how i would like my lover to come to me: on nosferatu (2024).

and my love affair with the horrific body.

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“Eventually, I confess to a friend some details about my weeping—its intensity, its frequency. She says (kindly) that she thinks we sometimes weep in front of a mirror not to inflame self-pity, but because we want to feel witnessed in our despair. (Can a reflection be a witness? Can one pass oneself the sponge wet with vinegar from a reed?)” — maggie nelson, bluets.

my nosferatu (2024) viewing took place in the late evening, during the onset of winter storm blair.

I didn't know her name was Blair yet. Instead, I only knew that the air was frigid and everything looked beautiful from where I sat inside the frosted car at the gas station.

I went with my oldest sister, who drove quickly but carefully.

The snow blew into our windshield, rendering the world white and endless in its steady dusting. We drove past neighborhoods with lovely fences that were a lattice of white, where single lampposts or clusters shed light onto the growing inches. It was the perfect atmosphere, and by the time we rolled into the parking deck, I had a feeling I would be entranced by the vampiric picture awaiting me.

We went to one of those large cinemas where you can order food as if it were a restaurant and sip on watered-down Argentinian white wine that tastes even more repugnant after several forkfuls of kale salad—weeping with some kind of sweet vinaigrette and weighed down with the almost pulpy bodies of avocado.

The film was perfect—to me and only to me. My sister was rather frightened, which was more than understandable. It was much more disturbing than I had hoped for and truly latched onto the gothic travesty that is vampirism. It showed the vampire in all its foul, terrifying glory: the imbalance of being the center of its affection, the terror that comes with summoning it, the terror that comes with losing yourself in it.

I've always loved the vampire in all its forms. I found it somewhat romantic to be someone else's lifeblood. I always imagined that I would be Ellen in the final scene, bringing the monster back to my chest to drink from my heart as I focused on a spot on the ceiling. I would spin out of myself and float above as I watched my body wither and weaken.

I was chattering relentlessly on the drive home, attempting to explain the pleasure I'd just received from the film. I was almost euphoric as I left the theater, my mind settling into the dark little nook inside me. There were so many themes, like a miniature carnival powered by my own gothic psychosis and borderline animalistic hunger for the terrible and disturbed body.

I'm realizing now that I felt connected to Ellen. Her visions, her connection to this other world through her own machinations? It was a looking glass, and I had been realized. I'd felt this way since I was younger: on the edge of two worlds, tapped into this unsettling energy that possessed me and led to my creativity and suffocating devoted nature. I romanticized it, laid in the dark with orchestral music playing and my mirror turned away from my bed due to superstition.

I had—for lack of a better word—prophetic dreams that came to fruition at times in my life. They say the third eye opens, but it felt like eyes were opening all over me. Even now, I'm still strange and feel highly connected. Ellen's body and its movements—I wished at times that would happen to me. That I could scream so freely and expel whatever was inside me, whatever spirit I was touching that was aching to touch me back; whether benevolently or not, I didn't know.

A friend recently told me that I was so easy to understand, that they didn't know how people so often misunderstood me. I told her that most people don't listen to me as intently. I am brushed off as feverishly dreamy, an overt desperate romantic who holds on too tightly to things others so easily let go of. I am white noise.

I am Ellen in the eyes of Friedrich.

As I waited for this tide to slow inside me, I ventured on a quest to see what others thought. Most of the analysis was the same: beautiful and focusing on the love—between Ellen and Thomas mostly, thank God—or the themes of grooming and assault. These were good visions, dredging up thoughts I hadn't yet brought into the light.

But for me, Nosferatu was transformative for one main reason: it was about the body, the horrific body, and how that was, too, its own monster.

Body horror has always been a sub-genre that speaks to me, almost in tongues.

As a woman—and a woman in a family rife with both health anxiety and problems—I've always viewed the body as its own kind of monster. Better yet, a prison. I could not leave it; it came everywhere with me. I almost wept in frustration when I experienced pain in places I didn't remember provoking, bruises that I couldn't explain the existence of.

It was worse when I had to speak to doctors or my own family. My tongue felt like a limp snake in my mouth, and I was wailing in my head for it to move so that I could explain the tremors, the stomach aches, the back pains, the—

It was endless and it was there in the day and worse in the night. I was overly aware of my breathing, of my blood flow, and convinced myself that every possible path led to an ailment that would take me off the earth and cast me outside the gates of whatever the afterlife was.

I worried about going to sleep and not waking up again, opening my eyes only to find myself in a place with a wide sky. I thought a lot about the afterlife and thought of it as white and quiet. It presses against you, I decided. You are slick, weeping, and bare. There is a birdsong in your head. You turn, crouched low like a dog, and whomever you love, they are there. I likened myself to being insane, which was made worse by the truth that I wasn't.

The body is an eternal malady, heightened by femininity in whatever way you respect and engage with it. I grew grateful for my menstruation and looked forward to every cycle because I viewed it as a cleansing—an emptying. I worried when it was late. I wanted to be drained. There is the vampire, do you understand?

When I watched Nosferatu, I was captured by Lily-Rose Depp's open mouth and her quaking frame as she experienced almost orgasmic visions brought on by Count Orlok. Her tremors and terror were so open and large on the screen, a shuddering revelation of her anguish at the hands of this obsessive monster. You aren't allowed to be like that in this world.

And she had people who loved her during this time, like Anna, who was determined to keep her beside her despite not being clear on what was haunting her closest friend.

Ellen's body becomes a theater of horror, her seizures and visions playing out before an audience that alternates between concern and morbid fascination. When she writhes in the garden, when she collapses on the beach, her private torment becomes public property.

I recognize this transformation of private pain into public performance. We're expected to contain our suffering in neat, digestible packages—to hide our tremors, our tears, our terrors. But Ellen's body rebels against this social contract, much like our own bodies sometimes betray us in public spaces, demanding to be acknowledged in their dysfunction.

I think I found it cathartic to have a woman's body twisted and bared on a large screen. It was as if Eggers was saying, “Look at her!” and as if I was saying, “Look at me!” In real life, I often apologize for my pain and discomfort because I am so aware of the emotion it brings to other people.

This past Thursday, I went to get my blood drawn. It was a fasting draw, so I ate nothing, only pumped my stomach full of water leisurely. The phlebotomist got through two vials before I felt an explosion of anxiety and lightheadedness claim me in the chair.

I tried to keep going and apologized a thousand times over for the onset of my anxiety attack and the way it disrupted her work. My blood sugar descended, and I had to practically crawl into the bathroom, sitting heavily on the cool porcelain of the toilet as my mother patted my head with her wet hands.

I apologized to her too, despite everyone telling me that I had done nothing wrong. “You are not the first,” the phlebotomist told me. I thought of that long after she claimed the remaining three vials of my blood. She had to use baby needles; my veins were horrifically small like my father's.

The insides of my arms are still bruised, and I dread when I have to do another panel. They had to let me eat, and I felt embarrassed and childish, almost upset as if I had failed in some way by letting my body burst from the confines of propriety.

Nosferatu, Ellen, Eggers and his direction—they understood that.

Then there's the desire of body horror. I love the body exposed.

I think of the way I like to do my hair, to put it up so that the bend of my neck is visible. When I braid it, I pull it to the side so you can see the swallow of my throat and the strain of my collarbones. I am calling attention to the way that I am living and the way the world is moving through me.

Ellen's body is exposed—albeit through sheer clothing most of the time until the eventual end. She shows herself and the dark edges of her most inner nature to the Count, and he becomes obsessive. It is too much, and she feels maybe shame? I'm not sure. It is just too much, almost oppressive—this viewing and wanting.

The genius of this adaptation lies in how it twists desire into horror and back again. Ellen's attraction to the vampire—and his to her—exists in the same space as her revulsion. Her body becomes a battleground between want and fear, between the erotic and the grotesque.

I think of how we navigate our own relationships with our bodies: how we can desire them, hate them, fear them, all in the same breath. I love my naked body most before I clean it—rinsing it dutifully with warm sluices of shower spray and the soapy slime of my body wash. I hate it sometimes when I touch it, even if it feels good.

The film understands this contradiction. When Ellen arches her back in those vision sequences, we can't tell if she's in ecstasy or agony—perhaps because there's no real difference anymore.

This is further emphasized by its gorgeous cinematography and soundtrack.

Nosferatu's visual language speaks in shadows and reflections, showing us Ellen's body fragmented and distorted through mirrors, windows, and darkness. In one scene, her reflection splits across multiple surfaces, each showing a different version of her—much like how we see ourselves differently in every mirror we pass, each reflection revealing or concealing our perceived monstrosities.

The film's use of shadow play turns Ellen's body into something both more and less than human, reminiscent of those moments when we catch our reflection on an unexpected surface and briefly don't recognize ourselves.

These visual distortions externalize what many of us feel internally: the sense that our bodies are constantly shifting between familiar and foreign, between home and horror.

#7 from “figure series #1” by nymira gray.

In the end, Ellen's submission to Orlok is not just an act of sacrifice or love—it's an acknowledgment of the body's ultimate betrayal and triumph. Like all of us who live in bodies that sometimes feel foreign, she chooses to embrace her monster rather than fight it.

Perhaps that's what makes this version of Nosferatu so devastating: it understands that the most terrifying horror isn't in the vampire's bite, but in recognizing ourselves in the mirror he doesn't cast.

When Ellen finally brings the vampire to her breast, it's both surrender and reclamation. She takes control of her body's betrayal, makes it her choice rather than her curse. I think of how many times I've had to make peace with my own body's rebellions—the anxiety attacks in medical offices, the unexplained bruises, the sudden restriction of breath.

The vampire mythology has always been about transformation, about the body becoming something other than itself. But Eggers's vision suggests something more profound: that perhaps we were always already monsters, always already caught between states of being and unbeing. The horror isn't in the transformation—it's in the recognition.

In those final moments, as Ellen's body becomes both feast and altar, we understand that this was never really about the vampire at all. It was about the terrifying intimacy of inhabiting a body that is simultaneously self and other, beloved and feared, sacred and profane. This is the true horror that Nosferatu reveals: not that monsters exist, but that we might be them.

I'm sure there is more to it than that. Maybe this is just the strange fascination and projection of my own mind. But I think, deep down, I feel that it is right because with the exposure and mutilation of the body came no denial of love.

Anna loved Ellen—which she thanks her for—and Thomas loved her even more after seeing the truth, and her love for him never weakened. Count Orlok was at the least captured by her conjuring of him and found no issue with wreaking havoc on her body, no matter what it looked like.

And that is the core of why I am entirely bewitched and enamored with this film. That idea, that someone would look at me with all of my irrationalities and worries and perversions and sometimes weak flesh and find me only more beautiful than the day before—it haunts me. It is a heaven I wonder if I will ever reach.

I am chronically melancholic, starving for a beautiful life that allows me to be a bit strange and untethered. I want to convulse and scream and break a cabinet of plates as Ellen did with Thomas, and wake with someone next to me who still wants to braid my hair and speak with me.

The body exposed and twisted is the heart exposed and twisted. I suppose I adore the idea that as far as the terror goes, love can go further.

nosferatu (2024) poster design by ilya khokhlov.

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