Without Fiction, Belief, Myth — What Are We Left With?: An Exploration of Robert Eggers’ NOSFERATU

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu doesn’t just resurrect a legend—it guts it, drags it through the dirt, and holds it up for inspection under flickering candlelight like a scientist trying to understand why it still twitches. This isn’t just another vampire flick. It’s an autopsy of power, desire, and the catastrophic consequences of stripping the world of myth. It clings to the bones of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but yanks out the gothic seduction, leaving something raw, grotesque, and deeply unsettling. At its core is a question that lingers like a bad omen: What happens when you purge the world of fiction, of belief, of the irrational? The answer is ‘Nosferatu’. And he is not merciful.  

Willem Dafoe’s character tosses off a line like a casual curse: “We are not so enlightened as we are blinded by the gaseous light of science. I have wrestled with the devil.” A throwaway remark? Hardly. That’s a dagger to the heart of modernity. The Enlightenment was so busy congratulating itself on reason, logic, and the dismissal of superstition that it bulldozed over the very stories that kept people alive. No myths, no legends, no irrational fears to haunt the mind. Just cold, hard facts.  

And what has that left us with? A world that sneers at mystery, that equates belief with stupidity. It’s no accident that Ellen’s whispered prayers, her desperate grasping for something beyond human comprehension, feel so futile. She’s a relic of a time when people still lit candles in the dark and feared what lurked just beyond the firelight. But this world—the sterile, rational, godless world, has no room for her.  

She prays, she pleads, she reaches for salvation. And what does she get? Not a merciful God. Not even the dignity of silence. She gets Orlok.  

There’s a cosmic cruelty to it, a bleak punchline that lands like a kick to the ribs. This isn’t just a personal nightmare, it’s an existential horror story. A world without fiction is a world without warnings, without whispered folktales to keep us from wandering into the dark. It’s a world that leaves Ellen utterly unarmed. Because what is a rational mind supposed to do when it meets the irrational? What defense is left when we’ve banished all the old superstitions?  

Horror has always been the genre that laughs in the face of certainty. Every ghost story, every creature feature, every whispered urban legend is a threat to the idea that humans have everything figured out. Monsters live in the gaps, in the places science refuses to acknowledge. And Nosferatu? He thrives in that space. Orlok feasts on a world that thinks it has no use for myths. He is the thing logic cannot touch, reason cannot banish. Proof that horror doesn’t need belief to exist, it only needs an opening. And what is modernity if not an open door with no charms, no crosses, no whispered prayers to keep the nightmares out?  

But here’s the kicker: Ellen’s horror isn’t just supernatural. It’s painfully human. She sees the danger. She warns, resists, begs to be heard. And, of course, no one listens. The label of “hysterical woman” has been stapled onto female characters in horror for decades, but Nosferatu doesn’t just acknowledge it; the film makes us choke on it. The real terror isn’t Orlok’s looming shadow; it’s the way Ellen is reduced to a fragile, over-imaginative woman until it’s too late. By the time anyone takes her seriously, she’s already marked.  

But Nosferatu isn’t just about being ignored. It’s about something worse: the violation of body and identity. Nosferatu lets Dracula’s bite be what it has always been, a grotesque act of pleasure. Stoker’s Dracula was a masterclass in coded queerness, a Victorian fever dream of repressed desire. The vampire has never just been a monster; he’s always been a figure of forbidden pleasure, of transgression, of seduction that unsettles because it cannot be controlled.

Eggers takes that history and rips it to shreds. In Nosferatu, Orlok’s feeding is stripped of all the old romanticism. For him, it is an indulgence. For Ellen, it is an assault. This is a crucial shift. Where Dracula has long been read as a figure of transgression, Orlok is pure hunger. This is not seduction. This is power, force, violation. Dracula, the hypnotic seducer, is gone. What remains is something much darker: a creature that takes because it can, that finds pleasure in consumption, but offers none in return.

This makes Nosferatu one of the most brutally honest adaptations of Stoker’s novel. For centuries, the vampire’s bite has been framed as a kind of dark, forbidden eroticism- penetrative, dangerous, and thrilling. But Ellen’s experience is stripped of ambiguity. She is not entranced. She is not seduced. She is drained and discarded.  

And the horror is deeply gendered. Ellen’s body is not her own; it is something to be possessed, consumed, made into an object of pleasure for something stronger. This taps into a long tradition of horror films using monstrous figures to reflect real-world fears of women not being believed, of their autonomy being erased, of being reduced to something to be devoured. Horror has long been a space where these anxieties play out, from Rosemary’s Baby to It Follows, and now Nosferatu, that continues this legacy with devastating clarity.  

But what makes this version even more chilling is how utterly alone Ellen is in her suffering. She knows what is coming. She tries to warn others. And yet, she is met with silence, disbelief, and inaction. The men around her are either oblivious, complicit, or too weak to intervene until it’s too late. Her fate is sealed not just by Orlok’s hunger, but by a world that refuses to listen.  

Yet, horror in Nosferatu, isn’t just in the monster—it’s in the absence of him. Orlok doesn’t need to be seen to be felt. Eggers weaponizes negative space, forcing us to fear what isn’t there. A frame too empty. A shadow that should be cast but isn’t. The sheer wrongness of a silent room where there should be noise. This is a film that doesn’t just creep under your skin, it makes you feel like something else is already there, watching. Waiting.  

And that waiting is part of the film’s greatest trick. The soundscape of Nosferatu is as much an instrument of horror as Orlok himself. Silence isn’t just eerie; it’s oppressive. It stretches out, making every breath feel too loud, every movement feels like an invitation for something to strike. But when sound does return, it does so like a whisper at the back of your neck, soft, insidious, just enough to make you turn, only to find nothing there. Until, suddenly, there is.  

If Orlok represents anything, it’s inevitability. Death. Disease. The collapse of everything we think we’ve built to last. He is not a villain who can be reasoned with or outwitted. He doesn’t care about human ambition, romance, or ideology. He exists to consume, and the only thing anyone can do is maybe delay the moment he takes his due.  

The true horror of Nosferatu isn’t just that Orlok exists. It’s the knowledge that no matter how many times we vanquish him, he will always rise again. The monster is never truly gone, only sleeping. Waiting.  

Because without fiction, without belief, without myth-

What are we left with?  

Nosferatu.  

And he does not care whether or not you believe in him.