Nosferatu and the Absence of God

I’m writing this shortly before the darkest day of 2024: Dec. 21, winter solstice. It also happens to be just ahead of Christmas Day and the release of the year’s darkest movie: Nosferatu.

I mean "darkest movie" literally. Written and directed by horror specialist Robert Eggers, this is a monster mash of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), and just about every Dracula movie you’ve seen. Yet few of those films—even the ones in black and white—have been as drained of light and color as this Nosferatu. It’s as if blood has been sucked from the very images and they’ve been left to lie, lifeless, in the moonlight. On occasion, a candle or torch attempts to keep the decrepitness at bay, but such illumination is only temporary. Shadowy fog dominates most of the frames.

There is potent theological resonance here, in that such darkness depicts a world that is absent the presence of God. This is the harrowing reality that Eggers’ movies present. His independent debut, 2016’s The Witch, features a pious colonial family, but their rigid beliefs offer no protection against the hag of the title (to say nothing of the goat that might just be a mouthpiece for the devil). His follow-up, The Lighthouse, follows two keepers of a small outpost in 1890s New England, but with its allusions to Poseidon and Prometheus, it might as well be unfolding in a purgatory governed by Greek mythology. (Unless, of course, it’s set in hell.) The Northman, a bloody retelling of a 12th-century Nordic legend, takes place in a pagan setting, where Christianity is an odd, faraway rumor about a god who is a “corpse, nailed to a tree.” The God of Christianity is often referred to in Eggers’ movies, but rarely, if ever, felt.

This has never been more explicit than in Nosferatu. The movie takes place in 1838 Germany, in the town of Wisborg, where newlyweds Ellen and Thomas Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp and Nicholas Hoult) begin their life together underneath a persistent gloom. In Wisborg, Christian signposts are all around: crosses hang on walls and dot cemeteries; Christmastide is dutifully observed; children say their prayers before bed; adults make the sign of the cross upon hearing bad news. But amidst the doldrums of gray skies and pitilessly dark nights, to say nothing of Ellen’s unsteady spirit, these all register as pointless, superstitious gestures, rather than devout expressions of a vibrant, living faith.

Consider Nosferatu’s opening scene. We’re introduced to Ellen as she frantically utters a distressed prayer in the middle of the night. At first she calls to God, but when she gets no acknowledgment, she cries out to “anything.” It’s no spoiler to say that the title character—the vampiric Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård)—supernaturally answers her plea instead. As in Eggers’ earlier films, only evil seems to have a tangible presence and power. Those who believe in God are left grasping in the blackness, helpless.

You could call such a milieu “anti-Christian,” except that we see something like it in the Bible. In three of the four gospel accounts of the death of Jesus Christ, an unusual period of darkness occurs. At that time, Jesus “gave up his spirit” (Matthew 27:50 and John 19:30) and “breathed his last” (Mark 15:37 and Luke 23:46). What happened next is a matter of much theological debate. In a 2020 article for The Banner, Calvin University English professor Debra Rienstra describes this moment as a time when the “scriptural drama holds its breath.” She continues: “Jesus is in between . . . between the burial and the rising, silent in the grave.”

Perhaps Christ found himself in a place not unlike Eggers’ Nosferatu—one devoid of the presence of God. The Apostles’ Creed, written around the second century, claims that after his death Jesus “descended into hell.” A much later confession, 1563’s Heidelberg Catechism, suggests this descent took place in order “to assure me during attacks of deepest dread and temptation that Christ my Lord, by suffering unspeakable anguish, pain, and terror of soul, on the cross but also earlier, has delivered me from hellish anguish and torment.” And what is the nature of this anguish and torment? According to the Apostle Paul, it is to be “shut out from the presence of the Lord . . .” That sounds something like the grayscale godlessness that Nosferatu imagines.

Working with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, Eggers creates an atmosphere that is almost gorgeous in its godlessness. There are desaturated images in Nosferatu that I will likely never forget. In one tableau, in which Nosferatu attacks a victim, the monster straddles her before a row of black bushes, white flowers bursting forth like last gasps of air. Another scene depicts a sudden downpour that bursts over Wisborg after someone utters Nosferatu’s name, causing pitch-black umbrellas to blossom in the gray streets. And then there is the curious moment in which the camera slowly pushes in toward the back of Ellen’s head until we’re lost in the obsidian spiral of her hair—adornment as gateway to a hellish abyss.

While one understanding of Holy Saturday—that period between Christ’s death and resurrection—imagines him lost in a similar abyss, another reading offers a brighter possibility. Known as the “harrowing of hell”—and traced in Rienstra’s Banner article to early theologians like Tertullian, Hippolytus, Ambrose, and Chrysostom—this interpretation imagines Jesus not as suffering in a place of damnation, but actively working against it. Here he is busy saving souls, bringing them—as he promised the thief who was crucified by his side—to “paradise.” We’re drawn to this interpretation “because we need it,” Reinstra writes. “However poetic and allegorical you want to make Jesus’ Saturday adventures, we need to know the theological truth beneath: Jesus conquers death and hell. . . . We need to see him defying hell as it exhales a last filthy breath.”

Nosferatu is almost all filthy breath. (Another striking image is the silhouette of a mourning man at the door of a mausoleum, distraught over the gruesome deaths of those he loved.) You can understand why such a movie would be released when the year is at its darkest point. But why offer it exactly on Christmas Day? As with Holy Saturday, much debate has swirled around the placement of Jesus’ birth on Dec. 25. While there is scholarship linking Christ’s death and conception (the annunciation) to arrive at that date, it’s more common to note that in third-century Rome, the day fell within the Saturnalia festival marking the return of longer daylight hours—including a feast celebrating the birth of the unconquered sun on Dec. 25. Releasing Nosferatu on Christmas Day is more than a cleverly ironic marketing ploy, then. It suggests that opposing Christmas is integral to the movie’s ethos.

And yet, while feeling enveloped by Nosferatu’s black beauty—as Thomas is while standing on the lonely road leading to Orlok’s castle, inky pines looming over him on either side—my mind went not to pagan traditions or theological calculations, but Isaiah 9, where the prophet offered words that are often shared during the Advent season: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned.”

Light does eventually dawn in Nosferatu. It’s a dim light, dreadfully earned, but it’s there. Similarly, by the time you’re reading this, 2024’s winter solstice has come and gone and 2025 has arrived. Each day is a little brighter than the one before, echoing what the Gospel of John also assures us: “The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

Even if Nosferatu can’t fully see it.

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At Think Christian, we encourage careful cultural discernment. We recognize and respect that many Christians choose not to engage with pop culture that contains particular content, such as abuse, sex, violence, alcohol or drug use, or that employs the use of coarse language. To that end, we suggest visiting Common Sense Media for detailed information regarding the content of the particular pieces of pop culture discussed in this article.