The Robert Eggers remake of Nosferatu works not just as a horror movie, but as a character study centered around its protagonist’s sexual nature. Here’s why!
So, when I was a child watching Spongebob Squarepants and I first saw the famous Nosferatu cameo, my first thought was most certainly not, “When I’m almost 30, I’ll write about the sexual nature of the protagonist in that character’s new movie!” Yet here I am. Nosferatu was originally a 1922 film that essentially ripped off the story of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and it was remade in 2024 by Robert Eggers. Though Eggers grounds his version in old-school gothic horror through the production, cinematography, and dialogue, he also puts the story through a more modernist lens when it comes to its lead female character, stealthily turning the film into a heightened sexual character study.
That lead character is Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp, of The King), who possesses a mysterious connection to the occult that has plagued her since childhood. In 1838 Germany, her new husband and real estate agent Thomas (Nicholas Hoult, of Juror #2) is sent away to sell a home to the mysterious Count Orlok, aka Nosferatu (Bill Skarsgård, of Boy Kills World, which I still won’t shut up about). But Orlok is actually a monstrous vampire, and he uses this as an opportunity to seek out Ellen, who is revealed to have a traumatic past with the monster. He invades her home, spreading destruction and plague to her family, all to gain her eternal devotion to him.
The connection between Ellen and Orlok is the core heart and driving force of Nosferatu. It plays a prominent role in any iteration of Dracula, but this remake takes it to an entirely new level, especially when it comes to the sexual nature of Ellen as a character. There’s surprisingly a lot to unpack in regards to the choices she makes, how she feels about herself and Orlok, and how the world around her may have played a part in shaping her personality and sexuality. So… let’s do the unpacking. There will be full spoilers for the entire film going forward, so be warned.
Who Are Ellen And Orlok In Nosferatu (2025)?
The ways in which Ellen and Orlok operate are crucial to establish upfront. The first scene of Nosferatu is Ellen, as a child, woefully calling out for any sort of guardian angel or companion out of loneliness. In what easily outclasses the worst Tinder response you could imagine, Count Orlok ends up answering her call and assaults her in a way that’s later confirmed to be sexual. We later learn that Orlok had continued to torment, stalk, and harass her for years after that first encounter, causing afflictions like seizures and dark dreams that had her friends and family questioning her mental health.
That is, until she committed herself to Thomas, after which point her afflictions apparently stopped, meaning Orlok seemed to leave her alone. When Thomas goes to meet the Count, however, he is tricked into signing a document that nullifies his marriage to Ellen. From this point on, Ellen’s ailments resume and Orlok is able to reenter her life. Her pledge to Thomas seems to have been fending him off, but as soon as it’s accidentally legally voided, he is free to pursue her once more.
It would be one thing if Nosferatu were a random demon who just happened to attach himself to Ellen at random and refused to let go, as nothing more than a scheming, one-dimensional monster of pure sexual lust (in other words, a slightly less evil Harvey Weinstein). But when you consider the fact that Ellen initially called upon him, that he never seems able to let go, and the many times Ellen refers to herself as a shameful being for her uncontrollable bond to him, the picture of him and Ellen becomes much more complicated.
Ellen’s True Sexual Desires
On paper, Ellen may appear to be a pure, wholesome woman who unabashedly despises Nosferatu. He’s traumatized her in multiple ways, he slaughters her loved ones, she vocally denounces him when they reunite, and she ultimately sacrifices her life to ensure his demise. But the more we see of her, the more that appearance violently crumbles. Orlok claims that he is a product of her own nature, “an appetite,” and that she deceives herself by claiming to hate him. These may sound like the manipulative words of a gaslighting stalker, until you ask yourself something: why did Orlok disappear when she met Thomas?
You could say it’s because her union to Thomas broke her soul’s commitment to Orlok, but how? Is that just how the supernatural laws of the Nosferatu work in this world… or is that the point where she was finally willing to let him go? Now, I seriously doubt the film is making some misogynistic argument akin to, “She was asking for it deep down,” or “She didn’t say no.” But from a character standpoint, there are clear signs that at least part of Ellen contains a volatile, twisted sexuality that would not rest unless it was being sated by something, be it a loving husband or the demon who latches onto her when no one else will.
Ellen only starts feeling Nosferatu’s presence again when Thomas is about to leave her behind for business reasons, which makes her feel lost and unable to carry on without another means of fulfillment. She dreams of literally standing at the altar with Death itself and feeling happy even as she gazes upon dead bodies. She later aggressively throws herself at Thomas and makes Orlok watch them have sex to get back at the vampire… in crasser terms, revenge f**king. Even occult expert Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe, of Poor Things) claims that demons more readily go after “those whose lower animal functions dominate.”
Ellen is successfully entranced and corrupted by Orlok’s will at least a few times, complete with longing stares and sensual moans. Is his power over the human mind just that strong, or does a deep-seeded sexual longing for him make her more susceptible than most? Were those cravings always buried within her, or has Orlok’s stalking embedded them within her after years of wearing her down? Or, to paraphrase Ellen herself: does evil come from within her, or from beyond?
Again, none of these takes in any way insinuate that Ellen is at fault or truly wanted him. They merely suggest that part of her yearns for something beyond what a healthy person would desire, and that Orlok despicably preys on that part of her as many abusers do. That is, if Orlok even has the choice of whether or not to do so. He describes himself as incapable of love and yet forcibly drawn to Ellen due to her pact from years ago. It’s as if his very physical nature is literally stopping him from letting her go even if he wanted to… much like how the deepest recesses of Ellen’s lust can’t be totally destroyed, and as long as it remains, so too does he.
Society And Sexuality In Eggers’ Nosferatu
No matter what you think of Ellen or her innate desires, Nosferatu insinuates that fault may be found within her society’s reactions to them. Ellen is established as having felt lonely even as a child, leading to the inadvertent summoning of Orlok. Her psychosis only worsens from there as he puts her through hellish ordeals like sleepwalking, disturbing dreams, and seizures. Through it all, she’s not seen as a victim of abuse, but rather a poor girl with terrible medical and psychological ailments. Some are sympathetic towards her, like her best friend Anna (Emma Corrin, of Deadpool & Wolverine), but others are more fed up by years of tending to her plight, including Anna’s husband (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, of Bullet Train).
When Ellen meets Thomas and her afflictions go away at last, we know this is because her pledge to Nosferatu has been broken. But the people in her life believe she simply needed to find a loving husband to quell her unraveling, and that her relapse is just the result of his absence. All she needs is a good man to keep her in one piece. So, when her eerie premonitions return and she’s once again possessed by Orlok, everyone around her still thinks that she is just mentally unwell. Almost nobody believes her dire pleas for true understanding, even when she tries to give vaguer warnings like urging Thomas to not leave.
Ellen is, to some extent, as much a victim of Orlok as the time she’s living in. The 1800s were an age when women’s needs – both mental and sexual – were controlled, suppressed, and dismissed far more heavily than they are today… although nowadays that’s becoming debatable. And on top of those suppressions keeping Ellen from being believed, they partially contributed to her initial loneliness in the first place. Ellen describes how her sixth sense frightened her father as she got older, and how he viewed her as sinful after Nosferatu’s first assault on her. A few other passing comments on her “ardent nature” or how her whims dominate the household also imply that it’s uncommon to see a woman as passionate as her.
Moments like these imply that she has a stronger emotional and maybe even sexual drive than most women of her time, but she’s unallowed or feels personally unable to practice them in the way she wants, deep down. Even worse, when her desires bring forth Nosferatu, she comes to believe that her own soul is impure and she has darkness within her, despite her having clearly not wanted nor expected to summon something so vile and destructive. The world made her lonely, which made her accidentally latch onto a monster, which then in turn isolated her further and made her seem like even more of an unwell freak to society.
In other words, Ellen is living in a time unfriendly to her sex, is cruelly punished in multiple ways just for being different, wishes to not feel so alone and confined, and believes herself shameful and unclean for having had that wish in the first place. All while no one believes that she was sexually assaulted by a demon. Versions of Dracula – and, by extension, Nosferatu – already have themes of seduction and even sexual repression. But by rooting the titular vampire’s history so deeply within Ellen’s life, Robert Eggers’s interpretation presents a tragic, disturbing mirror of female sexuality vs. society.
Lily Conquers Nosferatu… Or Does She?
As Orlok’s reign of terror reaches a fever pitch, von Franz tells Ellen that Nosferatu can be destroyed, according to research, if a maiden sacrifices herself to him just before daybreak. This drives Ellen to go to Orlok in her bedroom, repledge her eternal fealty to him, and allow him to feast on her flesh in the throes of sex. Talk about love bites. This distracts Orlok until sunrise, at which point the light from the sun washes over the room and kills him. Ellen, too, has died at his hand as the sacrifice.
Going off everything we’ve covered, there are a few different ways you can look at this. One is that Ellen had absolutely no desire to go through with any of this, and she would have taken any other route to killing Orlok had one been possible. This is a total sacrifice, one that she suffered through without any joy and made with the sole intention of protecting her home and loved ones. Even though she’s been put through terrible abuse for years, she is unfairly the one who pays the ultimate price for everyone else, including those who may have wronged her.
But the question remains: was there any part of her that actually longed for this experience? It’s not impossible to think that she either fully embraced her eternal bond with Orlok, to the point of living and dying with him as one, or that she felt any minor or major degree of pleasure from these nastily erotic final moments. Maybe her lust made it easier to perform the sacrifice, or maybe she expected pure suffering but wound up feeling bliss in the moment. Von Franz did state, after all, that she had to harken to her true nature and the evil within herself.
Or maybe her sacrifice was an act of self-loathing on her part, as she finds herself so detestable and filthy that she believes she deserves to perish with the physical embodiment of that filthiness. She clearly believes she is to blame for all her troubling thoughts and the death that Nosferatu brought to her home. How much does she see herself as a monster on the same level as Orlok, or Orlok as an extension of her own inner evil? (Again, from her own self-image, not the viewer’s intended perception of her as some “evil” thing.)
No matter what, one thing is certain: this ending, though successful in destroying Orlok and his plague, is tragic for Ellen. The only way to be rid of the evils within and/or around her (depending on how you look at the story) was to destroy the entirety of the person Ellen is. Whether that tragedy stems from the unfairness of her predetermined destiny, her submission to the darkest parts of herself, or her self-loathing and judgement by society, is left up to you to decide.
Nosferatu (2025) Reshapes The Sexuality Of Its Source Material
Again, Bram Stoker’s original Dracula novel has always had at least an undercurrent of sexual themes, mainly revolving around Dracula’s nature as a deceptively seductive, penetrating figure. Such themes have been analyzed for decades and made their way into many adaptations of the tale, even the original Nosferatu. We’ve even seen leading ladies have personal relationships with vampires in other adaptations and vampire stories, such as the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula and… sure, I’ll include Twilight out of pity.
But by giving Ellen and Orlok an established relationship before the main plot, and through the nature of how that relationship comes to be and persists, the Eggers version raises some of the most unique questions about the primary female character – especially as a sexual being – in any Dracula adaptation. The context, the ensuing conversations between characters, and the film’s disgustingly barbaric presentation bring a lot of uncomfortable but fascinating questions to the table about who Ellen truly is, how her identity feeds into her world, and vice versa.
To some viewers, Nosferatu could be a strong feminist film about standing up to domineering gaslighters, or an indictment of the way abuse victims are silenced and ignored. To others, it could be a symbolic look at a woman’s internal conflict between decency and morbid urges, or maybe even how an otherwise healthy balance within her is compromised by neglect. For me, it’s all of the above in one gruesome package. Eggers is no stranger to ambiguous meaning in his movies, even in a film as bombastic as The Northman. So, it seems perfectly in-character for him to inject that same exciting uncertainty into one of the world’s most famous stories.
Nosferatu is now available to watch on digital and on demand. Read our review of Nosferatu!
