In the new Dracula film, Nosferatu, the vampire, Count Orlok (both named in homage to the 1922 film Nosferatu), is quite a monster. No dapper, charming aristocrat, this beast is a rotting, hulking creature from our nightmares. His low, slow voice and menacing stare sum up a vicious demeanor. He is not after love. Rather, he feeds on the blood and the souls of his victims.
Nosferatu has a lot going for it. One point of keen interest here is the way in which the director, Robert Eggers, evokes 19th-century beliefs about madness and the treatment of mental illness.
Orlok’s primary target is Ellen Hutter (played by Lily-Rose Depp), a woman who suffers horrible visions of a dark figure who desires her. She finds herself sleepwalking, writhing, and screaming. Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, an upstanding medical man and hospital director, ties her to the bed and gives her ether. At his wit's end, Dr. Sievers decides to bring in a specialist, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (played by Willem Defoe).
Franz is not only a genius physician but is also an investigator of the occult. Assessing Ellen, he determines that this is not a case of madness but rather of demonic possession. Here is where Eggers dives deep into the history of mental illness.
Prior to the intercession of Franz, Ellen is diagnosed with hysteria. This was a very common diagnosis in the 1800s, one mainly aimed at women. Hysteria was something of a catch-all, characterized by a wide variety of symptoms, described by scholar Andrew Scull as including “the trances, the fits, the paralyses, the choking, the tearing of hair, the remarkable emotional instability, all with no obvious organic substrate.”
Hysteria was an ancient diagnosis, derived from the Greek word for womb. For millennia, many authorities believed that it was caused by the womb “wandering” about in the body in search of “moisture.”
In the film, Ellen flips about wildly on the bed, at one point arcing her body severely in an inverted U-shape. As Eggers probably knows, this was a “classic” hysterical position, as documented by the 19th century’s leading expert on hysteria, the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot would have patients at his hospital demonstrate their hysteria in front of audiences. The U-shape position was photographed and documented as “proof” of one’s madness.
The twist in Nosferatu, however, is that Dr. Sievers’s diagnosis is incorrect. Ellen is not suffering from a medical condition. She has a vampire problem.
In the book Dracula, Bram Stoker gives us Renfield, a madman in an asylum who is controlled by the vampire. In this movie, Herr Knock plays the role. Like Ellen, he is “mad” not by dint of mental illness but rather because Orlok has attacked his mind from afar. When he is seen killing sheep, he is thrown into a cell in Dr. Sievers’s hospital basement.
As with Ellen, Dr. Sievers starts with a regular medical diagnosis. He is nervous about putting Knock in the basement cell because, as he tells an employee, locking up the mad is no longer appropriate. He is, in 19th-century terms, an “enlightened” man. It soon becomes clear that Knock is completely out of control, however. He is placed in a confinement chair that looks a lot like the tranquilizer chair developed by 19th-century mind doctor and psychiatric pioneer Benjamin Rush.
Once again, Professor Franz is right. Knock’s is not a mental health problem but a supernatural one.
Nosferatu is not an attack on the modern medical mental illness model, nor is it a historical account of psychiatry. It is, rather, a quasi-feminist fantasy in which psychiatry’s past is conjured up to show how patriarchal medical authorities are wrong, and a woman’s insight is right.
THE BASICSIn the end, the so-called “hysterical” woman defeats the monster, not the doctors. For Eggers, the underestimation of Ellen’s power is an indictment of “19th-century society,” which has her “shut down, and corseted up, and tied to the bed, and quieted with ether.” Her defiance of its strictures presents audiences with a new kind of hero, a female Victorian rebel.