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Catholics don’t have much cause to go to the movies—and Robert Eggers’ remake of the classic silent film Nosferatu is at once an argument for and against this. Eggers presents a hauntingly beautiful film about horrifically ugly things and, in so doing, makes a compelling case to retain a spiritual center in a world where the spiritual has been relegated to a place of unimportance.
Though Nosferatu contains indefensible sexual content (which easily disqualifies it from unconditional viewing), it is, notwithstanding, a noteworthy instance of a mainstream film leaning into the truths of ancient principles instead of the lies of modern propaganda. Though, in reviewing this piece of “elevated horror,” the question is begged whether horror as an art form has any place for Catholics.
In 1995, for the centenary of cinematography, the Vatican recommended 45 significant films for Catholics. F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent-era Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is the only horror film on the list. The film, starring Max Schreck as the titular vampire, is considered the first horror movie and an exemplar of German Expressionism in its distorting shadows and presentation of inward emotion as opposed to outward realism.
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Besides its horrific subject and imagery, Nosferatu was controversial as a thinly-veiled bootlegging of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and lost a suit led by Stoker’s widow, resulting in a ruling that all copies of the film were to be destroyed. Rogue copies of Nosferatu survived to haunt cinemas like the undead ghoul it featured, and it has since become a staple of film history.
The Vatican’s inclusion of Nosferatu is interesting, considering the film’s lavish remake over a century later (it was also revisited by Werner Herzog in 1979). The themes of the story are spiritually significant. As Stoker himself put it in his novel, “the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.”
Nosferatu brings two epochs in Robert Eggers’ distinct style, set in the German town of Wisborg at the dawn of the industrial age, when the world was getting too small and too civilized for things like gods and goblins. Eggers presents a premodern time that is both disenchanted and enchanted—etymologically, “in a song”—with new-age men exposed to old-world monsters empowered by the loss of faith.
The surge in society, science, and success—and the resulting spiritual stagnation—is what makes the times susceptible to spiritual attack. The protagonist, Ellen (played fervently by Lily-Rose Depp), is a young woman with a gift of transcendent sensitivity, whose morally puritanical and socially restrictive upbringing failed to channel her otherworldly intuitions and longings wholesomely, leaving her a lonely victim of a fiend who animates the putrid, mustached body of a long-dead Transylvanian nobleman, Count Orlok (played with dripping gravitas by Bill Skarsgård).
Orlok rises from a tomb of ancient history with unnatural powers, deadly patience, and the calculation of a warlord to befoul Ellen’s goodness as her demon lover, unguarded as she is by a spiritually blind society. Ellen would have been a potent mystic in a more mystical age but is a victim of her times as much as she is of the vampire—the “nosferatu,” in an archaic Romanian tongue.
Throughout this dark fairy tale, Eggers’ directorial talents are on full display. With emphasis on natural lighting and historical accuracy, Eggers plunges into the dream logic of terrifying trances under demonic sorcery. He recreates the rituals of Romanian gypsies who feared the undead as the devil’s grotesque parody of resurrection. He embodies evil in Orlok as an authentic folklore vampire, an antichrist of rotting flesh and eternal appetite who comes at Christmastime to a city languishing under spiritual and physical plague to destroy life in spite of life. Throughout this dark fairy tale, Eggers’ directorial talents are on full display. With emphasis on natural lighting and historical accuracy, Eggers plunges into the dream logic of terrifying trances under demonic sorcery. Tweet This
At the same time, Eggers holds up the aura of holiness in the haloed heads of icons high on a convent ceiling as the cure to the hand of Hell. He emphasizes that evil can only be overthrown by heroic sacrifice and that darkness is no match for the light of redemption. All this with an eye and a palette and a script that conjures up a world where all this was reality and, though lost, is no less real. Disturbing and dreadful though it be, Nosferatu is powerful, art-house cinema that gives voice to the dimensions that scientism and secularism cannot explain. The vampire represents an often forgotten or discredited ancient evil that finds ample opportunity to prey upon the busy, godless people of a busy, godless world.
The inclusion of the original horror movie, Nosferatu, on the Vatican list suggests that tales of terror have a place in the Catholic imagination. It certainly had a place in the classical imagination. Horror has much to do with the tragic structure, where a good man toils toward his own undoing without realizing it until it’s too late. That coming to grips with a chaotic universe, that wrestling with human fragility, and the catharsis of seeing lives come crashing down is the stuff of horror. Moreover, ghosts, monsters, violence, death, and fear are indelible parts of imaginative inheritance. All of these may be inspired by the fascination with evil as well as the determination to conquer it.
But is fear a healthy emotion? Fear is one thing; fear of the Lord is another, which involves a kind of self-knowledge. It may be that the healthy horror reaction is one of being humbled and not horrified. But this is not necessarily what horror commonly delivers. There is no genre more polluted than horror, and it requires so much caution that it merits dismissal. Nevertheless, there is something good in the emotive experience and heightened sense that there are powers beyond our ken and control. That is a strong subtext of any worthy horror story—that for all our learning and sciences, there are things unaccounted for, which offers a true and often chilling perspective.
This principle is central to Nosferatu and Eggers’ emergent filmography—The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), The Northman (2022), and Nosferatu (2024)—all include a vibrant or visceral spiritual element and energy that is unusual and unique. Whether religious or mythical or folklorist, Eggers’ vision incorporates the incorporeal with intention and skill, capturing images and dialogue that evoke a world that is still touched by the spiritual elements and attitudes that once used to dominate human enterprise and imagination—and which must either be joined or rejected.
Eggers, 41, considers himself a spiritual person but “not in any kind of a traditional way, but certainly in all my work…I am trying to reach the sublime,” he said in an interview. When it comes to depicting people of traditional spirituality, he says,
It’s so frustrating being an American filmmaker sometimes, where even the small movies are so much more concerned about getting that profit back, and it gets so wrapped up in your brand and your identity. This is going to sound awfully precious…but the idea of medieval craftsmen doing it for God is an appealing one to me.
So it is. Eggers may not be a traditional believer, but he is certainly a traditional artist. His closing shot for Nosferatu is a testimony to his sensitivities to ancient themes of art, creating his own beautiful, yet brutal, tableau of Death and the Maiden, a common motif in German Renaissance art that developed from the medieval danse macabre. In this romantic custom, Eggers taps into an idea that is born of the Catholic artistic tradition of death, even with its erotic undertones, showing the love that must somehow be suffered in surrendering to death.
The mysterious intersection of sex and death have led to the current problem with the vampire. He has become less of a monster and more of a man: a sympathetic creature of gothic charm, a lost romantic soul of mystery, seduction, and seclusion with the attraction of the outcast. These qualities have their place in storytelling, but they assume a dangerous aspect when wed to the mythos of the vampire in the context of secularism and relativism. The moral muddiness that defines the age is one that recasts villains like vampires in a new, questioning light that asks whether foes might be misunderstood heroes. It is of cultural significance, therefore, that Eggers’ vampire returns to the monstrous identity of this creature of spiritual significance, even if he is still a seducer.
There are unfulfilled, vulnerable souls mired in the bloodsucking world who will be tempted by what the vampire signifies if not given an avenue to grace. Hence the vampire recommended by the Vatican. As the horror story has evolved, there is an increasing penchant to succumb rather than struggle, diluting the inconvenient implications of the spiritual realm. Orlok is reduced to a dried-out husk at the end of Robert Eggers’ film, but the evil which animated that son of the devil still seeks new victims with shadowy stealth. And of that enemy, and of the charism he has established over the centuries, Catholics should ever be wary.
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