Despite being a giant baby who has to Google the number of jump scares in a film before seeing it, I managed to drum up the courage to catch Nosferatu in theaters over the weekend. The film was excellent, creepy, and filled with classic vampire lore, but the dynamic between Orlok and Ellen haunted me the most.
To me, horror is most impactful when you know it can happen in real life, and the relationship between Orlok and Ellen is, unfortunately, all too familiar. Nosferatu opens with a teenage Ellen crying and calling into the night for companionship.
“Come to me, a guardian angel. A spirit of comfort. A spirit of any celestial sphere. Anything.”
Orlok answers her call, and they become “lovers” in a twisted sense. Though a young Ellen welcomes the relationship at first, their encounters turn to torture once Orlok’s true nature surfaces, and his lust bleeds into violence.
Years later, an adult Ellen still suffers from nightmares from the encounters but never actually tells anyone why. Toward the film’s climax, Ellen finally confides in her husband Thomas, who is reeling from his own harrowing experience with the vampire.
She calls her past relationship with Orlok her “shame” that she carried for years until she met Thomas, who affirmed her and showed her she’s more than what she went through.
The Ellen and Orlok dynamic made me think about my teens and the experiences that haunted me and many of my girlfriends well into adulthood.
My experience started at 16 when I went to my first hardcore show in my hometown, and I met a man in his mid-20s who played in a few bands in the scene. He was kind and charming and would give rides to shows if you needed them.
Despite all my mom’s warnings about older men, I began a friendship with him. My home life was dysfunctional, and while I had friends at school, many of those friendships felt superficial and were sprinkled with backhanded compliments and nice-nasty jabs.
I didn’t know it then, but at 16, I, like Ellen, was also calling into the ether for someone to ease my loneliness. And the man I met that day did exactly that. Like the early days of Ellen and Orlok, my friendship with this person was “sweet, and I had never known such bliss.”
He asked about school and the music I listened to. On our way to shows, he’d let me plug my iPod Nano into his car’s aux to share whatever new band caught my ear. Soon, compliments on my music tastes became compliments on my face, then my body. Then, hugs lingered a little longer, and texts became a little flirtier.
Eventually, our friendship ended with an encounter too inappropriate to be between a 17-year-old girl and a man whose 30s peeked around the corner. Afterward, I was left feeling a mix of emotions that gradually combined into shame. And, like Ellen, I carried that shame for years and kept it to myself until my mid-20s.
By that time, stories of grown men in the music scene grooming and assaulting their young female fans (and colleagues) would come to light, and I’d realize my story wasn’t all that uncommon.
In fact, it’s a tale older than Orlok himself. A teenage girl, feeling stifled and isolated by the expectations placed upon her gender, longs for “company and tenderness,” as Ellen put it. Another person, often a man and often older, comes along with the promise of genuine companionship.
He sees her, fills that void, and makes her feel desired. But eventually, Romeo turns out to be a wolf looking to devour an isolated and vulnerable deer. To this day, I still find myself catching up with girlfriends from high school and uncovering dark truths about their past relationships.
Dinners would lose their taste, and phone calls would become awkwardly silent when we’d recall a memory and realize that the ex-boyfriends, teachers, mentors, or musicians who showed us “love” only ever wanted to sink their teeth into our necks.
Like Orlok, many of these men would have a completely different delusion about the past. One of my favorite scenes in Nosferatu is when Orlok and Ellen confront each other. He calls Ellen an “enchantress” who stirred him from his grave and says she’s in denial about her lust for him.
“You are a deceiver,” Ellen says.
“You deceive yourself,” Orlok argues.
He tells Ellen she knows he doesn’t feel love, only appetite. He says they’re destined for each other and that she pledged herself to him all those years ago. And that, as sick as it was, she enjoyed it.
“I was an innocent child!” Ellen cries.
“Your passion is bound to me,” Orlok says. “Remember how we once were. A moment. Remember?”
The conversation struck a chord because how often have I seen this play out in real life?
“She came on to me; she tempted me; she didn’t say no; she knew what she was getting into; she liked it,” are all tired excuses (and lies) I’ve heard men say when accused of abuse, from emo bands to film producers to world-renowned authors.
But no matter what Orlok or any abuser says, what’s done in the dark eventually comes to light.
The bittersweet final scene of Nosferatu tugged at my heart the most. Seeing no other way to end Orlok’s wrath, Ellen sacrifices herself by letting the vampire feast on her until dawn. As the two are bathed in morning light, a deceased Ellen is beautiful and would appear almost unmarred if she wasn’t soaked in her own blood.
Orlok, who loomed large, foreboding, and powerful throughout the film, shrivels in the light and becomes nothing more than a sad, skeletal figure clinging to his victim. The sun reveals that Ellen was always beautiful both before and despite Orlok’s shadow over her life. And Orlok was always a pathetic, starving creature using the dark to cloak his weakness.
TsundEri 
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