Eggers advised me Demise and the Maiden was on his thoughts whereas adapting Nosferatu, in addition to numerous different basic 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 thus far function on the concept that we culturally share a type of unconscious during which fears, hopes, and even orgasmic reduction are half-remembered and repeated.
That is by no means extra specific than in Nosferatu, a movie during which Eggers renames his Van Helsing character after real-life Jungian psychologist Marie-Louise von Franz. In actual fact, it’s Dafoe’s Von Franz who muses that in pagan occasions 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 buddy 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 Demise 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 avoid wasting a husband she deeply loves, even when he can by no means respect how.
“I believe that she actually does love Thomas,” Depp advised 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 aspect 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 special aspect of her nature that somebody as earthly and traditional as Thomas can by no means totally 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 devour 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 a number of criticism on the finish of the second half of the twentieth century about nineteenth century novelists who have been principally 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 fascinating [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.”
