Nosferatu as folklore
…and what I mean by Modern Mythology
When Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu hit theaters, many viewers saw it as just another vampire remake—yet the film’s real power lies in how it draws from the deep well of myth and folklore. Modern audiences often encounter these stories as fixed, copyrighted properties, but historically they were fluid, evolving across cultures and centuries.
That’s where Nosferatu becomes more than a horror film that pointlessly rehashes old tropes: it’s an example of how myths survive through variation, retelling, and transformation. For the older, non-seductive vampire—part revenant, part demon—see Paul Barber’s forensic study, Vampires, Burial, and Death and Jan Perkowski’s dossier-driven The Darkling.
People think Nosferatu is just Dracula with the serial numbers filed off—and actually that’s exactly what it is. But I think Eggers recognizes that this is intrinsically the very nature of folklore. So many of us have forgotten, and maybe bought into the idea that intellectual property protects creativity. However, whether we’re talking about the varieties of Greek myths that are commonly only known through Bulfinch, or the folktales made singular by the Brothers Grimm (on which see Jack Zipes’ The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World), or the various traditions syncretized only in the last couple centuries—it is far more historically common for stories to have many similar but not singular forms.
To a certain type of thinking, the varieties and the variations are the thing. The singular story as product is a much newer, and I would argue more artificial construction. Oral-tradition scholars like Albert Lord show how such “multiforms” persist in performance (The Singer of Tales).
There is not a Loki, Dracula, or Superman. There are many—or none. This is the implicit lie in any literal interpretation of a “monomyth,” although I’d not be quick to call Joseph Campbell a literalist.
(You may get a glimmer here of my fundamental issue with copyright law, even if of course I think credit where it’s due is always good manners. But that’s not what this post is about.)
This has always been my way of thinking of stories—it’s why I’ve developed the Fallen Cycle as I did, or why I like the idea of a module or adventure as blueprint rather than a guide in RPGs. Watching Nosferatu a second time, it occurs to me that’s clearly recognized here as well. And on the filmmaking front: Eggers leans into immersive atmospherics—sound design guided like a conductor, stage-adjacent performances that still mind the lens, dialogue rarely the main course. There’s a “closeness” and intimacy that sits opposite someone like Villeneuve, who also foregrounds image and place but at a cosmic remove. For cinema, I’ve unlearned some of my old bias for purely cerebral scripts; the experience on screen is the point. Ordering Eggers for novelty is like asking a chef known for source-driven steak and potatoes to reinvent cows. You literally came here for a good treatment of those ingredients.
Eggers threads the needle between Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu—a pestilence fable where Orlok arrives by ship with rats and is undone at dawn by Ellen’s deliberate self-sacrifice—and Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, which reframes the Count as a tragic immortal and twists the finale so Harker carries the curse forward while Van Helsing is hauled off by the authorities. Eggers’ version returns the emphasis to folk demonology and epidemic dread (the rats are back), layers in occult design thinking drawn from the original’s lineage, and recenters Ellen as the active hinge of the story; formally, it adopts a period-precise, sound-led intimacy rather than silent-era stylization. Even the ending honors the older rule—dawn’s “purity,” not UV incineration—so the movie converses with both predecessors without copying either.
One of the key variations Eggers restores is the vampire not as a purely corporeal, charismatic seducer, but as a possessing spirit—a demon that rides the living or the dead, sometimes diffusing itself among rats and contagion, at other times focusing its presence within one host. This aligns with strands of Slavic and Balkan belief, where “vampire” names a type of revenant or demonic agency more than a tuxedoed noble. Early literary channels that fed Stoker include John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, while Western awareness of “vampire panics” came by way of Augustin Calmet’s 18th-century treatise and sensationalized cases like Arnold Paole.
As it is overtly presented in the film, this is a return to older folklore of the type rather than the introduction of something new. We see a village and glimmers of the myths and traditions that continued through Orthodox communities, much as other strains of (so-called) paganism remained in Christian factions of the West. The Moravian, the Transylvanian, the Ottoman, etc. Of course, the story of Vlad Țepeș is itself tangled up with a geopolitical hinge in that hotspot of eastern Rome, Istanbul—was it Constantinople? Byzantium?—where the 1453 fall of the city under Mehmed II reconfigured the region that later incubated Stoker’s sources.
There is not space to draw all these things out in a film, nor does a particular story always demand it, but the implications are there.
My sense, however, is that while it is true that the vampire as spirit or demon is typically the older if not original form—one might even go back to Babylonian and Jewish stories of Lilith and the lilītu—I don’t read Eggers’ Nosferatu as a mere restatement. It refines the link between incubus/succubus traditions and vampirism—long discussed by reference works on the incubus or succubus—and places it near the foreground without lapsing into pulp seduction.
The implication that Nosferatu is a demon carries with it occult baggage, fundamental to the story and yet on the surface used mostly in passing—signed compacts, deals with a devil (if not the devil), and sigils... a seven-pointed star on his grave, for instance. In much of Western esotericism, the heptagram indexes the seven classical planets. While Venus is more strictly tied to the pentagram by its fivefold synodic loop, later systems sometimes braid these associations, particularly as the heptagram became a glyph for Lilith in some traditions in the 19th century. It’s hard to say which Egger’s intended.
In any event, the film lets this texture do quiet work on the bond between Ellen and the Count. Their “relationship” is itself a sort of contract, signed, temporarily reneged upon, and then finally sealed with both of their death. It is however funny for a movie that is couched in occult symbols to rib Newton with a line about making him “cringe in fear of the supernatural.” It’s worth remembering that the historical Newton was neck-deep in alchemy and prophetic studies—see the Oxford-based Newton Project or the Cambridge collection of Newton’s manuscripts.
Eggers also returns the vampire to plague and vermin. The film’s rat-legion imagery and shipboard dread are not just production design; they’re the old equation of revenant = pestilence (you can see that line in Barber above, and in the dossiers surrounding cases like Paole). Contemporary reviewers also clocked this emphasis—see Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review.
It’s notable, too, that Nosferatu has always been an unauthorized cousin of Dracula. Murnau’s 1922 film changed names and details to dodge rights. Stoker’s estate sued, and a German court ordered prints destroyed. The myth survived anyway. Eggers knows this lineage and refuses to hide it, speaking openly in craft-focused interviews like the American Cinematographer piece on the 2024 production. On rules: he also nods toward pre-“sunlight incinerates” folklore where dawn and cock-crow end the visitation.
The various textual connections between incubus/succubus, Lilith, and vampires are well recognized in scholarship, but in this version they’re handled with an intentionally restrained pulse. However, it’s interesting that earlier Nosferatu adaptations typically lean less on sexual possession than Stoker’s Dracula. Here that energy lands differently, and it isn’t off-loaded from Mina/Ellen onto a friend but rather made central to the theme and resolution of the film—another small but telling variation. (Meanwhile, a brief aside: the movie’s nods at nineteenth-century “hysteria” are sharper suggested than argued—and better for it—given the medical history of the term’s long slide into dustbin diagnoses, or the basis of so much of the psychology of the era in maintaining patriarchal control over women.)
At the end, Nosferatu is destroyed by the light of dawn—as if a nightmare that clung to us for a single night. “It was all just a dream” can satisfy within this form precisely because the shape of the ending is already known; the meaning is in the middle, and as I’ve said, in the variations. If you don’t know how Nosferatu ends, you almost certainly know how Dracula ends. (Or Strahd? Or…) Eggers even threads a conscious homage to older lore: Murnau’s creature dies at cock-crow/dawn rather than direct solar incineration, and Eggers tips toward that tradition rather than the later codification.
Broadly speaking, this approach to story—as repeated and repeatable forms—is what I call “mythic,” where variations are a primary means of making meaning. It’s exactly what I mean when I say RPGs are mythic: the table retells, recombines, and thereby authors. Deities and demigods are optional. A cyberpunk campaign can be mythic without a pinch of magic. The other half, as I’ve said on the podcast, is that a story becomes common property in the doing—shared constraints, shared delight, shared authorship.
But there is another way of encountering media, where repetition of a form is bad because it is already partly or wholly known. It emphasizes surprise and novelty, so once you know the end, what’s the point of the start? “Nosferatu isn’t interesting, because I’ve already seen or read Dracula.” I don’t know what to make of that hermeneutic besides admitting it’s valid—like how some folks will always prefer rom-coms to, well, literally anything else. It’s simply not for me.
What Eggers does here is refuse the false binary. Nosferatu acknowledges its lineage openly—yes, the serial numbers are filed off—and then it treats that lineage as a living system, not a museum piece. The film doesn’t try to out-twist Dracula, but instead digs down into an older substrate and lets the variations do the work. That’s folklore. That’s how myths move. And if you want my bias up front: it’s how the best games, the best campaigns, and—occasionally—the best films keep breathing.
We’ve now seen what he does with witches, Vikings, and vampires. I’m looking forward to werewolves.
As an aside, one thing did break immersion for me, and it’s silly, but there it was: every time Orlok appeared I heard a voice singing, “staaart wearing purple, wearing purple…” He also kind of looks like “mental-asylum era” Nietzsche. Yes, it’s just a mustache—and fitting for the Eastern European folkloric frame—but nevertheless…
