(Above) Vlad the Impaler: Sometimes an Orthodox Christian ruler, sometimes Catholic, an apparent political apostate. A figure of legend remembered in Transylvania for his fierce resistance to the Turks, his folk memory helped shape the character of Dracula, and thence Nosferatu.

The reason for the question mark in the title is simple. I’m not sure that there can be an Orthodox Christian film review of the new version of Nosferatu. I don’t think it’s a good movie for Orthodox Christians to see, especially given the gratuitous sexual scenes and innuendo throughout. It’s definitely not good to see during the Nativity Fast, I confess. My older son, now a senior in college, newly returned from study in Ireland and on break at home, had wanted to see it at some point. I figured that it would be better to go with him and discuss it with him afterward, rather than him seeing it later alone or with friends. I also was curious, as an English professor in my secular job, focusing on Christian literature and film, as to what “signs of the times” might be discerned in the film.

I wondered how Hollywood in 2024 would treat the demonic-supernatural aspects of what is the story of Dracula, first written by Anglo-Irish writer Bram Stoker in 1897, filtered through the 1922 silent-film Nosferatu. How would the film given its demonic theme reflect our cultural transition from atheistic scientism to techno-neopaganism? In offering insight on that, it did not disappoint.

The 2024 version is a far cry from Stoker’s Victorian-era Dracula, while still reflecting it closely in a number of ways. The 1922 silent film intermediary (of the same title) has been interpreted as a kind of prophetic piece for the coming of Hitler, or as reflecting the sexual decadence of the Weimar Republic, or both. Yet Stoker’s earlier original (seen by some recent scholarship as dealing indirectly with Ireland’s colonial situation) borrowed loosely from legends of Vlad the Impaler (who bore the patronymic Drăculea or little dragon/little Satan), a sometime-Orthodox-Christian ruler who resisted the invading Turks in the region of Transylvania-Wallachia. So there was likely to be some kind of portrayal of Orthodox Christianity in the film. That, too, was the case (see No. 1 below).

Going to see the film, I also had in mind the insight of a beloved priest-monk guide who shocked me (as an English graduate student) once by saying that literature and film are demonic. That’s because they create fantasy images in the mind that distract us from meditative attention to God’s spiritual reality. In this they are like, and precursors to, the high technology of virtual reality today. Yet Hieromonk Seraphim Rose of blessed memory noted a view alternatively, but really I think supplementary, that classic films with implicit Christian values can help converts develop an affective side to their life as Orthodox Christians. St. Basil the Great wrote about gathering nectar from pagan learning to make Christian honey in effect. Also, I have found in my academic work a tradition of Christian poetics that runs from the first novels in the Byzantine world into modern times, notably in Dostoevsky’s novels. In any case, Nosferatu does not qualify as a classic “Christianish” film or a direct reflection of Christian poetics, or even pagan learning as such. I did find myself saying the Jesus prayer throughout the sometimes graphically shocking showing. But nonetheless I came away with four take-away points from an Orthodox perspective on the movie, listed below.

1. Critique of Western scientism. The story critiques Enlightenment science as a delusional philosophy in the ideology of the Global West. The old professor in the film who has knowledge of medieval demonology and the occult is one of two exceptions to that state of ignorance. The other exception is the Transylvanian Orthodox Christian women’s monastic community. The nuns recognize the demonic problem of Nosferatu and know how to deal with it, as the film portrays them. Meanwhile the Western Christians back in Germany basically seem clueless and ineffective. All this would fit well with the controversial Russian philosopher and Old Believer/Orthodox Alexander Dugin’s view of Western ontology as suffering systemically from its claim to be universal in a neo-colonialist way, fatally mistaking ideas for reality, as the occult does, while ignoring forces outside its limited ken.
   
   
2. Dangers of the occult. The old professor in the film, being interested in the occult, opens the door for the story to reflect aspects of the modern turn away from scientific quasi-atheism to neopaganism, as imagined for self-assertive moderns. But his whole attitude towards the end of the film seemed to me to make him in his occult knowledge complicit with Nosferatu, even though working to destroy him. (Some might see in that an analogy to how people become like their enemies when waging self-proclaimed “just war,” outside of Orthodox Christian approaches to life in which any war is at best a sinful necessity, even if also a holy war in its purpose. The “just war” trap is also part and parcel of the Global West’s claim to universalism historically, in which abstract ideas can become horrific reality.)
   
   
3. Sexual chaos and its self-destructiveness. There was a “goddess” factor in the ending of the movie that to me smacked of gratuitous neopagan-feminist themes. The orgasmic satisfaction of the female protagonist drives the plot. That needless to say is ultimately just promotive of self-absorption, a kind of masturbatory epic of sin. However, the film does imply that her overwhelming drive for orgasmic pleasure is not only attractive to demons but productive of deep and fatal disorder. One scene implies indirectly a same-sex relation with her best friend. In tandem with this, her husband is feminized and in effect raped by Nosferatu, and then tries to prove himself again to his wife in an aggressive sexual act, reinforcing the questionable nature of life-by-orgasm for either sex, and its blurring of Creation’s order. Such secular queerness is a demonic inversion of the Apostle Paul’s observation that “there is neither male nor female in Christ,” and Jesus’ discussion of God making man male and female (as in Genesis) for marriage between the two (or, as He also notes, for celibacy, as in Orthodox monasticism). But in the film the wife does note, while possessed by Nosferatu, that the husband led their conjugal love off-track with his careerism, which also led him to Nosferatu. The love of money is another type of passion, allied with lust and gluttony and pride (the will to worldly power apart from God), as the Church Fathers taught. So the film offers a critique of the global West’s modernity in a way here again. It is delusional, however, in that it does not reflect more of Orthodox Christian sense of natural law as the spark of God’s love in the human heart (following St. Basil and Dr. Herman Engelhardt’s calque). The latter view leads to the authentic spiritual experience and intercession of the Most Holy Mother of God, not to the sinful self-absorbed valorization of consuming female passion. The glimpse of the authentic is offered in the brief presence of the presumably Romanian Orthodox nuns already mentioned, and beyond the film in actual Church Tradition is seen in both male and female saintly martyr-intercessors for us. They model real self-sacrifice for others in Church history.
   
   
4. The spirit of Anti-Christ in today’s techno-neopaganism. Nosferatu at one point in the film names himself “Appetite.” This suggests the yawning maw of the spirit of Anti-Christ, affiliated with the Whore of Babylon in Revelation, and ultimately in the film with the female protagonist also, and pre-modern associations of orgasm with death and mortality. Throughout, the film offers as a result the consumption of all by Nosferatu, vamipirically, coupled with the unfaithful wife orgasmically. Such appetite illustrated in fictional storytelling, whether literary or cinematic, is only multiplied geometricaly in out world today’s virtual reality of digitalized cyber-delusions. The film does indicate how self-assertion in desire is ultimately self-destructive, and there is a theme of sacrifice on the part of the adulterous wife for others, reminiscent of the maiden in the vampire-hunting folk ritual glimpsed in Transylvania earlier by her husband. But its ending also makes self-annihilation in passion seem redemptive (as if to say, “oh no, I’ll just have to identify with my passions for the common good, woe is me”!). It offers no release from demonic possession afforded by a synergy of choice, struggle, and grace, beyond compliance and death. All this obscures the “moral” dimension of interpretation, in St. John Cassian’s fourfold scheme for reading Scripture, which became a basis for Christian semiotics in storytelling and art. Such moral reading can be found in negative lessons teased from the film. But the ending underscores this movie as an artifact of customized techno-neopaganism in today’s culture of cyber-life. That nonetheless makes it a “sign of the times” for sure.