Ellensferatu

Ellen = irritated stomach lining Too sensitive for this world. She experiences every irritant as a gothic event. She cannot simply “digest food”: she must suffer, tremble, prophesy, and possibly cause social instability.

Friedrich Harding = sauerkraut / tomatoes / acidic food He enters with firm moral certainty and immediately makes everything worse. Ellen does not feel understood. Ellen feels attacked. Verdict: socially respectable, gastrically unbearable.

Doctor Sievers = an antacid and a “what to avoid with gastritis” leaflet He is not the villain. He may even be right. But his world ends where Orlok begins. Verdict: relieves acidity, but not existential insufficiency.

Professor von Franz = psyllium / probiotics / kefir Strange, ritualistic, slightly suspicious. Requires water, timing, and occult discipline. But unlike the others, he may actually understand the nature of the disturbance. Verdict: not seductive, but potentially useful.

Anna Harding = boiled potatoes / fat-free plain yogurt Caring, safe, domestic — and almost aggressively bland. She will not hurt Ellen. She will bring a blanket, say, “You need to eat something soft,” and genuinely help her survive the attack. But she will not open any abyss. Verdict: soothing, but spiritually bland.

Thomas Hutter = bread / random “safe” snacks He seems to mean well. Technically, this is food. He is not the villain. But Ellen looks at him and feels: “You do not understand what is happening inside me.” Verdict: harmless in theory, exhausting in practice.

Count Orlok = soft, overcooked rolled-oat porridge with honey and banana Yes, he is overcooked. Yes, he spreads across the plate, and from certain angles looks like… a questionable substance. Yes, his banana is starting to wilt. Yes, he is not an Instagram Breakfast like Coppola’s Dracula. But he is exactly what Ellen needs: the sweet, enveloping thing that will help Ellen become herself. This is what Ellen was longing for. Verdict: not an irritant, but a completion. True healing begins where Ellen stops fighting her own darkness.

“Beauty and the Beast” (illustration by Walter Crane, 1870s)

Dracula, written at the very end of the nineteenth century, is considered the progenitor of the vampire novel. But it would be naïve to assume that before Bram Stoker no one was writing Gothic romantic prose. More and more readers are now discovering Carmilla; however, it is far from the only example of what we today call Gothic romance. There are many books that Dracula quite literally “stripped” — works that rival it in atmosphere, in the intensity of passion, and in narrative intrigue, yet nevertheless remained in its shadow. One of them is Prosper Mérimée’s novella Lokis: a “Beauty and the Beast” tale — only reversed.

(This is the second part of the post. The beginning is here)

Thus, the novella Lokis is the story of the passion of Count Mikhail Shemet — believed to be half man, half beast — for the young noblewoman Yuliana Ivinskaya. An ancient castle in the wilderness, somnambulism, adoration that borders on the desire to devour the beloved — everything we devotees of all things Gothic cherish.

There are no explicit sexual scenes in the novella, yet the folk “Rusalka” dance between Mikhail and Yuliana made my heart beat faster… Especially its ending. At the conclusion, when the partner is meant to fall to his knees before the partneress, Mikhail suddenly breaks the rule — seizing Yuliana and kissing her in front of everyone… (and I’m like: wow! My God, how they desire each other!)

Incidentally, Yuliana’s own nature is also animalistic: she is repeatedly compared to a cat — a metaphor she herself coined while translating poetry into Samogitian. (Yes, Prosper Mérimée did love creating images of clever, playful women! Naturally, by the laws of the 19th century, such enchantresses were routinely punished by death at the hands of their admirers. Yet it is obvious that Mérimée adored his Carmen; and so, indeed, with Yuliana.)

Here is a passage that perfectly captures the dynamic between Yuliana and the count:

"Always mocking, always mischievous, she chose first one of us, then another, as the target of her jokes. I nevertheless noticed that most often her victim was the count, who, it must be said, was not in the least offended and even seemed to take pleasure in being teased by her. On the contrary, when she suddenly turned upon one of the adjutants, the count would frown, and I saw how his eyes would blaze with a dark fire in which there was indeed something terrifying".

And how she tried to attract his attention! This is my favourite type of romance: he — enormous and severe, somewhat awkward; she — sensual and playful, treating him a little like a fool. If only she had known that his excessive passion would spin so violently out of control? I was truly rooting for these characters.

In the very name of the hero, Mérimée attempted to reflect the count’s bear-like nature — though not very elegantly. At the time Lithuania belonged to the Russian Empire; in Russian, the name Mikhail is considered “bear-like.” The diminutive for bear is mishka, and the diminutive for Mikhail is also Mishka. This is a Russian association, not a Lithuanian one. In Lithuanian, bear is lokys — which, in fact, is the title of the novella.

(It is rather amusing to observe how the French Mérimée confuses Slavs and Balts — forgive me, it’s delightful.)

The author indeed permits himself many historical inaccuracies and cultural misreadings. But are we truly here to nitpick details? What interests us is Gothicism and passion — and Mérimée can hardly be accused of lacking either.

Aware of his dual nature — his own, and that of humanity itself — Mikhail seeks answers. “Have you never,” he asks the professor, “standing atop a tower or at the edge of an abyss, felt simultaneously the temptation to throw yourself down and the entirely opposite sensation of fear?”

Here we encounter the same motifs as in Nosferatu: Eros and Thanatos as inseparable manifestations of the human soul.

Attempting to master the beast within, Mikhail turns to philosophy, to reading, to intellectual pursuits… Ye

t it is all in vain. He is overcome by impulses; he is consumed by jealousy. This jealousy appears absurd to an outside observer. Irrational — yet perhaps it becomes one of the causes of the tragic outcome: the inhuman, immeasurable desire to possess.

In a final attempt to subdue his animal nature, Mikhail tries to break with Yuliana, to leave her forever. Thus he parts from the professor. Soon thereafter, however, the professor receives a letter: Mikhail and Yuliana intend to marry.

The wedding appears fairy-tale-like, almost Disneyesque — which only intensifies the horror of the ending. At one point a horse startles and nearly knocks Yuliana down — but Mikhail catches her in his arms and carries her up the staircase… (Every romantic film envies this scene of charming patriarchal romance.)

Yet immediately comes the omen of disaster: Mikhail’s mad mother, witnessing the scene, screams, “Help! The bear has seized a woman! Shoot!” And perhaps no one sees more clearly than she.

In the finale of the novella, not only Mikhail Shemet disappears — but also the illusion that true passion can ever be “safe” or “sanitized.” Desire slips beyond the control of reason and reveals its true nature.

And do we not encounter the same formula in Nosferatu? Love that terrifies. Attraction to what society names monstrous. The perilous proximity between longing and annihilation.

Soon Dracula will acquire fangs, Orlok — the plague… Yet the beastly passion that makes both text and reader tremble already dwells in the Lithuanian castle. Lokis is a fairy tale turned inside out in relation to Beauty and the Beast: the beautiful prince proves to be the monster.

Before Dracula, before Orlok, there was Mikhail Shemet: enormous, passionate, fatally in love.

Lily Rose: ⬆️

On a basic level, that’s him denying being the “villain” (evil) Ellen accuses him of: “You are a villain to speak so” // “I am an appetite, nothing more.” Context matters. And this is an archetypal story which deals with universal and timeless themes.

On a deeper level, Professor Von Franz explains it: “Like every plague, its only desire is to consume all life on earth. It is a force more powerful than evil. It is death itself.” Orlok doesn’t want to consume all life on earth, at random, though, because this is a folk vampire haunting tale and Ellen is his target. It’s her life he wants above all others = “Blood is the life”. He wants her heart’s blood, her soul.

Nosferatu is Death personified. He’s a rotten corpse riddled with maggots, surrounded by decay. He wears his burial clothes, his castle is broken, he buys a ruin just to keep his sarcophagus in. He’s a walking “memento mori” (“remember you must die”) motif. The final shot of the film, as Eggers explained, is “Death and the maiden”, which is also a memento mori; Death dragging a maiden to the grave, Death triumphant because you can’t stop Death, nor put an end to it, but Werner Herzog’s is the version which explored this best, in my opinion, even though Eggers’ version is more hopeful.

He’s Time, “the Great Devourer” (the “death clock” from the 1922 original), connected to Saturn (the Roman God of Time, Agriculture and Wealth), whose symbol was the scythe, at the origin of medieval Death iconography, and mostly the Grim Reaper. Von Franz mentions this, during the funerals: “The grim reaper wields his heavy scythe with every change of wind.” It’s time as the great reaper who devours all, and none can’t escape it. There’s no end to death, which is why Harker/Hutter is doomed to become Nosferatu, and Ellen/Lucy sacrifice is meaningless in this aspect. You can’t stop Death by dying, that’s idiotic (which is why Eggers gave it another meaning on his adaptation, and his is a deeply spiritual/occult tale).

The folk vampire is a representation of death and disease, or better yet, death brought about by disease. Tales about vampires were popular during plague epidemics. Here, sexuality is a disease because of the time period the story takes place, which is why sex and death are the core themes. In this sense, Nosferatu “infects” the characters with sexual desire. Female sexuality, in particulary, was seen as a plague in need of containment, which means, put under patriarchal control, either with medicalization (Ellen) or own by a husband (Anna).

Nosferatu has been living in my head rent free for the past month and a half and I finally had the chance to draw them!

Emma Corrin also called the Hardings the “light”, and they are this early 19th century/Victorian/Biedermeier family role model, as Lily herself has explained; Anna is the woman Ellen aspires to be, but can’t because she has too much “darkness” within her.

Eggers is into historical accuracy, but when you know the historical context is hard not to cringe, yes. However, within 19th century context, being the “angel in the house” is the light, and seeking independence was madness and/or demonic (darkness), which is why Ellen finally having enough of Thomas bullshit is presented to the audience as a sort of demonic possession, and also Thomas having sex with his wife. All of this is shown as the work of a vampire for a reason.

bedtime demon

Konstanzer Weltchronik, Germany ca. 1450