Eggers informed me Loss of life and the Maiden was on his thoughts whereas adapting Nosferatu, in addition to numerous different traditional tales about love being supplanted by obsession or self-annihilation, from The Daemon Lover to Wuthering Heights. They every faucet into one thing that’s primal and interesting to the filmmaker’s Jungian leanings about how “these ins and outs of the previous are knocking round in everybody’s heads to a point.” All the director’s movies up to now function on the concept we culturally share a form of unconscious wherein fears, hopes, and even orgasmic aid are half-remembered and repeated.
That is by no means extra specific than in Nosferatu, a movie wherein Eggers renames his Van Helsing character after real-life Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz. In reality, it’s Dafoe’s Von Franz who muses that in pagan instances Ellen may need been revered as a Priestess of Isis, celebrated within the cities of Rome or Thebes, as a substitute of dismissed and locked away as a “troubled spouse” by her father, her husband, and her husband’s condescending good friend who’s the epitome of their nineteenth century second.
Von Franz is Eggers’ voice within the movie, providing true pity but additionally admiration for Ellen’s plight. In contrast to the literary Van Helsing, Von Franz has no delusions that he can defeat the vampire, however he is aware of Ellen’s female energy can conquer the beast. For Ellen, the associated fee is succumbing to literal darkness. She is certainly marriage ceremony herself to Loss of life made flesh. However she isn’t surrendering to evil; she is recognizing the darkness that’s in her personal nature… as all of us should. She then makes use of it to save lots of a husband she deeply loves, even when he can by no means recognize how.
“I believe that she actually does love Thomas,” Depp informed me. “To me that basically is the love story, as a result of she needs so badly to be what he wants and what he needs, and I believe he so badly needs to be what she needs… [but] she has this facet to her that he can’t perceive, sadly, however I believe is fulfilled in her pull to Orlok.”
Whereas different Dracula films search to show the vampire right into a romantic determine, the romance of Eggers’ Nosferatu comes from Ellen’s real love of Thomas. The vampire represents a unique facet of her nature that somebody as earthly and standard as Thomas can by no means absolutely settle for, however that doesn’t imply the vampire is itself romantic. Even Orlok says he’s nothing however “an urge for food” within the film. And his urge for food is to destroy and eat all in his path, together with one thing as delicate and youthful as Ellen. Her self-actualization is thus accepting that she has the urge to be destroyed. Maybe all of us do.
“There was loads of criticism on the finish of the second half of the twentieth century about nineteenth century novelists who have been largely male, but additionally feminine, needing to kill off the heroines who had sexual need or leanings to darkness, and the way misogynist that’s, which isn’t unfaithful,” Eggers mused in regards to the motifs he’s exploring. “However I believe that it was additionally attention-grabbing [to have this] archetype of this demonic feminine who was the hero of the story and the savior—the cultural savior [who] the Victorians wanted to one way or the other get out.”
