat.

Each vampiric creature developed under specific conditions, with the Holly wood vampire becoming its own “type”. We know what to expect from a movie vampire: its flashing fangs paired with a vaguely Eastern European accent, or glittering skin and sob-worthy backstory. While Stoker’s Count was created to feed (and feed off of) fin-de-siècle anxieties surrounding imperial collapse, disease, miscegenation, sexuality and devolution, these fears translate less successfully to modern screens and society. Perhaps we aren’t afraid of that kind of vampire anymore. Most popular contemporary vampire media, like What We Do in the Shadows, relies on this fact for its success. Instead of feeling like the vampire is a dangerous and freakish threat to our existence, we see ourselves as part of the gang. By bringing a vampire out of Romanian folklore to our screens, Eggers brings something new (or very old) to the genre.

Romanian vampires, though often blanketed with the term “vampyr”, are distinct entities. In Adrien Cremene’s Mythologie du Vampire en Roumanie (1981), he divides them into “types”: strigoi and moroi. While dead moroi were known as nightmare-bringers, living strigoi were beings with multiple souls and hearts, who could commune with other vampires through sending out their souls at night. They were often referred to as witches, rather than vampires. In the opening scene of Nosferatu (2024), we see Ellen call out to a ‘Spirit’ or ‘anything’ that will hear her call. Ellen is established as a somnambulist (sleepwalker) early on in the film, connecting her with the night, while Von Franz believes she may have been an oracle in time long past. Like wise, according to her doctor, her body has too much blood. To me, this suggests that Ellen, and her connection to Orlok, was inspired by the strigoi. Yet, in her scientific realm of 1830s Germany, she is misunderstood: constrained, bled and drugged to negate her confusing abilities.

T he term Nosferatu/ nosferat has a more challenging history with multiple conflicting sources – as is often the case with studies into folklore. Combining an 1896 article by Heinrich von Wlislocki, a Transylvanian folklorist, with the 1885 travelogue of Emily Gerard, the nosferat was a type of Romanian vampire that was believed to drink human blood and have sexual intercourse with sleeping women and newlyweds. Alongside other vam pires, the nosferatu bit their victims over the heart or between the eyes, rather than on the side of the neck. According to Gerard, the only way to kill a ‘nosfera tu’ was through staking or burning the creature in its grave. While moroi and strigoi seem to be part of the same sys tem, the nosferat stands apart, appearing in texts about Romania, rather than Romanian texts themselves. In Egger’s Nosferatu (2024), he combines elements of the nightmare-bringing moroi with the more familiar nosferatu to create a truly terrifying creature. Watching the f ilm for the first time, the scenes of Orlok feeding were among the most horrify ing; the messy gulping paired with the sinewy crunch of bone was enough for me to put aside the popcorn. As horror audiences, we’ve come to expect certain behaviours from on-screen vampires that, when challenged, causes a similar kind of dizzying uncanniness and threat that early vampire texts created. After all, Stoker’s Count drinks from the chest of his victims too, though films have made us forget.

My favourite scene in the film is Thomas Hutter’s encounter with the Roma and a vampire. With a vibrant culture and far-spreading history, Romani people on-screen are often boiled down to offensive stereotypes, while off-screen they face severe discrimination. Though Egger’s portrayal of a Romanian section of the Roma is not perfect, it is a considerable improvement from earlier vampire films– yet the bar is pretty low. Hiring nonprofessional Roma actors, musicians and dancers alongside a regional vocal coach and extensive costume research, Eggers and his team put effort into depicting the group more authentically. Most interesting, however, is their unique connection to this area’s folklore. Though Roma representatives and writers have rightly pointed out that Eggers continues to use stereotypes of the “dancing gypsy” and the pickpocket, he does give them the upper hand in understanding the Nosferatu. Despite Thomas’ German education, city clothes and formal documentation, he is at a loss when it comes to the vampire, and he is rightfully laughed at for it.

Non-Roma sources unfortunately outweigh those shared by Romani people themselves, yet there are elements of crossover. In several articles from the 1950s folkloric revival, Romani people, specifically in Eastern Europe, believed that mullo (one who is dead) returned from the dead to drink human blood, as a result of improper burial. Likewise, dhampirs, children of male vampires, could be hired to locate and kill vampires through staking it. Vampires could also be noted through their vile appearance or animal appendages. In Nosferatu (2024), the group use a young maiden on a horse to locate the vampiric corpse, before asking their leader to ‘Find his tail! His cloven hooves!’. While Von Franz argues that the only way to kill a Nosferatu is through Ellen giving herself to the monster, it’s significant that the Roma Thomas encounters have already secured a way to source, identify and kill vampires effectively, without killing a young woman.

 For me, this shows how folklore travels poorly from verbal and generational transmission to formal written sources. Von Franz’s fascination with the occult leads him to read texts about the vampire, Dr Wilhelm’s respect for his former teacher leads him to forego other sources, and Thomas trusts Von Franz over following what he saw the Romani people successfully perform.

In the male-centric world of 1830s German science, superstition is a pastime from which one objective answer is drawn. Egger’s film reveals the cultural underpinnings of Romanian vampires as complex, mobile and varied, making it more challenging for us as a viewer to pin down what Orlok is. By the end of the film, as violets are scattered on Ellen and Orlok’s entangled bodies, we ask: wasn’t there another way? The answer is there probably was, if our characters were willing to learn outside their books.

Written by Charlotte Bookham,

MA Public History student

Issue 18, Popular Culture, Spring 2024.

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Charlotte Bookham is a MA Public History student. She wrote her undergraduate dissertation on vampires of the fin-de-siecle, and her current research explores Victorian circuses, material culture and animal/ human relationships.