I quite admire the work of Robert Eggers, particularly his first two films The Witch and The Lighthouse. Though I enjoyed elements of his Nosferatu, like the magnificent opening sequence, the exquisite monologues, the overall originality and thematic ambition of the film (this is a story that has been told by no less than Murnau, Herzog, and Coppola)—I left the experience feeling slightly unsatisfied. The problem for me was not so much Eggers’ style but his teratology. In other words, it had to do more with me than his Nosferatu.
Do I still find vampires terrifying? The question made me recall this essay on Angela Carter’s short story The Lady of the House of Love. In that tale the protagonist is a vampire who for centuries has devoured young men’s blood. Her final demise curiously comes in the form of a young man who arrives to her castle riding a bicycle. This seemingly harmless stranger, who is also a virgin, ends up destroying her with a single kiss. In the end it was not so much the young man that vanquishes the vampire, but his bicycle of all things.
The bicycle in the story is a symbol for something far more sinister and terrifying than any of the monsters of old: modernity. The young man is a soldier joining the front in World War I. The World Wars, which some historians call a single event with a brief interlude in between, displayed the horrific destructive capability of the modern age. The scale of mass murder, the razing of cities, the collective trauma it left as its scarring legacy—these are the elements that China Miéville suggests gave rise to the innovative teratology of the Weird, symbolized most famously in the tentacle. It is to this teratology and its astonishing contemporary reinventions that I am drawn to more and more. As he writes in his essay Weird Fiction:
The fantastic has always been indispensable to think and unthink society, but traditional monsters were now profoundly inadequate, suddenly nostalgic in the epoch of modern war. Out of this crisis of traditional fantastic, the burgeoning sense that there is no stable status quo but a horror underlying the everyday, the global and absolute catastrophe implying poisonous totality, Weird Fiction's revolutionary teratology and oppressive numinous grows.
Weird monsters are the embodiment of a universe that is not just indifferent to the lives of human beings, but delights in torturing them. Weird is a devastating portrayal in literature of the notion of progress, because life in the context of this dehumanizing machinery, this age where individual action is rendered insignificant before forces of incomprehensible magnitude, amounts to a nightmare one can never fully wake up from.
These days the most fervent Satanism is child’s play compared to the quotidian horror underlying our day to day, horror we are a part of whether we like it or not. Eggers’ Nosferatu emphasizes the occult; to me this makes it feel nostalgic. The film has many merits. It possesses an extraordinary morbid beauty. For a film that is stylistically similar to The Exorcist and The Entity, I found the climax surprisingly delicate and moving.
But I am far more afraid of the little rectangle in my pocket than the undead count. As a matter of fact necromancy, shadows, the occult—this is now our shelter.