Tea at Trianon: 'Nosferatu' (2024) is a Frightening Wake-up Call

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, January 2, 2025

'Nosferatu' (2024) is a Frightening Wake-up Call

I hate vampire movies of any kind but this review is interesting. From The Catholic World Report:

It is appropriate, therefore, that Eggers is now able to offer his own Nosferatu to the same movie-going public that might otherwise buy a ticket to the latest Avengers copy of a copy or run-of-the-mill horror film. And as for the latter category, while his film is not exactly jump-out-of-your-seat terrifying, it is a whole lot scarier, not to mention gorier and more sexually explicit, than its two predecessors. Most importantly, Eggers’ Nosferatu is a major artistic achievement that engages with the realm of the spirit even more profoundly than his previous efforts.
Eggers sticks with Murnau’s version in using the German instead of English names for the characters. He also broadens the Romantic-era female passion of the character of the young bride, Ellen, played in a show-stealing performance by Lily-Rose Depp. We learn early on that Count Orlok is drawn from Transylvania to the German town of Wisborg (a fictionalization of Wismar on the North Sea) precisely because of Ellen, who had had an erotic experience with the demon count in a moment of juvenile longing. The theme of the danger of sexual awakening is only hinted at in Murnau’s original and ignored completely in Herzog’s remake, but Eggers is right to make more of it than his predecessors. He invites the audience to think about how, even in our disenchanted age, the few spiritually sensitive souls around us may not only be in danger themselves, but may also bring risk to the rest of us. Without a culture-wide understanding of good and evil, their passions make them sitting ducks for dark opportunists.

And yet, while it may have been Ellen’s confused pubescent desires that initially made her susceptible to Orlok’s sorcery, the door is open for her passions to be redirected to good. There is a tender conclusion to a brutal scene in the film where Ellen confesses her shame to her husband, played by the excellent Nicholas Hoult, and she thanks him for giving her the appropriate avenue in holy matrimony for her God-given fervor. In the end, Ellen takes the opportunity to redeem the world around her, just as the female protagonist in Murnau’s version does, only more dramatically. The final sequence between Count Orlok and Ellen is a shocker, but Eggers pulls out all the stops to show how the light ultimately knows no equal in the darkness. By sacrifice, darkness is banished and order is restored. (Read more.)