Nosferatu is both a very new film and a very old film, and that contradiction is what makes it so fascinating. The version released in theaters this past Christmas is director Robert Eggers’s remake of the German filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s silent classic from 1922, and it’s been surprisingly successful at the box office, bringing in an estimated $40 million in its opening week. Both films are retellings of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, with the plot rearranged and the names of characters changed—from Dracula to Count Orlok, from Renfield to Herr Knock, and so on. Both are masterpieces of Gothic horror in their own way, and both contain rich veins of political subtext that are worth examining. 

Eggers isn’t the first filmmaker to revisit the silent Nosferatu. Werner Herzog remade it in 1979 with Klaus Kinski in the lead role, and the prolific character actor Doug Jones starred in a low-budget independent version in 2023. There’s also Shadow of the Vampire, the metafictional horror movie from 2000 that imagines an actual monster stalking Murnau’s set. But more than any previous retelling, Eggers’s Nosferatu holds fascinating—and disturbing—historic echoes of the German original. Murnau and his crew made their silent film in the wake of the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918-19, as fascism was beginning to emerge as a hideous threat across Europe. More than a century later, Eggers made his version as the COVID pandemic continues to ravage the planet, and as neo-fascism is emerging in the United States and elsewhere. As a result of their historical context, both films are preoccupied with themes of plague and contagion, and with their respective societies’ fears about race and immigration. They can be seen as violently xenophobic films, portraying Count Orlok as an immigrant figure who is also a demonic spreader of plague and decay and has to be exterminated by the protagonists. But that would be a superficial reading, and ultimately a flawed one. Dig a little deeper into the vampire’s tomb, and you begin to realize that it’s not the ethnic or cultural other that’s really the looming threat at Nosferatu’s heart. It’s the economic elite.

All versions of Nosferatu are dominated by the central figure of the Count, who sets the plot in motion. Orlok is Dracula, and in a narrative sense the two characters are almost identical. Both vampires lure a hapless real estate agent (called Jonathan Harker in Stoker’s Dracula and Thomas Hutter in Nosferatu) to Transylvania, where they torment and menace him for several days in a crumbling ruin of a castle, only to become obsessed with the broker’s partner (sometimes a wife named Ellen, sometimes a fiancée called Mina). The vampire then travels to western Europe to prey upon her, causing all kinds of death and chaos along the way. But visually, the two characters are very different. Count Dracula is usually portrayed in film as a handsome, eloquent, and seductive nobleman—Bela Lugosi in 1931, Christopher Lee throughout the 1960s and ’70s, and Danish actor Claes Bang in the BBC’s 2020 miniseries. By contrast, Murnau’s Count Orlok is a pure monster—a cadaverous creature with a bald head, a pointed nose, ears like a bat’s, and long, clutching, clawlike fingers. And in the Weimar Germany of the 1920s, that particular collection of attributes added up to one thing: an antisemitic caricature. 

The parallels between the original Orlok and antisemitic depictions of Jewish people are fairly obvious, and they’ve been remarked on by many film critics over the years. As J. Hoberman writes for Tablet:

So who or what is Nosferatu’s ancient, tremendously powerful creature, a sort of humanoid rodent given an imposing hooked nose, who communicates with his minions in a mysterious code, which includes several Hebrew letters as well as the Star of David, and, contaminating every space he occupies, arrives out of the East with a swarm of plague-bearing rats to feast on the blood of naïve Aryans until destroyed through an act of Christian sacrifice by a virtuous woman? The vampire recalls two monstrous slanders against European Jews, evoking both the blood libel and the accusation of poisoning wells to spread disease that resulted in widespread pogroms and the near-extermination of Jews throughout the Rhineland in the mid-14th century.

When Orlok’s minion Herr Knock reads in the newspaper that plague is spreading across Europe, he knows it’s a sign that his undead master is on the move. The vampire and the disease go hand in hand. To the twin slanders Hoberman identifies, we could add a third: what Jewish cultural scholar Jonah Cohen calls the “lust libel.” A counterpart to the “blood libel,” this narrative has historically depicted Jews as “perverse, predatory, pornographic, horny vampires of the Orient”—notice that Cohen says “vampires”—and thus threats to an idealized white womanhood. Orlok embodies this antisemitic idea, too. In all his incarnations, he’s driven by an obsessive desire to bite a German woman in her bed, and the onscreen penetration of a supple neck with fangs is a clear innuendo. Taken as a package, the fears the vampire represents can be seen as deeply xenophobic ones—and in 1922, xenophobic politics were on the rise. 

When Nosferatu debuted in German cinemas, one of the people in the audience was Julius Streicher—the propagandist for the Nazi Party who would soon become the editor of its newspaper Der Stürmer and would later be executed at Nuremberg for his role in spreading antisemitic stereotypes across Germany and helping to incite the Holocaust. Streicher reportedly loved Murnau’s film, and in the years that followed, he would fill the pages of Der Stürmer with vampire imagery. At one point, he even published a cartoon of a bat with a Star of David on its chest flying through the night looking for victims, labelled “Der Vampyr.” (This stuff doesn’t have to be clever to be dangerous.) Hitler, too, compared “the Jew” to a vampire in Mein Kampf, writing that “wherever he establishes himself the people who grant him hospitality are bound to be bled to death sooner or later.” Unlike with Streicher, there’s no evidence that he saw Nosferatu specifically—but we do know that he was a big fan of movies, sometimes watching two or three in a day, so it’s not impossible. In any case, it’s not hard to see why the film would appeal to the mentality of a Nazi officer. Its underlying logic is not just xenophobic but violently, even genocidally, so. For Thomas Hutter, Dr. von Franz, and the other protagonists of Nosferatu, the goal is for no more vampires to exist in the world. The insidious and inhuman outsider has to be killed, whether with a stake through the heart or burning sunlight. For Hitler and his allies, it was the same with their perceived racial enemies. 

These xenophobic and antisemitic undercurrents may partly explain why there have been so few Nosferatu remakes—just three, plus Shadow of the Vampire—compared to the more than 100 Dracula films that have been made. But now Nosferatu has returned, as if from the grave, and so have the politics that surrounded Murnau’s original. Today we can hear language from the political Right that wouldn’t be out of place in 1920s Germany, or in a vampire movie. We have Donald Trump saying that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” or that they’re bringing “bad genes” across the border, or that American Jews are “disloyal” if they don’t vote for him, or calling coronavirus the “Chinese virus” and sparking a wave of anti-Asian hate. We have Elon Musk slandering Muslim immigrants in the U.K. as rapists. We have  J.D. Vance telling everyone that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pets, or Musk suggesting that they might be cannibals. The fear of contagious disease, the fear of sexual predation and miscegenation, even the fear of being bitten and consumed; it’s all here. 

In that light, it would be easy to view the 2024 Nosferatu as a straightforwardly right-wing or bigoted film and a reflection of the Trumpian times it emerges from, just as it would be easy to view Murnau’s Nosferatu as latently fascistic. Eggers in particular faced accusations of unsavory political leanings with his last project, The Northman, which is a retelling of Hamlet set in Viking times. On its release, Guardian film critic Steve Rose described the film as “the kind of movie the ‘alt-right’ loves,” noting its “uniformly white” Viking society, its scenes of macho violence, and its antiquated gender roles: “Men do the ruling and killing; women do the scheming and baby-making.” Eggers’s Nosferatu, too, has an all-white cast (with the exception of Paul Maynard, who pops up briefly in the pivotal role of “Dockhand.”) It also updates Murnau’s fixation on plague imagery—when the citizens of Wisburg board up their shops and declare themselves “quarantined,” it’s impossible not to think of COVID—and it’s full of nudity and eroticism, taking the sexual aspect of Orlok’s obsession with Ellen from subtext to plain old text. But is it really that simple? Are the Nosferatu films just reactionary fever dreams, in this century and the last? 

Well, no, they’re not. (Not that they would necessarily be bad films if they were right-wing, since there’s no straightforward link between good politics and good art. Especially in horror, where we’ve also got H.P. Lovecraft to contend with.) As usual, it’s more complicated than that. As Hoberman points out, F.W. Murnau was no Nazi. On the contrary, he was a gay man whose partner was Jewish, and several of the actors in 1922’s Nosferatu were Jewish themselves, as was its screenwriter, Henrik Galeen. (You can read Galeen’s screenplay online.) Just because Julius Streicher and people like him probably saw the original Nosferatu as an expression of bigotry doesn’t mean that’s the only reading, or that it’s the one the filmmakers intended. Likewise, Robert Eggers is no alt-right MAGA supporter. In interviews, he recalls hesitating to make The Northman because he didn’t want to be associated with “the right-wing misappropriation of Viking culture” and “the macho stereotype of that history,” and the film itself is a lot weirder and more hallucinogenic than its swordfight-filled trailer would suggest. In Nosferatu, he switches up the vampire’s visual style, eliminating the pointy nose and instead giving Orlok a huge mustache that makes him look more like the historical Vlad the Impaler than any antisemitic stereotype. He also defuses the character’s antisemitic connotations in a cruder way: at one point, Orlok, fully nude and visibly rotting, emerges from his coffin to attack Hutter, and we see that he’s uncircumcised—which you typically wouldn’t expect in a Jewish-coded character. And as several critics have pointed out, although Eggers’s Orlok is still a predatory monster like the previous versions, actor Bill Skarsgård’s portrayal also has a certain seductive quality, more like Lugosi or Lee’s portrayals of Dracula. Rather than simply wanting to see him killed, the viewer can also find themselves captivated by him—just as Ellen is in some scenes. The film is complicated and ambiguous, as good art tends to be; simple anti-immigrant propaganda, it’s not. 

In fact, Nosferatu has more to teach us about economic class and the monstrous effects of capitalism than it does race or immigration. It’s critical to remember that, although Orlok is an immigrant, he’s not a poor immigrant like the ones Donald Trump or Elon Musk demonize today. Instead, like Trump and Musk themselves, he’s a tremendously rich man. He owns a castle, buys another sprawling mansion from Thomas Hutter’s real estate firm, and pays in gold. He commissions an entire ship to carry his coffin, which seems to be the only cargo, from Transylvania to Germany. In Eggers’s version, he dresses from head to toe in extravagant (if decaying) furs. Even his desire for Ellen is less about hunger or sex than it is acquisition. When Willem Dafoe’s Dr. von Franz uses the word “possession” to describe the occult hold Orlok seems to have over her, it’s literal; he wants to own Ellen and add her to his pile of treasures. The fact that it’s framed erotically, and in some scenes Ellen seems like she might not mind being possessed and dominated, doesn’t change that. This is all made clear by the trick Orlok plays on Hutter early in the film, getting him to sign a contract in an unintelligible ancient language that’s ostensibly for property but that really dissolves his marriage to Ellen and the crucifix-like supernatural protection it offers, allowing the vampire to move in for the kill. He’s trying to buy her, and his wealth gives him just as much power over people as his occult abilities do. Maybe more. 

A lot of things about the world today become clearer when we learn to see the rich, and not poor and working-class people from other nations, as the true vampiric threats facing us. Who is it, for instance, that really spreads deadly diseases like COVID-19? Not Chinese immigrants, as Donald Trump would have you believe. Rather, it’s the much-vaunted “business community,” which wants as few public health regulations as possible and everyone back to work. We saw this play out in 2021, when the CEO of Delta Airlines pressured the Biden administration to reduce the quarantine time for workers infected with COVID-19 from ten days to five, citing potential labor shortages as the reason. How much preventable death and sickness came from that decision alone? Or to name another horror associated with vampires, who is it that’s responsible for some of the most heinous cases of sexual abuse, harassment, and exploitation? Not Muslim immigrants, as Musk is now trying to claim, but rich men like Musk himself—or Jeffrey Epstein, or Trump, or a dozen others from recent years—who prey upon those with less wealth and power and who have the resources to make society look the other way. (Or on a lesser scale, people like the McDonald’s managers in the U.K. who were recently named in a class action lawsuit for pressuring their workers into “sex for shifts” arrangements, or the landlords who take advantage of their tenants in a similar way. Call them the petit bourgeoisie, or the Renfields to the bigger capitalists’ Dracula.) Practically every accusation leveled against ethnic and religious minorities by the political Right is something of which the rich, who right-wing thought exists to defend and serve, are guilty themselves. 

With some of today’s billionaires, the parallels to vampirism are distressingly literal. Take Peter Thiel, for instance. In 2016, it came out that he was interested in injecting himself with the blood of younger people in order to slow down the aging process and extend his lifespan, although he denies having actually taken any transfusions. (While blood products do have appropriate medical uses, there’s no evidence that “young blood” is an effective treatment for diseases of aging or that it offers any “health and wellness benefits,” according to the FDA.) More recently, another Silicon Valley multi-millionaire named Bryan Johnson revealed that he, too, spends $2 million a year to siphon blood from his own 17-year-old son—who he creepily refers to as his “blood boy”—in an effort to stay eternally young. If these aren’t modern-day Count Orloks walking among us, what are they? 

It’s notable, too, that Nosferatu is set in Germany in the 1830s. That’s also the time and place when Karl Marx lived, and you can easily imagine him walking the streets of Eggers’s Wisburg, pondering the economic roots of society’s problems. As it happens, Marx had a lot to say about vampires, sorcerers, and other occult beings. In his writing, he continually returns to the Gothic as a source of inspiration, even describing communism itself as a “spectre haunting Europe.” Today, there’s an entire subfield of scholarship called Gothic Marxism that explores these analogies further. In a famous passage from Capital, Marx describes wealth itself as a parasitic monster: 

Capital is dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. 

But what does Marx mean by this? In what sense is “living labor” being sucked away to help capital “live the more”? Well, consider how you feel at the end of a long working day or week: exhausted. Drained. Your energy, your life force, has gone somewhere, hasn’t it? Where? Into your pockets in the form of wages, yes. But not all of it. It’s also going into somebody else’s pockets in the form of profit—a shareholder or a CEO somewhere in a castle on Wall Street, who you’ve never met and never will, who is invisible to you and yet “lives the more” because you go to work every day. Your own personal Orlok. The capital, the wealth, that billionaires hold is not the fruits of their labor; nobody could possibly work enough to earn a billion dollars, even if they lived for thousands of years. (Don’t take my word for it. People have done the math.) The billionaires’ fortunes are your “dead labor” and that of billions of working people around the world. Marx called this process the extraction of “surplus value,” and if you’re interested in economics it’s worth reading his accounts of it in full. But every worker instinctively understands it. Malcolm X summed it up perfectly when he said “show me a capitalist, and I’ll show you a bloodsucker.” Later, Current Affairs contributor Malaika Jabali took that line a step further, creating a taxonomy in her book It’s Not You, It’s Capitalism: “student loan vampire,” “credit card vampire,” and more. 

One of the most memorable quotes from Eggers’s Nosferatu comes when Orlok appears to Ellen in a dream (or is it?) and says, in his haunting, raspy voice, “I am an appetite. Nothing more.” The sexual aspect of the line is obvious, but it’s also true of capitalism. Like a vampire’s bloodlust, a capitalist company or brand’s desire for ever-greater profit is never satisfied. There’s always another dollar to be made, another market to be conquered. As the brilliant Marxist essayist and literary critic Jack Graham puts it:

[D]racula is a successful commodity or brand. That is what successful commodities or brands do. They reproduce. Seemingly without human input and out of human control, to the point of threatening people. They seem to do this despite the fact that their reproduction is actually a result of human production. As with vampires, commodities are reproduced by the parasitism upon, and negation of, the human subject. Capital is the vampire battening on us, as Marx saw. Commodity production hollows people out. Capital expands as humanity shrinks. 

Even the film Nosferatu itself, by virtue of its production and distribution under capitalism, is vampiric. The teenagers who collect the tickets and sell the novelty popcorn buckets in the theaters—and get a pittance of a wage in return—are being exploited. A surplus portion of their labor and their life is being siphoned off somewhere else and becoming corporate profit and CEO bonus packages. The same is true for Robert Eggers and for all the actors, special effects artists, sound engineers, and other professionals who come together to make a film like this. They’re paid comparatively better than the ticket-takers, sure, but executives who had nothing to do with the artistry behind the film are taking a cut of that $40 million opening box-office, too. Next year those executives will want more profit, and they’ll look for a way to squeeze it from the artists’ veins—maybe by replacing them with AI, maybe by cutting their wages or health benefits, or, as Current Affairs chief film critic Ciara Moloney has written, by killing their films entirely and writing them off for the tax money. That’s why there was a huge Hollywood strike in 2023: because people in the industry recognized the exploitation and fought back. 

This drive for ever-greater expansion and profit, this Orlokian appetite, is the greatest threat facing humanity today. It is the vampire latched on all our throats, and there’s no aspect of our lives it doesn’t touch. The demand for infinite economic growth is what drives the oil companies that sink their metal fangs into the earth and suck greedily, creating a deadly threat to all humanity, as we’re seeing now with the wildfires in California. It’s behind the skyrocketing rent prices (often arrived at through conspiracy and collusion between landlords), the corresponding historic rise in homelessness, and the prison labor system that’ll enslave you once you’re arrested for being homeless and trying to sleep in public. It’s behind the actions of for-profit healthcare companies like UnitedHealth, which was just exposed for overcharging cancer patients by more than 1,000 percent for their medicine, and it’s why people love Luigi Mangione. In Eggers’s finest visual flourish, Count Orlok stands on a balcony and stretches his grotesque hand over the streets of Wisburg laid out below him—and the shadow of his hand spreads like a stain, becoming the shadow of death itself and covering every home, shop, and church steeple. Today, capital and capitalists do the same to the whole world. 

In all versions of Nosferatu, salvation comes through knowledge. To defeat the vampire and bring his reign of terror to an end, our protagonists must first learn his name, understand his nature, and grasp his weaknesses. With today’s political crises and their roots in capitalism, it’s the same. You have to see your enemies for what they are in the clear light of day: not your fellow human beings, no matter their nation or race, but inequality, oligarchy, and greed themselves. Then drive a stake through their hearts.