EGGERS // BERGMAN

BY AIDAN MONKS

In Nosferatu (2024), Robert Eggers has consolidated his reputation as one of the most important filmmakers currently working in horror. Having emerged as a production designer on short films and independent genre flicks, he only released his first feature-length film in his early thirties, being the folk horror landmark The Witch (2016). In this sense, he is somewhat comparable to the British auteur Derek Jarman, whose feature debut Sebastiane came after years of scenic design work for stage and screen, including Ken Russell’s controversial masterpiece The Devils (1971). Films like The Devils, as well as the late 1960s and 1970s cacophony of folk horror classics from Witchfinder General (1968), which displays some uncharacteristically good acting from Vincent Price, to the original Wicker Man (1973), are certain influences on Eggers’s filmmaking style–including an approach to mood, tone, and tension that digs mercilessly under our skin, as opposed to a dependence on jump scares to keep the audience hooked.

 Gothic literary critics have drawn the distinction between ‘horror’ and ‘terror’ as categories. Horror connotes blood and guts–of which you’ll find no shortage in Eggers’s oeuvre–and terror is more elusive: a dark passageway in an ancient-seeming castle which the unsuspecting protagonist is reluctant to traverse, but which they do anyway. Terror is infinitely more interesting since it has an exclusively psychological component which creates tension with the instruments of normality, such as the toxic power dynamics in a family unit (The Witch), the oppressive sublime of an entrapping landscape (The Lighthouse), or a forthcoming plague (Nosferatu). There are far too few horror filmmakers nowadays who know the difference between horror and terror, or who utilise the power of the latter more thoroughly. It is what makes The Babadook (2014) a better film than The Human Centipede (2009). The horror output of A24 for the last decade has been, without a doubt, some of the best in recent memory, revitalising a sense of mystery and psychological depth to the genre, away from exposees on the limits of bodily affliction. I have nothing against body horror when the filmmaker has a point–i.e., Julie Ducournau’s films–but anybody found in a matinee screening of an Eli Roth torture porno should be instantly called in for questioning. Films like The Witch, Hereditary (2018), and Midsommar (2019) have simultaneously set the standards for tone in horror cinema and paved the way for a folk horror revival. We can visibly observe this influence in British cinema, for example, where there is a rising folkloric tendency in films like Enys Men (2022) and Starve Acre (2023).

 And yet, Eggers’s films seem to stand out to me, especially on re-watch. A film like Nosferatu, which is by no means as good as his earlier work, has a sense of beauty and sensuality driven through the central themes of death and corruption which recalls the plethora of Gothic fiction he has clearly read, and reminds me of Jonathan Glazer’s cult horror Under the Skin (2013). There is a reason the style has been called ‘Gothic romance’, and canonical novels of the genre like Matthew Lewis’s The Monk are subtitled ‘A Romance’; not only due to their cultural status within the Romantic tradition more generally, but also since the themes of these stories typically transgress romantic boundaries, between love (civility, obedience, etc.) and sex (desire, chaos, etc.), for example, and in a traditionally Freudian sense, the Id and Superego in contradiction. Angela Carter understood this when writing the short stories published in The Bloody Chamber, most of which display an erotics of death and decay taking the latent content of the human subconscious in their firing line. It is an extraordinary collection, which I would argue exemplifies the best of the modern Gothic; of that which Gothic fiction was always intended to be. Reading The Bloody Chamber or its acidic film adaptation, The Company of Wolves, alongside Bram Stoker or the previous two Nosferatu films by F.W. Murnau and Werner Herzog respectfully, is especially enlightening when watching Eggers’s fresh vision, which ups the sexual implications of the subject matter.

 But we can also find interesting tracery in his favourite films. Eggers has praised poetic Eastern European films such as forgotten gems by Sergei Parajanov, Yuri Ilyenko and Andrei Eshpai, and not-so-forgotten classics like Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985). However, one of his favourite films–which he has highlighted on more than one occasion–strikes me as particularly interesting for analysing his approach to horror. That being, Ingmar Bergman’s nightmarish Cries and Whispers (1972). Perhaps I am biased because Cries and Whispers is also, without a doubt, one of the greatest movies I have ever seen, but Eggers’s apt description of this surrealist family drama as ‘one of the best horror movies ever made’ and an indispensable influence on The Witch and, later, Nosferatu is quite telling.

Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop) is a Swedish period film written and directed by Bergman, and based–as with the vast majority of his best work–on his dreams, in this case a recurring dream image of four women in white clothing lingering in a red room, and the multifaceted nature of his mother, Karin, who all four protagonists represent. It is about three women waiting for the fourth to die as she gradually succumbs to advanced uterine cancer, two of which are her estranged sisters. As the film progresses, audiences are given a plot increasingly dictated by dream logic, symbol, and metaphor, with the story collapsing into mood and montage as the inner ‘corruptions’ of these disconnected sisters is dredged from perpetual silence. There is something deeply unsettling about Cries and Whispers, which may be down to set decoration, pitch-perfect and capricious performances, extended takes, and other examples of technical aptitude. Or something more terrifying beneath its red-hot epidermis. Time is, of course, a factor: there are plenty of clock ticking sound effects which impose themselves at various instances. The collapse of dreamscapes and reality mean that anything can happen: dead people come back to life, memories of trauma and betrayal are saturated indistinguishably within the present narrative. These are particularly agonising. All while the dying sister descends into the most harrowing displays of physical suffering Bergman ever captured, and that is saying something. The parallels with Eggers’s films are most obvious with regards to Harriet Andersson’s performance in these instances–her physicality, her breathing, etc.–and the moments of possession which he has captured in The Witch and Nosferatu. In many ways, it’s impossible to film sickness and suffering in all its harrowing lowliness today, having borne witness to Cries and Whispers, without invoking Bergman.

The horror of Cries and Whispers is clear: screaming, dying, death, injury, self-harm, and unrelenting focus on all of these things. By contrast, when asking someone why they felt like ‘that’ when watching a film like this, their response rarely mentions the scene, for example, where one of the sisters mutilates her genitalia. It’s about mood: an overall diagnosis. Cries and Whispers exhibits terror in its silences (dialogue is relatively sparse throughout), or the manic whispers which flood the screen on occasion; the aura of death permeating each frame, and that quintessentially Gothic association of erotic, sensual detail in the same breath as corruption. The red walls mean blood, perhaps primarily menstrual blood–but also passion, alarm, and decay. It is a complex and challenging epidermis, which syncs sororal alienation with repressed desires; the immediate terror is what might take place should this repression surface. If The Witch and Nosferatu are about anything, they are about the repressed desires of young women, in particular, defying the customs of their present ages, and the supernatural manifestations of this so-called ‘corruption’. In Eggers’s version, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) veers on the side of allegory rather than literality, as an embodiment of Ellen Hutter’s (Lily-Rose Depp) Victorian sexual self-consciousness. The choice to design Orlok like a decomposing corpse, in this one, shows not just fidelity to the folkloric roots of vampirism in Eastern Europe–vampires were often cast as plague-survivors by superstition–but commitment to the kernel of decay.

Nosferatu ends, unlike its predecessors, in remarkable serenity. After a two hour rampage in which several of the central characters are gradually picked off, and a cataclysmic tragedy closes the whole bloody project, the last image and Willem Dafoe-spoken aphorism leaves viewers with an obscure sense of poetry. Yes, the sensual undertones of vampirism are foregrounded throughout. Yes, there is a sexual connection between possession and neurotic lust. But the final shot of the film–you will agree with me if you have seen it–epitomises the tense coexistence of love and corruption. The tone is understated, almost nostalgic. It reminds me of the ending of Cries and Whispers when, having written her out by the film’s half-way point, Bergman offers us a flashback into the memories of the dying sister when she and her two siblings–now incorrigibly divided–took a meaningful walk one afternoon and sat in a swingset as they played on when they were girls. The result is an impenetrable mix of fatal sentiment, melancholy, and naivety: all lost to time’s ruthless arrow, but which undoubtedly drew breath once upon a time. The beauty and the bloodshed in chorus.