the following was an exercise for a class to see what my professor's response would be...
Dracula, or vampires in general, whether in book, stage, film, or television form, can represent many things, and be interpreted in many ways. Thanks to performers like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman, over the years Dracula has been accepted as more or less a suave, attractive, yet dark seducer of women. Bram Stoker’s original Dracula characterization was a terrible monster. Migrating from Transylvania to Victorian England, the Count represents a fear of immigrants from the East (which is a response to colonialism), religious animosity, and contemporary versus conservative sexuality. Stoker’s Dracula isn’t simply ugly – he’s down right horrific to behold, the spitting image of a “criminal type.”
F.W. Murnau’s vision of Dracula focuses the terror by simplifying the themes and getting to the bare bones of the vampire. While there still could be some loose interpretations from Nosferatu concerning a fear of immigrants, it’s the sex that seems to concern Murnau, specifically sex and sexually transmitted diseases.
As the film begins, we are introduced to Thomas Hutter (Stoker’s Jonathan Harker): a naïve young real estate agent, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. A creepy, clearly devious, old man named Knock (who is loosely based on Renfield, as we eventually discover) employs Hutter and sends him to the distant exotic land of Transylvania to visit a prospective client named Count Orlok. Hutter’s kind hearted and loving, yet dismally dreary wife, Ellen (a mix of Stoker’s Mina and Lucy), is left to pine for Hutter under care of their friends.
Hutter travels to Transylvania and serendipitously happens upon “The Book of the Vampires” in his inn room. He carelessly reads through, and light-heartedly throws it in his bag as he leaves for the rest of his journey to the Castle Orlok. One is reminded of how young people tend to shove off their knowledge of the dangers of STDs; willful ignorance, it seems, transcends generations.
Upon arrival Hutter, and indeed the audience, is introduced to quite possibly the most terrifying vision of a vampire put on film. Without Max Schreck’s iconic performance as Orlok, it could be said that vampires wouldn’t be as popular and legendary as they are today. His long clawed fingers, skeletal thin body draped in black, and rat-like nose, eyes, teeth and ears visually personify plague in a really terrific way. However, while references to the plague are explicit, it’s what is implicit that’s important.
Orlok is essentially a sexual deviant, according to what the filmmakers of early twentieth century would have imagined. He sleeps all day and prowls out at night; he’s foreign, because god forbid these deviants come from our own neighborhood; and most importantly, his promiscuous life style has left him diseased, sallow-faced, and infectious. Whatever his disease is isn’t important. What is important is that he infects Hutter and Hutter is left ill, and upon his return home, the disease is spread.
It isn’t necessary for Orlok to be a physical character for Nosferatu to work as a metaphor for STDs. Naïve Hutter travels to an exotic land, where he encounters an awakening of sorts (extra-marital or homosexual sex), contracts a disease, and upon return home, infected, he becomes a threat to his own wife and perhaps many others.
So indeed, Orlok attacks Hutter in the night (the homosexual encounter), then later is attracted to a photo of Ellen. Orlok agrees to purchase the house across the street from Hutter’s own home, and without delay leaves his castle to travel to Wisborg. While it’s true linearly that Orlok leaves before Hutter does, it’s also true that Hutter attempts to leave at the same time, and gets hurt and held up in a hospital. The implicit metaphor is that Hutter is ill stricken, and even though the doctors attempt to heal him, he isn’t cured, and his arrival in Wisborg is practically at the same time as Orlok’s – he brings the disease with him.
Meanwhile Knock, Hutter’s creepy, clearly devious boss is losing his mind. Is Knock a sexual deviant as well, who is stricken with the old maddening STD, syphilis? It’s obvious that Knock is based on Renfield because he has a connection with Dracula, he is Dracula’s slave, and Knock has a connection with Orlok, because most likely Orlok is an STD, so Knock is infected by him.
Orlok’s descent upon Wisborg on the schooner along the Black Sea is taken from Stoker’s source novel, and is mainly used as a plot device for Orlok’s travel, and to further emphasize the explicit metaphor for the plague.
As we approach the climax of the film, the townspeople are panicked in fear of plague infestation, Ellen happens upon and reads “The Book of the Vampires,” and Orlok casually moves into his new house. Somehow Ellen is clairvoyant and surmises that Orlok is a vampire, and understands that the passage she reads in the book applies to this exact situation: the only way to kill a vampire is for a woman pure of heart to sacrifice herself to him, so that he loses track of time until sunrise, which will burn his flesh. Orlok creepily, longingly stares at Ellen from across the street, and she beckons him, then faints. In the most iconic scene of the film, Orlok creeps through her house, up the stairs, then preys upon her, biting her neck. He becomes so occupied that he forgets the time and the sun rises, causing him to burst into smoke as he attempts to escape. The implicit metaphor plays out rather interestingly here: the STD preys upon the innocent by tempting them; but it’s the innocent’s blood that can eradicate the disease? By sacrificing oneself, a person who isn’t promiscuous, the disease cannot be spread, and therefore the disease dies.
Many writers throughout the years have attempted to insert metaphors for vampires as a spreading virus, Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend is perhaps the best example of this, however it was F.W. Murnau’s original adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula that seems to be the first and quite possibly the best use of vampires as a metaphor for the danger and spread of sexually transmitted diseases.
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