'I am an appetite': The poetics of Nosferatu

& why you should heed the dark call

Take note: Spoilers ahead.

I watched Egger’s 2024 Nosferatu late last night, curled up in bed by the glow of candlelight. My initial reluctance to see it felt dissonant; it kept it swirling in my head for months until I finally gave in.

It was an image of Lily Rose Depp—the white of her eyes contorted up into her head, mouth dripping with foam—that lured me in. Or was it the promise of a frightening, lurking vampire? That in this film Count Orlok had again taken up the archetype of a gruesome thing, not the glittering anti-hero we’re used to (and that I, too, have loved).

The film isn’t a massive departure from the original Nosferatu, although there are differences. In both, Ellen—Nosferatu’s protagonist and subject of Count Orlok’s obsession—sacrifices herself to Death, to him, to save those around her from a literal or metaphorical plague of darkness. But it was also her fate. She was meant for the darkness. For it was the maiden’s deep plea—come to me—that Death could not resist.

Why? After Ellen’s mother’s death during childhood, she fell into a well of lack. She wanted for touch, for love, for companionship. In childhood, she suffered seizures and nights of somnambulism, which, at the time, was a condition thought to have some connection to the beyond.

Nosferatu was shot on 35 mm film, thank-goodness, so it was hazy and dreamy, like the magnificent aesthetics of the 90s, when everything felt as though it were captured through a golden scrim. The muted tones and visual shadow play—like an overhead shot of long hands as silken shadows spanning across a city’s rooftops—were so delicious and meticulously gothic, I wanted to throw open my windows and scream into the night.

I could not stop thinking on Lily Rose Depp’s shifting facial expressions as she confessed to her husband that she, in a dream, had married death instead, and how she adored it—I was so happy, so very happy.

In her marriage to Death himself, everyone she had loved was dead, and the stench of their bodies was horrible—but fuck, she had never been so happy. In her face, an ecstatic catastrophe, an orgiastic grief. I think at this early point in the film, she was standing at the altar of her impending death.

The film kept me awake, thinking, thinking, until the wee hours. And in the darkness, I felt as if the Count’s spindly fingers were outstretched toward me, groping for me in my sheets. I’d give myself to him, I would—even with Benjamin my husband beside me, I thought.

I felt a kinship with Ellen, whose utter desperation for touch, for love, for companionship fell outside of the norms of her restrained society. She is a woman of incessant romantic protestations. A woman with a connection to the otherworld. A woman of fathomless hunger, who walks out naked into the dead of night. She is a representation of many things—a repressed woman, a weirdo, a die-hard romantic. But it was her poetic energy that struck me.

I think poets are the seers, the dreamers, the shamans of our everyday reality. It may be a romantic notion, but of course, I am prone to romantic notions. I am dripping in notions of notions. I am fits of fancy. I am an appetite.

Who else is paying such attention to the sea, the afternoon light, the desire, the emptiness, the ardor, the presque vu, the portents of things to come—and translating it all, as if channeling it from beyond?

Most people don’t get poetry. Most people don’t want to be bothered with poetry. And yet we poets continue on, channeling, writing, seeking, getting our hands dirty with the things that don’t fit easily into everyday reality.

Who, beyond the poet, finds themselves regularly split in parts, squeezing into the mundane, pushing against the social expectations around expressions of grief and ecstasy? Who captures the blurriness between longing and repulsion better than the poet? Who wants to break social norms, even if only in lineation?

Who, other than the poet, wants to lace themselves to their obsessions?

Who lives in constant relationship with what is seldom noticed?

What can better give shape to the eroticism of restraint than a poem?

Ellen’s imprisonment is not subtle. She is without social power; she is told that she is ill, that she mustn’t think of the dreams and desires and feelings that scratch from deep within her. She writhes in pain—or is it pleasure? The want in her perforates her from within.

The Poet within me has always been intrigued by what exists beyond the light. Or beyond what we can see. Or beyond what we should be looking for. By what we’re too not to want. What is beyond the performance of our own lives? What have we tethered ourselves to that keeps us from the truth? Are we restrained in some way?

Ellen is told to be quiet, to be good, not to wake the children. She is at some point bound by a corset and tied to the bed, and snuffed to sleep with a poison-soaked rag by the hand of some man-doctor. It’s all too much. It’s just an endless drama. It’s unbecoming. And she’s keeping everyone awake, goddamnit. So they try to control her.

But no man can control her darkness. If you are born with it, it will sit inside you like an organ, and it will metabolize your life. If you are a poet, you pick at it. You pluck it. You become bloated with it. You give it space inside you, and on the page. You let it haunt you, hunt you. You downright feast on it until your chin is dripping with the flesh and fruit of the night.

Society wants to contort itself around the repression of shadow—politicians who pretend the suffering isn’t happening, billionaires who would rather live on Mars than confront their own abandonment, wine-moms who would rather become smaller and quieter and pettier than admit their unhappiness, men who’d rather silence woman than deal with their loneliness.

Whatever your darkness is—longing, fear, insatiable horniness, abandonment, sorrow, rage—you can’t deny it, lest it will eat you. You will be subsumed by it either way— I am an appetite—so walk into the garden at night. Make peace with it before it controls you.

He is my melancholy. He is my shame, says Ellen; there is a sense that she has long made peace with this.

Some see her death as by the hands of man, and there is certainly an argument I could make here. But I see this her death as a bid for her own freedom, that she would rather give in to death than live a life of such restraint. That the vampire was the doorway through which she could attain some freedom.

The vampire isn’t just a monster—it’s our monster. It is a container for that truth. It wants to be acknowledged. You might fear it, but oh, you also want it. It is the thing that wants you to stick your neck out into the darkness, on some balcony come midnight, and let yourself be taken.

I think about one of the last shots in the film—death, broken to bone, splayed out over Ellen’s bloody body. Death & the maiden, entwined in decay and flower. I think on how a thousand poets would find comfort in this image, while others gag, suppressing a faint, nearly-erotic inner voice.

I also keep finding myself thinking about my recent book, SAINT OF, how at its core is a devastating, absolute hunger—for more, for so much more than the world as we know it can give. To be ruinous. To give in to the impulses we were told were too dark. To not ignore the call.

The poet is the somnambulist, and the poem is the dream.