Viclore

I recently went to see the 2024 remake of the classic German film Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror- simply named Nosferatu. Whilst the film has given me an appreciation of exactly why the original film led to a law suit by the family of Bram Stoker (the writer of Dracula), it also got me wondering: Why’s Nosferatu called that? What’s the meaning of the name Nosferatu? What even is Nosferatu?

Within Dracula, the term nosferatu is used in place of vampire:

The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages; he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements; the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, and the owl, and the bat—the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown. 

Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, and the original Nosferatu film was released in 1922. Stoker was not the source of this term; it appears earlier in a paper by Emily Gerard. She spent time living in central Romania, and used her time to write about the culture and landscape of Transylvania. In 1885 she published Transylvanian Superstitions, which describes the nosferatu as such:

More decidedly evil [than the Strigoi], however, is the vampire, or nosferatu, in whom every Roumenian peasant believes as firmly as he does in heaven or hell. There are two sorts of vampires-living and dead.

The living vampire is in general the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate persons, but even a flawless pedigree will not ensure any- one against the intrusion of a vampire into his family vault, since every person killed by a nosferatu becomes likewise a vampire after death, and will continue to suck the blood of other innocent people till the spirit has been exorcised, either by opening the grave of the person suspected and driving a stake through the corpse, or firing a pistol shot into the coffin. In very obstinate cases it is further recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic, or to extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave.

That such remedies are often resorted to, even in our enlightened days, is a well-attested fact, and there are probably few Roumenian villages where such has not taken place within the memory of the inhabitants.

In Nosferatu (2024), we do not learn the source of Count Orlok. We do however see the practice of opening a grave to drive a stake through the corpse being practiced by the local people. Due to the local people’s reaction to the mention of the name Orlok and the belief that one bitten by a vampire will become one in turn after their death, perhaps the person in the grave was a local person believed to have been attacked by Orlok; the means through which Orlok is ultimately defeated is however not mentioned here.

Although Gerard’s 1885 publication appears to be the first use of the term nosferatu within the English language, it is not the first one internationally. In 1865 Wilhelm Schmidt published “Das Jahr und seine Tage in Meinung und Brauch der Rumänen Siebenbürgens”, which seems to mean “The year and its days in the opinion and customs of the Romanians of Transylvania”. Unfortunately I do not know German, and so am at the mercy of Google Translate.

Schmidt (again with the help of Google Translate) had the following to say on the nosferatu:

Next I add the vampire ー nosferatu. This is the illegitimate fruit of two children conceived out of wedlock or the unfortunate spirit of someone killed by a vampire, who can appear as a dog, cat, toad, frog, louse, flea, bug, in short, in any form and, like the Old Slavic and Bohemian Blkodlak, Vukodlak or Polish Mora and Russian Kikimora, as an incubus or succubus zburatorul – particularly when it comes to newly engaged couples. What was believed and practiced as a defence more than a hundred years ago is still true today, and there is hardly a village that is not able to present what it has experienced or heard with the firm conviction of the truth.

This is very similar to what we saw in Gerard’s account. Gerard was said to have worked reviewing French and German literature for newspapers, suggesting that she knew the German language. However, she did also demonstrably spend time in Romania. The similarity between the two accounts, in my mind, suggests that both parties spoke to similar sources; not that Gerard adapted hers from the writings of Schmidt.

So where can we source the name nosferatu from? It is alleged that nosferatu may be derived from Nesuferitul, which is said to be Romanian for “the offensive one” or “the insufferable one”; a quick Google Translation suggests that it means “obnoxious”. Perhaps this means that it was a local euphemistic term referring to the creature which the Western world calls the vampire, which was taken as a precise name for the creature by foreign visitors.

Another suggestion is that the term may have come from the Greek nosophoros (νοσοφόρος), meaning “disease carrier”. This would certainly tie into the theme of Nosferatu bringing the plague seen within the movie. However, the number of borrowed words from Greek in Romanian is very low; it seems unlikely that such a word would have made it into the Romanian lexicon to be repeated within folk stories.

Perhaps this connection was used within the design of the Nosferatu creature of the movies. Vampire traditionally do not bring plague with them- why would they? They require a healthy population to feed upon. The villagers seen in the film did not seem to be particularly afflicted with plague. In Dracula, the namesake Count Dracula came to the UK as he wished to find new victims. In Nosferatu we can only infer that Count Orlok wished to move to Germany to be closed to Ellen Hutter, a character which he had a psychic connection with. Perhaps he sought to spread the plague to pressure her into offering herself to him? It would not be the first time that plague has been used as a weapon- in the 14th century Siege of Caffa, Black Death infected corpses were infamously catapulted over the city walls to weaken defenders.

That said, did Count Orlok really need the plague to pressure Ellen? He killed her friend and threatened her husband personally, without the use of plague. Perhaps he utilised it to increase the overall temperature of the situation, and increase the pressure upon her. Perhaps as a supernatural creature Count Orlok is doomed to carry out a set of actions along a set path; if he is as well read as the Count Dracula upon which he is based, surely he would know how a nosferatu is defeated. Any yet, he still engaged in the ritual of spending the night with a woman who gives him her blood of her own free will, enticing him to stay into the morning light- aggressively sought it out, even. Perhaps the playbook which he was doomed to follow prescribed the spreading of the plague, even when it would not be in his best interests to do so.

In conclusion, I believe that the nosferatu is called as such because the word was a euphemistic term used by local Romanian people for the creature which we know as the vampire. The exact etymology is lost on me because I don’t know the langauge. I also think that Count Orlok is not a vampire per se, but instead a different (albeit related) creature which also functions as a plague bringer. This ultimately makes the nosferatu a doomed creature as it is destined to not only sicken it’s primary food source, but also as it is doomed to seek out its own self destruction through the ritualistic seeking of the woman who will destroy it.