Opening the vampire movie on Christmas Day wasn’t only a coy marketing ploy. It was the point.
Written and read by Josh Larsen
Clips courtesy of Focus Features
References/sources found here: https://thinkchristian.net/nosferatu-and-the-absence-of-god
I’m writing this shortly before the darkest day of 2024: Dec. 21, winter solstice. It also happens to be just ahead of Christmas Day and the release of the year’s darkest movie: Nosferatu.I mean "darkest movie" literally. Written and directed by horror specialist Robert Eggers, this is a monster mash of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and just about every Dracula movie you’ve seen. Yet few of those films—even the ones in black and white—have been as drained of light and color as this Nosferatu. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images and they’ve been left to lie, lifeless, in the moonlight. On occasion, a candle or torch attempts to keep the decrepitness at bay, but such illumination is only temporary. Shadowy fog dominates most of the frames.There is potent theological resonance here, in that such darkness depicts a world that is absent the presence of God. This is the harrowing reality that Eggers’ movies present. His independent debut, 2016’s The Witch, features a pious colonial family, but their rigid beliefs offer no protection against the hag of the title (to say nothing of the goat that might just be a mouthpiece for the devil). His follow-up, The Lighthouse, follows two keepers of a small outpost in 1890s New England, but with its allusions to Poseidon and Prometheus, it might as well be unfolding in a purgatory governed by Greek mythology. (Unless, of course, it’s set in hell.) The Northman, a bloody retelling of a 12th-century Nordic legend, takes place in a pagan setting, where Christianity is an odd, faraway rumor about a god who is a “corpse, nailed to a tree.” The God of Christianity is often referred to in Eggers’ movies, but rarely, if ever, felt.
This has never been more explicit than in Nosferatu...