Belceboo

I cannot judge of your countenance, but there is something in your voice which persuades me of your goodwill and kindness.

FRANKENSTEIN (2025) | DIR. GUILLERMO DEL TORO

“And someone said to me in an interview the other day, well, you know, isn’t Ellen like this victim? What is like to play this kind of victimized character? And I was like, well, I don’t think she’s a victim, at all. Because she’s kind of calling the shots the entire time. And he, you know, there’s a power play there. He’s [Count Orlok] trying to overtake her in this way, and, you know, destroy the lives of those around her. But, she calls out to him. And she makes the sacrifice that only she can make. She has a great deal of agency in this story that I felt we haven’t seen in iterations of the past.

And there’s a lot of, you know, themes of female oppression in this movie, of course, it’s a part of the society we are representing as well […] and part of that is the element of sexuality, like repressed female desire, and Ellen, you can see from the beginning, has that within her. She’s got that fire, if you will. And you see that mirror again in one of the first scenes when we are at the Hardings House and everything, and there’s this kind of steamy moment with her husband, and you can tell that she has that within her but doesn’t really know what to do with it. And then, there’s like the moment when Friedrich tries to kiss Anna and she’s like “really? In public?”.

It’s an interesting mirror because I think Ellen has so much going on within her the she doesn’t know what to do with because of the environment that she’s a part of. And I think that Nosferatu himself is the physical manifestation of that darkness and those darker desires that she’s learning to come to terms with, I suppose.”