When I think of the gothic as a genre, the first titles that come to mind are Frankenstein, Crimson Peak, Edward Scissorhands, and the beloved Tell Tale Heart. Accompanied by these titles are assumptions about the architecture within them; gargoyles and abandoned, rot-filled castles. Assumptions about character elements will typically follow: supernatural, romantically disturbed, macabre individuals. Then assumptions about the weather; cold, perhaps rainy, with flashes of lighting– maybe even floods. What’s even more interesting is that these common assumptions are almost always correct, and are considered tell-tale signs of the gothic genre. The 2024 film Nosferatu starring Lily Rose Depp, Bill Skarsgård, and Willem Dafoe took a step back in time and embodied all of these traditional elements of the gothic in a hauntingly beautiful gothic romance.
With regard to cinematography, the first thing that I noticed was the seemingly new-age gothic noir style. Traditionally, film noir is known for its high contrast black and white film style featuring elongated shadows, moody lighting, and unbalanced compositions. Gothic noir is quite similar and uses these same effects in a way that heightens the horror and dread of the supernatural, madness, or isolation in the gothic, whereas film noir uses it to heighten things such as suspense, pessimism, or cynicism in crime or detective fiction. The opening scene of Nosferatu featured Ellen (Lily Rose Depp), face half illuminated while in prayer, while the entirety of the background behind her is enveloped in darkness. The camera pulls back to find a scene illustrated in deep blues, blacks, and grays, as Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) answers her prayers through the billowing window (another interesting gothic element) cloaked in blackness to contrast Ellen’s full light. The scene is hauntingly beautiful and highlights the ways in which the characters differ from each other, introducing the macabre nature of their relationship to the audience: his daemon-like yearn for her blood, and her search for companionship through madness. This inherently introduces the recurring themes that persist within traditional gothic romances: they are doomed to fail from the beginning – most often resulting in one or both of their deaths.
While disgustingly intriguing, the final scene was emphatic of this idea by nature with reference to this film style. In this scene, Ellen submits not only to her internal hauntings of darkness but to Count Orlok’s need for her blood. In a grotesque effort to kill him and end her internal suffering she lures him to the light (both physically and cognitively) to end the terror of the plague for the town. The scene is overtly sexual and horrifying and does everything that the gothic asks of a romance between two characters while the cinematography continuously enhances the ending of the story by the ever-shifting shadows and beams of light.
Another strikingly gothic element of the movie is the presence of the supernatural. One of the ways in which the supernatural appears is when Thomas – Ellen’s husband – is travelling to Count Orlok’s castle in the Carpathian Mountains. Here an unmanned carriage appears in the empty, looming woods, ready to take him the rest of the way to the castle. The supernatural also appears within Ellen herself as she appears to be almost possessed by Count Orlok’s spirit at times, causing seizures, dreams, and hallucinations as he attempts to lure her to him. And of course, Orlok himself stands as the main supernatural element of the story, as he is neither human nor daemon, but somewhere in the middle, driven towards companionship through his desire for Ellen’s blood.
One of the larger influences of the gothic in the story of Count Orlok and Ellen is the presence of the Bubonic Plague itself– which is (arguably) the origin point of the gothic, as it introduced intense feelings of isolation, fear, dread, and the macabre to some of the largest port cities in the world at the time where roughly twenty-five million people died in Europe alone.. The theme of death is ever rampant in gothic literature and cinema, and in this case pushes the entire narrative of the story forward as it controls the anxieties of the characters with reference to Count Orlok representing the plague in itself.
The gothic is notoriously thick with symbols, themes, and history that could be dissected over and over again. Some attributes of the gothic that appeared in the movie that were not touched on within this article are: the presence of storms, strategic placement of gore, Orlok’s voice, and costume design. The bottomless well that is the influence of the gothic within this movie attracted viewers from all over the world to come and see Egger’s take on the story which, of course, left many (like me) extremely satisfied and hopeful for the presence of the gothic within future cinema …but also left others regretful, as any good movie does!