The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

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In one of the most iconic scenes of F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, Count Orlok steps out of his castle to receive Thomas Hutter, the young solicitor whose life he will soon upend. Dressed in black, his hands folded in front of him, he slowly emerges from the shadows of the barrel-vaulted gate to his inner keep as if he were a spider coming to collect his prey, more arachnid than human. Yet Orlok—Murnau changed the names of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in a futile attempt to avoid copyright laws—is no mere animal.

Horror films, it is often said, express the social anxieties of their time, and this vampire is a dense Expressionist image of post-World War I German fears: mass death, famine, and the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed tens of millions around the world. Standing at the threshold of his keep, Orlok announces himself as a pestilence that will infiltrate a German town, bringing corruption and death. What’s more, the economic crisis and political fragmentation of the Weimar state helped fuel fears of foreign influence and rising antisemitism. Some critics have seen Nosferatu as a caricature of the Jew, recognizable to the audiences of the time. Vampires cross all geographical, physical, moral, and corporeal borders. They are unquestionably cosmopolitan.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, rapid technological change, and the fast-moving political situation in the United States, where immigrants and people of color have been cast as threats to a white American body politic, the power of horror films is easy to understand. Monsters inhabit social fault lines, growing in number as the faults widen. Horror’s shock effects and visceral charms not only continue to draw young audiences seeking thrills and chills to movie theaters, they have also bled into more serious drama and popular culture. If home-invasion horror crystallized suburban fears in the 1980s and ’90s, and the zombie apocalypse became ubiquitous in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis as a reflection of the increasing precarity of the middle-class, Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad used horror elements to tell the story of Walter White’s increasingly monstrous response to a lack of affordable healthcare.

Gilligan’s new postapocalyptic drama, Pluribus, adopts the same slow-burn horror approach to explore the faultlines of our era of perpetual connectivity and the attention economy. In the dawning age of Neuralink and anthropomorphic AI robots, he has grasped that old school cyborgs—Star Trek’s Borg Collective or The Matrix’s virtual reality-bending agents—are quaint, if not downright kitschy. Here, an extraterrestrial signal leads to the making of a virus that causes the “joining” of all of humanity—except for thirteen lucky-unlucky individuals who are immune—into a single hive mind that calls itself “the Others,” a plural monster that is both human and more than human, everyone and no one, embodied yet without fixed form.

What does it mean that “the Others”—let’s call them “the Pluribus”—lack precisely what makes a monster: i.e., its monstrous figure? What does it mean that the monster is now simply us?

One critic recently suggested that monsters are having a “sympathetic turn.” In Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein, for example, Jacob Elordi plays a misunderstood creature mistreated by his all-too-human maker. Yet as Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel itself suggests, this turn is hardly new. We have long identified with monsters, and above all with vampires. Dracula is the single most reproduced figure in film history. By the 1960s, bloodsuckers were countercultural icons. Andy Warhol paid a queer tribute to Bela Lugosi’s 1931 Count Dracula in his 1963 The Kiss (Bela Lugosi), and was himself nicknamed “Drella”: a combination of Dracula and Cinderella. In Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre, Klaus Kinski played Dracula as a lonely—and very straight—creature crushed by the ennui of his eternally repetitive days. For Herzog, Nosferatu was a way to reconnect with a German democratic past that wasn’t tainted by fascism, but his Romantic antihero was also ultimately not very different from the average teenager: all he really wanted was love. And of course, the hugely successful Twilight franchise only cemented the vampire as a global pop-culture sweetheart. Today, streaming television is infested with countless teenage covens, and vampires are clearly the sympathetic monster of the twenty-first century par excellence, a global vanguard of alienation, difference, and marginalization.

There’s a powerful element of sympathy in Gilligan’s Pluribus, too, but it significantly complicates audience identification and resists any simplistic politics of otherness. If the vampire is a nineteenth-century materialist embodiment of death, a creature that takes your blood rather than your soul, Gilligan’s billion-headed monster is the exact opposite: a humanity that has become a benevolent, peace-loving consciousness where all material differences are overcome. Forbidden to cause harm to the point that they cannot eat fruit until it has fallen from the tree, the Pluribus is (are?) an ecological communist collective. And yet, however noble it may be compared to the wasteful standards of our consumerist society, it violates all modern principles of individual freedom and self-determination. The Pluribus doesn’t embody or represent evil, moral collapse, or amoral natural drives. At once reassuring and creepy, each of its members is a distinct, existing being who lives and dies on their own, yet each is fully integrated into the hive, a mere drone.

This simultaneous separation and connectedness is usually associated with zombies. Their lack of identity and their robotic movement put them at odds with traditional visions of monstrosity as the embodiment of a moral idea. In Pluribus, they point toward something we’ve “known” for some time: namely, that the cheerful and persistent attention we receive from the internet isn’t just sympathy, connection, or a way to empower ourselves. It is also a bespoke surveillance state that mediates, sees, and records everything we do—and, increasingly, everything we think about doing. Further, it does so supposedly for our benefit, because it wants to cater to our needs and make us happy.

As a multitude, the Pluribus is neither formless nor shapeless, neither sublime nor cosmic. Yet its peace-on-earth apocalypse is more total than any twentieth-century totalitarianism, because it doesn’t feel like a giving up of freedom. The hive manifests only as individuals—i.e., precisely what we believe we are and aspire to be—but they are all doubles. This is evident in the relationship between Carol Sturka, the show’s hero and one of the thirteen people who are not assimilated, and her hive representative and chaperone, Zosia. Carol is a romance author who refuses the hive in the name of messy, conflictual individuality, and sets out to undermine it. In horror-film parlance, she is a “Final Girl”: a resourceful female character in the slasher film genre who defeats the killer and becomes the audience’s point of identification. Here, however, the monster is a charming, attentive woman and the Final Girl ends up sleeping with her even though she openly admits that she—i.e., they—are working tirelessly to figure out how to assimilate Carol and the remaining handful of individuals. The name Zosia is a Polish form of Sophia, meaning “wisdom”; in French, however, “sosie” is a lookalike, a doppelgänger. In Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Seven Old Men,” a poet walking through Paris encounters seven identical decrepit old men one after the other. Deeply unnerved by the seemingly unnatural experience and afraid of seeing an eighth sosie that would be “ironic” and “fatal,” he rushes home and locks his door.

Carol is the apotheosis of horror’s twentieth-century female victims and modern selfhood realized in one of its most hallowed types: the author. Inversely, Zosia is a subservient tradwife. But they are doubles, not opposites. Zosia’s subservience makes us cringe, but it allows us to see Carol from the perspective of the Others: from their point of view, she is unquestionably monstrous. When she loses her temper and screams at Zosia—they are highly sensitive to expressions of negative emotions—she causes the death of eleven million “Others.” Gilligan invites us to weigh the price of Carol’s determination to remain a free, modern individual in the face of Zosia’s submission to the collective. Side-by-side, Final Girl and monster are both sympathetic and monstrous, figures of repetition rather than individual beings who manifest and act out their subjective interiority as hero or monster. They are life understood in terms of genetic code, as biotechnology.

Curiously, Gilligan’s doubles resonate with Robert Eggers’s 2024 Nosferatu, a remake of Murnau’s silent classic that opens with a nod to its compressed Expressionist image of Orlok stepping out of the shadows. Yet rather than announcing the monster, it begins by introducing us to his victim, Ellen. Reversing Murnau’s narrative sequence, Eggers begins with her lying in the dark in lonely yearning and despair: “Come to me… hear my call,” Ellen pleads until a deep voice replies: “You wakened me from an eternity of darkness.” She sits up into the moonlight with her hands clasped in prayer in front of her, visually echoing Max Schreck’s folded hands in Murnau’s 1922 version, and goes to the door to meet her monstrous lover. Before she crosses the threshold of her house to meet him in the garden, Eggers shows us the unlikely couple as reverse silhouettes of one another, an emblematic double image suggesting that it is not only the vampire who haunts Ellen, but she who also haunts him.

Horror aficionados will quickly grasp that Eggers has not only turned the traditional vampire myth upside down, he has also produced a new monster mash-up (think Dracula vs. Frankenstein or Freddy vs. Jason). Like Carol and Zosia, Ellen and Orlok constitute a double image that moves beyond the polarities of human and monster, killer and victim. Here, Orlok is a function of her desire: “I am an appetite, nothing more,” he states sententiously, and fastidiously sticks to the letter of the contract they seal in sex and blood. Their frenzied fucking in the garden isn’t merely impersonal and animalistic, an adolescent one-night stand; it has the mechanical, wooden quality of pornography, and it can easily be read as an allegory of menstruation as a biological rhythm of the female body, of Ellen “coming into her blood,” according to an old-fashioned expression.

Here, however, we can glimpse something larger than just another twist in the horror genre: a turn that takes horror beyond itself. As doubles, Ellen and Orlok blur the distinction between biological function and subjective desire and point to a perhaps inevitable confusion between bodies and persons. At another level, however, they are also figures of cinema itself as a mechanical art of two-dimensional surfaces—of specters and shadows—rather than distinct, three-dimensional individuals. Eggers’s Nosferatu and his Final Girl are not just each other’s doubles; they play out cinema’s spectrality and its strange powers of seduction as a danse macabre of marionettes, one that hollows out the figure of the monster. Instead of representing a dark otherness that destroys human life, they become figures of the sameness of the apparatus as a machine of predictable repetition.

Eggers is not the first filmmaker to see a connection between the vampire and cinema. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula includes a sequence made to look like grainy hand-cranked early film. Gary Oldman as Vlad makes his way through London’s streets in a stuttering movement that suggests he is out of phase with the living crowds he moves through, a cinematic phantom. In the background, newspaper boys shout: “See the amazing cinematograph! A wonder of modern civilization!” In case we miss the point, when he catches sight of Mina, played by Winona Ryder, he suavely introduces himself as a foreigner lost in the big city: “I am only looking for the cinematograph. I understand it is a wonder of the civilized world.” Their torrid affair unfolds as a shadow play on screens and glass partitions in restaurants and other public venues as a morality tale about the cinematic fantasies that shape life in the modern metropolis.

The form and narrative of the modern vampire arose with the founding of cinema itself. In fact, it appears—flickeringly—in film before Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula becomes its definitive text. In Georges Méliès’s 1896 Le Manoir du diable, the devil appears as a bat before taking on human form and is eventually driven out with a crucifix. Although there are no explicit references to movies in Stoker’s novel, he clearly imagined his Count in terms of photographic reproduction. He has Harker use his Kodak more than once, though never on the Count himself, and his working notes describe Dracula as a skeleton as it might appear on a photographic negative. Throughout, the novel displays an obsessive interest in the period’s technologies of recording and reproduction, the phonograph, the telegraph, and the typewriter.¹

Considering this history, the fact that Eggers’s Nosferatu is the first full-length American remake of Murnau’s film rather than an adaptation of Stoker’s novel is significant. He is clearly interested in the movie-ness of the vampire, and the film shows this off in numerous ways. Murnau famously used a photographic negative image to indicate the moment when Hutter crosses over into Nosferatu’s domain. Eggers takes the idea and expands it by using a cool, bluish palette, particularly in the opening scene, to suggest a world made of flat, artificial surfaces—a two-dimensional reality in which human and monster are merely positive and negative versions of the same flickering cinematic image. This is the case even at the moment when Ellen most expresses her female humanity: a crucial scene in which she confesses to her husband that she was the one who first summoned Nosferatu. As she explains her reasons, she grows upset and is gripped by a violent and involuntary shaking her contemporaries would easily mistake for possession, the presence and power of the vampire. At the peak of her rage, she rips open her dress and her corset, her eyes roll into the back of her head, and her face becomes a horrific mask as she wails monstrously. At this moment, Eggers shows us a close-up of her mouth as a gaping cavity, her tongue contorted into something misshapen, a kind of stunted, deformed phallus. Yet this classic horror-movie image also reveals the mouth as a piece of stagecraft, a theatrical machine.

To film this scene, Eggers and Lily-Rose Depp, who plays Ellen, researched the work of the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, who used a large photographic archive of women incarcerated in Paris’s Salpêtrière hospital to define hysteria as a female mental illness. But as the historian Georges Didi-Huberman has noted, the “extreme visibility” of Charcot’s photographed subjects exposes a blind spot of early experimental psychology, the way that scientific observation can become a kind of violence.² In effect, Eggers and Depp turn Charcot’s reduction of female suffering to hysteria—as well as Stoker’s Victorian vision of women seduced and possessed by Dracula—back on itself. Ellen’s monster face sets Charcot’s photographically fixed women into motion. Her shuddering is a reaction to the social strictures embodied by her corset, the distressed monstrosity of the body deprived and confined; but it is also a performance, not simply a symptom of female malady. If anything, the scene reveals male panic more than female madness. Ellen’s freaked-out husband (Nicholas Hoult) suggests calling the doctor, and she instantly calms down. “No, no, please. I’ll be good, I promise,” she begs him, more afraid of hospitalization than of Orlok and more in command of herself than she lets on.

Ultimately, Ellen’s monstrous fit is less a manifestation of female otherness than a political act of self-assertion that reveals something more unsettling: monsters—and I would argue all of them, even literary ones—are radically cinematic, the products of a cold machinery of reproduction. Monsters are images we produce, and even the most sympathetic monsters imply an aesthetic politics that obscures the fact that their otherness stems not from what or who they represent, but rather from the fact that they are images. In a time when otherness is being weaponized in the United States and elsewhere, and images of supposed threats to our body politic are generated and disseminated by campus-scale machines, the refusal to see how monsters are produced is not innocent. It is deeply ideological and contributes to the political violence that now surrounds us.

This is not to say, however, that monsters are merely figments of our imagination and so we can sleep soundly. On the contrary, it means that they are all too real. Ellen’s shuddering body, gaping mouth, and blank eyes dispense with the monster whose face we can enjoy or fear as the other’s face. By presenting no monster and no victim—or, rather, both at once—Eggers’s Final Girl becomes the true successor to Murnau’s Orlok, a final “Final Girl” who exposes the sympathetic monster as the most dangerous one of all. In the image of her contorted tongue and the sound of her wail, Eggers recovers the monstrosity of the cinema image, our need to give a face to our facelessness. She is the monster we will never be done with.