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Lily-Rose Depp‘s performance in Nosferatu as Ellen Hunter, a newlywed young woman entangled in a nightmarish psychosexual battle with a vampire, is being heralded as career-defining. Her co-star Bill Skarsgård plays Count Orlok her tormentor — and looks very different from the sexed up vampires we’ve seen in recent decades.
Director Robert Eggers kept Skarsgård’s look under wraps in the film’s promotion. But he teased in an interview with Vanity Fair that Orlok would look more like a “folk vampire” than the heartthrobs of recent cinema. What does “folk vampire” translate to? A frightening figure. “That means he’s a dead person,” Eggers said. “And he’s not like, I look great and I’m dead’. Folk vampires, in some ways, are more visually similar to zombies.” And he looks every bit his pre-historic age as he “courts” Ellen.
And that’s where power resides in Nosferatu, Robert Egger’s interpretation of the 1922 F.W. Marnau classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, a film that turns one of horror’s most dated tropes on its head.
The Heartthrob In The Vampire Horror Genre
From Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt in Interview With A Vampire to Robert Pattinson in Twilight, vampires have been played by literal teen idols for decades. They’re often presented as central players in young women’s sexual awakening. And the genre has been criticised for this. Charity Women’s Aid expressed concern about Twilight, a tale that could be interpreted as the story of a many-centuries-old stalker who grooms an insecure teenager. “Coercive and controlling behaviour can be mistaken for romantic behaviour at early points in relationships, and our culture all too frequently reinforces this confusion,” a spokesperson told the BBC in 2020 ahead of Meyer’s final series instalment.
Coercive Control In Nosferatu
Skarsgård’s Orlok is not the seductive vampire villain we’ve come to expect from these narratives, and Ellen is far from his passive victim.
In Nosferatu, a young Ellen’s childhood loneliness and fledgling sexuality leads her to summon Orlok accidentally. “Come to me, come to me, here is my call,” a teenage Ellen whispers as a hand reaches out to her in the darkness. The teenage Ellen promises herself to Orlok and an implied erotic encounter follows.
From then on, Hutter is haunted by memories and nightmares of what she describes as “my shame.”
She attempts to move on, falling in love with Adam Hutter, played by Nicholas Hault. He’s a junior solicitor and a naive and inexperienced young man. Ellen loves him in the ardent, lonely fashion that anyone who has kept a major secret from their partner to preserve a picture-perfect image of themselves will understand.
When he summoned away to execute a real estate deal with an eccentric client, Count Orlok, in a distant land, Ellen is seized by panic and begs him not to leave. His worry about their finances outstrips his worry about her mental health, and he takes the assignment, leaving her with friends played by Aron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin.
Lily-Rose Depp Upends The Ingenue Trope In Nosferatu
Depp’s Hutter is far from the passive figure of traditional vampire narratives. She’s sexually rapacious (her young husband seems at times overwhelmed by her enthusiasm) and demanding.
And as Orlok encroaches on her life, she’s terrifying as much as she is terrified.
According to Deadline, the instruction of choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie Lily-Rose Depp learnt a form of Japanese dance called the Butch or “dance of utter darkness.” Her scenes of possession are violent. As male doctors gather around her, wondering if her malady is caused by her period, she writhes and contorts her body with jerky movements, leering uncannily and jerking about like a marionette on a string.
Anyone who has had their feel of vampire movies might expect Skarsgård to appear without his prosthetics and in his hauntingly dashing form when he arrives on Depp’s doorstep. But as he demands not only her body but the fulfilment of a promise she made as a child that she be “his” for eternity, he remains glistening and reptilian.
You might wish Skarsgård would emerge behind his prosthetic, but he doesn’t. His interactions with Hutter aren’t aestheticised. He’s a hulking grizzly monster, which makes his coercion of Hutter, which ranges from supernatural erotic trickery to crude blackmail and threats, more obvious. She’s not a young girl fascinated; she’s an adult woman entangled with an abusive and controlling centuries-old stalker.
Her choice is less about leaving her husband for a supernatural “bad boy” and more about saving her loved ones and city from death.
Nosferatu is a haunting interpretation of Marnou’s original. It is worth seeing alone for the attention to detail in costumes, exemplary cast, including Emma Corrin, Samuel Taylor Johnson, and Willem Defoe, and tight script. Egger’s decision to make Orlock a frightening figure makes the story even more powerful and gives Ellen, along with Depp and Hoult’s performances, more power.
Nicholas Hault becomes a genuinely heartbreaking figure as he realises his wife isn’t simply melancholy and needy. She’s a victim of childhood abuse locked in an ongoing battle with her predator beyond his understanding, and far from saving her, she may need to rescue him.
It’s an unusual scenario for a relatively innocent young man living in the conservative 1830s to find himself in, making the pair’s dedication to each other even more moving.
Egger’s Nosferatu imbues one of the oldest horror stories in the genre with a modern interpretation of domestic terror.
Who Is In The Nosferatu Cast?
Nosferatu has a packed cast. Along with Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hault, and Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin play the Hutter’s friends, Anna and Friedrich Harding. Willem Defoe plays the professor who comes to their aid, Albin Eberhart von Franz and Ralph Inerson appears as Dr Wilhelm Sievers.
Nosferatu Release Date
Nosferatu will be released in Australia on January 1st, 2025.
The post Lily-Rose Depp’s Nosferatu Finally Flips The Dated Vampire Seduction Narrative appeared first on ELLE.
