This Christmas Day, amid the usual holiday trappings, a Nosferatu remake will arrive in movie theaters. Whatever combination of iconoclastic provocation and marketing savvy led A24 to schedule a vampire film’s release for December 25, this bit of counterprogramming may offer an opportunity.

A century ago, the famous exemplar of German expressionism handed audiences an unapologetically Christological ending. Will this new version, created by filmmaker Robert Eggers, do the same?

The monsters inhabiting our horror stories are never irrelevant to human experience. Frankenstein’s pieced-together, reanimated giant and those Godzilla-scale creatures awakened by nuclear detonations signal apprehensions about the excesses of scientific inquiry and experimentation. Werewolves and zombies register fear of contagious disease and death.

Modern vampires bear the weight of the latter threat, too, but combine the possibility of a premature demise with either hope of resurrection (as one of the undead) or a chance at passionate romance with a beautiful (albeit ice-cold and deathly-pale) lover.

If centuries of vampire lore signal any truth about the human condition, it’s this: The unknown and the dangerous exercise unwonted power over our desires.

These days, those desiring to spin a vampire yarn can choose between multiple—let’s say four—narrative paradigms that have coalesced since this particular monster made his way into the English language two centuries ago. These templates differ according to the roles given to faith and each protagonist’s ability to resist the enticements of their bloodsucking admirer.

The same dark and stormy night in 1816 on which Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein, John Polidori lifted these creepy immortals from the pages of ancient Greco-Roman texts and Eastern European folk tales and planted them squarely in the gothic Romance novel. In The Vampyre (1819), the “deadly hue” of Lord Ruthven’s colorless skin and his “dead grey eye” fail to scare off the “virtuous wife and innocent daughter” who cannot gainsay, elude, or overpower his seductive spells. This monster is malevolence incarnate, a specter of unrepentant, unstoppable wickedness. Such a story rejects the psalmist’s promise that evil will be destroyed (Ps. 37:9) and allows no opportunity to flee temptation (James 4:7). Knowledge is impotent, and faith wholly absent.

Robert Eggers’s own The Witch (2015) constitutes a modern counterpart: Its powerful killers bathe in blood to restore their youth, float in the air during spell casting, and utterly destroy a Christian family whose faith crumbles one tragedy at a time.

J. S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) retains the mesmerizing power of the vampire, who awakens both ambiguous repulsion and even stronger attraction. This time, however, rescue arrives in the form of human ingenuity. The knowledgeable Baron Vordenburg saves the day by uncovering the entombed murderer and adroitly applying stake to chest and axe to neck. Though Le Fanu makes clear that the vampire cannot bear the sound of praying, no invocations, crosses, or eucharistic wafers play a role in Carmilla’s defeat.

Marvel’s vampire-hunting Blade, who once headlined a film trilogy and will reappear on screens before long, provides a modern example of this type; he dismisses crosses and holy water as utterly worthless.

A third variant, codified by Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), actualizes faith by granting surprising agency to the titular vampire’s prime target. Mina is “one of God’s women,” her fiancé attests, “fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.” Mina veers from precedent by showing no interest in Dracula when he materializes in her bedroom; love for God and her husband protect her heart. Though the vampire begins her transformation by forcing her to consume his blood, her prayer, “God grant that we may be guided aright,” is finally realized when the men kill the vampire with the help of clues Mina herself collected.

The final, more recent archetype adds conflicted, remorseful vampires to the mix, soulful parasites whose inner torment pairs well with chiseled jawlines and piercing eyes. Any romantic interest they show is passionately reciprocated by their would-be prey. Joss Whedon’s Buffy and Angel series popularized this strain of narrative with help from Anne Rice’s books, and have since spawned Twilight, Underworld, The Vampire Diaries, and a host of similar ilk.

In realizing his childhood dream to remake Nosferatu, then, filmmaker Robert Eggers has many options. Filmmakers often play fast and loose with source material, so Eggers need not toe the line drawn by F. W. Murnau—who himself took liberties when (illegally) adopting Nosferatu from Stoker’s Dracula in 1922. Murnau’s film turned the Mina character, renamed Ellen, into the central hero by allowing her to sacrifice herself to save others, a Christlike “sacrifice of her own bloode” that provides the only means of delivering her town from the vampire’s bloodlust.

The same character (now named Lucy) does the same in Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu, using a cross to ward off the demon until she learns that only the death of a “pure-hearted woman” can end Dracula’s reign. Unfortunately for the world, her valiant sacrifice does not save anyone. In a twist that recalls evil’s inevitable victory in Polidori’s original, Lucy’s infected husband becomes the new lord of darkness.

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The trailer for Eggers’s film sketches the outline of a female protagonist eager to embrace the dark lord who sails through her window on the night wind, a protagonist who later complains to her husband that “you could never please me as he could.” These clips could sum up the entirety of the tale or subtly mislead.

Perhaps Eggers will turn our protagonist into a sad victim of her own lust. Or, maybe, she’ll become an adulteress whose passionate devotion somehow humanizes the fiend. She could even prove herself a mastermind who defeats Dracula by playing mind games better than he. 

There’s one more possibility we can discuss with other viewers—whether Eggers realizes it or not. If our hero recognizes her need for the divine and, like Stoker’s Mina, prays “with all the strength of my sad and humble soul,” perhaps the film’s release date will not prove quite so irreverent.

Paul Marchbanks is a professor of English at California Polytechnic State University. His YouTube channel is “Digging in the Dirt,” where he discussed Nosferatu after its release.

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