How Nosferatu and Heretic Challenge Blind Faith

 It seems like no one saw the connection between Nosferatu and Heretic, where the directors present us with their cases against and for blind faith in different but ultimately similar ways, letting us know how we see the world. What tipped me off about what Eggers is doing is that I read the book a couple of months before the trailer for Nosferatu came out. In the book, Lucy Westerna (here Anna), the best friend of Mina (essentially Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp), had to be beheaded. When Lucy became a victim of Dracula, she turned into a vampire, leading to her beheading. But here, we see Aaron Taylor-Johnson coughing blood and kissing her dead body, without awakening her or the kids.

I thought about why Eggers made this choice—to not show another vampire—and realized that Dracula, or here Count Orlock, is actually the plague itself. For me, he was part unstoppable imagination, part powerful hallucinations and feaver, some mental illness, and the real plague that came from Romania.

Who was the first to come into contact with Orlock? Ellen. The movie starts with her experiencing some kind of epilepsy, switching back and forth to the image of the vampire sucking her blood, leaving her breathless, with symptoms we see throughout the film:

Epilepsy — also known as a seizure disorder — is a brain condition that causes recurring seizures. There are many types of epilepsy. In some people, the cause can be identified. In others, the cause is not known. Seizure symptoms can vary widely. Some people may lose awareness during a seizure, while others don’t. Some may stare blankly for a few seconds during a seizure. Others may repeatedly twitch their arms or legs, movements known as convulsions.

Sounds familiar? Ellen developed this dark obsession with these characters she either read, heard, or imagined somewhere along the way. Legends and myths travel—ask yourself, how do we know about so many of them now? Fairy tales, gods, witches.

The second person we meet is Herr Knock, who had already started his occult journey. I need to check again whether he had already gone to Romania or if his mental illness caused his belief in the stories of the dark book he possesses. What was it? The Book of Secrets? We know people who believe in books and act on their teachings. Who do we find in the count's coffin?

Ellen then placed—or we could say dumped—her fears and beliefs into the feeble mind of Thomas, who was either already under the influence of the plague due to his contact with Knock or was about to catch it in Romania in that village among all the unclean people there. Little by little, he starts experiencing the fever and hallucinations, built from his wife’s nightmares and ongoing mental problems, the strange encounter with Knock, and the Romanian people, who were extremely superstitious to the point of sacrifices, digging up dead bodies, and staking them.

No one who wasn’t affected by this myth, the hallucinations, or the mental illness due to epilepsy—or wasn’t experiencing something they couldn’t explain—ever saw Dracula.

How fascinating it was to see that even the men of science went to Willem Dafoe’s character when they couldn’t label what was happening. Doctor von Franz (aka Willem Dafoe) only reinforced the beliefs of the feeble-minded and mentally challenged with superstitions. And we believe him because someone told us we’re watching a movie about vampires, where no one in their right mind actually sees a vampire. But we hear that a creature is coming, and we can’t explain the strange things happening around us, so it must be true.

Here, as in Heretic, the directors test our core beliefs and how we see the world. Did the monster actually cause the damage with its arrival (which was an incredible way to portray it), or did the real powerful diseases of the mind and body combine and evolve into this legend that gave a face to the thing we fear: death, so we can cope?

I can’t stop thinking about the final scene, where Orlock died in the arms of his conjurer, Ellen, and how her husband and the doctor came into the room without reacting to the count’s body on top of her. I need to see it again, but I don’t feel like either of them actually saw the count. Her husband simply came to her and closed her eyes after she died. And how she died—the way it was prophesied in the book that Knock and von Franz got hold of. A book that she probably got hold of earlier and that reinforced her belief in the creature. We know people who believe in books and act on their teachings.

The creature was on her body, drinking her blood until the song of the first cock (which I thought was a hilarious way to put it)—a grotesque, deformed, and disruptive reality creature. I don’t remember anyone reacting to it. How fitting it is for my argument that the creature died with her.

I feel like Nosferatu and Heretic are the answers to Life of Pi, where two stories are told, both with the same end. One of those stories is disturbing and horrific, while the other has color, a clear threat, and hope to defeat it. Which one would you choose?

It’s interesting that I didn’t realize what Life of Pi was saying back then. After the second viewing, it hit me harder than I could’ve expected. Now, the same revelation happened with Nosferatu, powered by Heretic, which is the opposite of what Pi did back then. It showed me that I had faith and blind belief. Now, with the eyes of realism and the prior knowledge I gained from reading the book, I was able to challenge the belief in Nosferatu and see that he was just an answer to questions that had no explanation when they were asked.

It’s striking that so many people didn’t see these connections and only saw the monster, even when the movie provided the necessary evidence to overthrow it—like the audience was suffering from that fever and the need to believe there’s something else responsible.

Keep in mind Eggers’ movie The Witch, which portrayed a realistic take on a family struck by hunger and sickness, explaining their suffering through witchcraft—the one explanation that made sense back then. Of course, in The Witch, it seemed like the witch existed by the end. But here, Eggers’ craft is so sophisticated that he ends the movie with Ellen’s death. How powerful a book can be—its words, interpretations. How powerful a movie can be?

Iliya Badev