"Nosferatu" and the Pathology of Women’s Sexual Desire

In Robert Eggers’s new film "Nosferatu" (2024), Nosferatu is the dark Count Orlok, whom the socially alienated young Ellen summons as spiritual company, and the force her older, betrothed self must confront, navigating both attraction and repulsion.

After her mother’s death, Ellen sought solace in the count, who appeared in dreams and trances that contemporary doctors labeled as epileptic fits and melancholy. These episodes temporarily subside after her marriage to Thomas Hutter, but during his six-week journey to Transylvania, her fits, dreams, and sleepwalking resumed, creating a sense of danger for her friends.

Doctors are called into her sick room to observe her symptoms: her labored breathing and panting, her rapid heartbeat, her rolled-back eyes, her sense of suffocation, and her contractions and convulsions. They debate her condition, taking note that she has too much blood (with liberal menses) and a fanciful, albeit melancholy, mind. Doctor Wilhelm Sievers bleeds her and gives her ether to calm her delirious ravings.

Set in 1838, Eggers’s remake captures the cultural fear surrounding women’s sexual desire. Nosferatu and Orlok represent external manifestations of Ellen’s so-called nymphomaniac hysteria and onanism. However, Ellen’s eventual reclaiming of her sexuality overturns the historical idea that women’s sexual desire stems from a lack of will.

During one of Orlok’s visits to Ellen in Wisburg, he reveals to her that he represents her own appetite, embodying the sexual desire inherent in her nature. According to Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a Swiss metaphysician, Ellen’s vulnerability to Orlok—her own sexual desire—stems from her strong animal instincts and an alleged lack of willpower.

Historically, “[i]n the healthy condition, the will was credited with exercising a supervisory function over all activities of the mind—and over so-called lower impulses, or instincts, of humanity’s animal nature as well” (Oppenheim 43). In their medical theories of nymphomania, or uterine fury, physicians regarded those women afflicted by the disorder as having a “temperament naturally inflammable” and a weakened will that is less capable of “exert[ing] a powerful resolution, and flee[ing] with speed, from this cruel and destructive foe” (Bienville 29). In this context, Orlok, like sexual desire, becomes a “destructive foe” that threatens Ellen and the social order. In this same scene with Orlock, Ellen describes Orlok’s presence as slithering within her like a snake.

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theories of women’s sexuality also imagined strong sexual desire as a “serpent that hath insensibly glided into her heart” and can mortally wound her. Ellen’s symptoms—melancholy, delirium, and convulsions—align with historical theories of hysteria and diseased sexuality. Doctors warned that unchecked lust inflamed the “fibres of the brain” and irritated the blood, causing both mental and physical distress. Fitting for a vampire story, the nymphomaniac hysteric’s problem lies in the blood, and they are deemed “monsters in human shape” (Bienville 34).

Ellen’s initial summoning of Orlok in her youth, marked by an ambiguous act of sexual desire, reflects historical medical anxieties about onanism and women’s so-called hysterical tendencies. Ellen first ‘summons’ Orlok in her youth and pledges herself to him in a scene that ends in half-orgasm, half-fit, whereupon her father finds her lying on the ground naked. The medical texts warned of "self-pollution," or onanism, as a propensity of nymphomaniac hysterics, and while the film does not detail what the initial pledge entailed, it could very well be an act of onanism when she embraces her sexual desire. This act becomes a secret that Ellen keeps even from Thomas for some time after their marriage and one that she calls her "shame."

Ellen’s reliance on marriage to Thomas to save her from her sinful nature reflects historical medical theories linking women’s sexual desire and hysteria to control through sexual union. She explains to Thomas how their marriage saved her from this shameful impurity. At one point when Orlok is speaking through Ellen in a possessed state, copulation with Thomas is what retrieves her to her senses and to herself. It is as if the sexual act with her husband exorcizes the "destructive foe" within her in a socially sacrosanct way.

The medical theory that marriage could serve as a cure and preventative for hysteria extended far back to the Greeks. Plato described women’s reproductive organs as “creatures” with an instinctual will, causing distress when unfulfilled. He wrote that the womb, “desirous for child-bearing,” could wander the body, “blocking up the passages of the breath,” and inducing “all kinds of maladies” until sexual union satisfied its demands (Bury xci a-d).

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Similarly, Hippocrates viewed hysteria as stemming from a sexually deprived, “migrating uterus.” He argued that women’s “cold and wet” bodies required intercourse or childbirth to prevent putrefaction, which otherwise led to tremors, suffocation, anxiety, and paralysis (Tasca 111).

Both theorists framed the womb as an autonomous, defective “matrix” driving women’s physical and mental instability. Although the Victorians understood that ligaments, muscles, and fascia prevented the uterus from wandering, they continued to theorize, in their own way, that marital intercourse and pregnancy could reinstate the uterus to its proper state and thus prevent and cure hysteria.

The film reinforces this narrative by showing Ellen’s symptoms worsening during her husband’s six-week absence. During Thomas’s absence, her dreams of Orlok intensify and she becomes prone to fits laden with sexual overtones. A seaside scene shows Ellen half-submerged in rhythmic waves, dress lifted and legs splayed, a visual metaphor for the perceived dangers of unchecked female desire. Friedrich, a family friend, jokes that her hysteria stems from her husband’s absence from her bed, reinforcing the trope that women’s sexual health depends on male presence.

Historically, failure to exert willpower over uterine fury was believed to lead to a woman’s death. Yet Ellen’s decision to re-pledge herself to Orlok at the film’s end overturns this narrative.

As Bienville writes (translated by Sloane), women who lack “resolution” to resist desire “after having taken the first step in this labyrinth of horrors” fall “insensibly… into those excesses which, having wounded the reputation, conclude by depriving them of life” (34). The medical discourse is laden with the language of monsters and horror, and according to this medical narrative, the monster in human shape who lacks willpower will inevitably die from the physiological distress wrought by her lascivious imagination. But Count Orlok insists that Ellen’s choice must be voluntary, not coerced, and she does deny Orlok during his first two visits in an act of self-shame and self-denial.

When Ellen consents to his third-night visit, she does so knowingly, having ensured that Thomas would be absent. This act of agency challenges the idea that women are passive victims of their desires. After their "consummation," in which Orlok drinks her blood, he dies at sunrise, and Ellen appears to die from blood loss.

However, metaphorically, her "death" may signify la petite mort—the “little death” of onanistic climax—and a rebirth through reclaiming her sexual desire. Eggers’s film, intentionally or not, reinterprets the historical medical narrative, transforming Ellen from a shameful victim of her desires into an agent of sexual autonomy.