Thank you, kind stranger!

The “astral” vampire you mention it’s called moroi in Romanian folklore, although it has other names in other countries. In Eggers’ “Nosferatu” it’s Orlok’s shadow, basically. Vampires in folklore target and attack their living relatives, yes, not random victims like literary or pop culture vampires (Eggers said he had no interest adapting because Folk Horror is his brand).

I’m very curious to see what folklore Eggers went with in “Werwulf”. One of misconceptions I keep seeing is that werewolves are “created” via deals with the Devil, which it’s not really the case. The most common folktale is boys being born with the curse, and doomed to become werewolves, usually seventh sons. Personally, I think Eggers went with this (he already did the “deal with the Devil twice), but I can be wrong. My country has a rich werewolf folklore, actually, but also very diverse, and sometimes just bizarre and not really horror film appropriate (ex: in some places, it’s believed you can break a werewolf curse by turning their clothes inside out).

“In 2004, 1500 miles from England, a story makes headlines in Romania. A group of villagers has performed a vampire-slaying ritual on a recently buried corpse. The incident occurred in the remote town of Marotino de Sus when a 26-year-old woman began complaining of a mysterious illness.”

I am thinking that perhaps he does feel -maybe a little too much- given that he displays obsession, need and an unrelenting drive for Ellen and Ellen alone ("I cannot be dated without you"). Maybe Orlok is supposed to be an anthesis to the ideal Victorian man (gentle, reserved, pious) as he demonstrates great displays of emotion (his obsession), has a sexual nature about him (Robert Eggers' comment about him being a "big angry erection with a mustache") and is, by default, sacrilegious. So with all of this, maybe the irony is that despite being a 400 year old corpse, he actually feels intensely? What do you think?

Count Orlok is a reanimated corpse, a revenant. As Eggers explained: “This vampire in my version is one from folklore — a walking corpse driven by fear and hunger”. Ellen is his obsession because she’s the “target” of his strigoi haunting, as Eggers also explained in several interviews: “Here, Orlok is entirely just focused on Lily-Rose Depp's character, but he leaves a whole lot of destruction in his path in order to get what he wants.” Everything he does is connected to Ellen: dragging Hutter to Transylvania, using Herr Knock to get to Wisburg, etc. When Orlok says he cannot love, it’s mean to be literal. This is a reference to the “Dracula” novel, and Orlok is thematic passion, which was seen as the opposite of “love” during the Victorian era; on a thematic level, Hutter is “love” and Orlok is “passion”. But this is not so simple because this is a multi-layered story and this is just the “surface” 19th century reading, and we have two more “lenses”: 16th century and “heathen times”.

Not only Ellen doesn’t know who he is, but Orlok himself has no interest in the present, either. He’s been dead for the past 300 years and locked away on his castle. He’s completely detached from life, as Craig Lathrop also said: “The castle had to feel diseased, like it had been forgotten by time,” says Craig. “There's no need for lavish furniture, because his needs are minimal, and everything about his space speaks to his alienation from life.” So, while I do agree Orlok can be seen as an antithesis to the Victorian man, surely he is the antithesis to Hutter, I still think it’s more complex than that because he’s not human.

I’ll need you to provide a source from a legit folklorist for that claim because there’s a lot of misinformation online, and you can even find articles with “nosferatu folklore”, when the word “nosferatu” is a 19th century invention from a Scottish author.

At the end of the day, “strigoi” is just the Romanian term for “vampire”; “morti” (dead) or vii/viu (living) is what sets them apart. A living strigoi is a witch or a sorcerer, and it’s different from the reanimated corpse type Eggers’ Count Orlok is (although he was/is a sorcerer). For a long time, Eastern European folklorists even refused to call their undead vampires “vampires” because of the association with the Western literary vampire, and folk vampire hauntings are more similar to ghost hauntings.

“[The strigoi/moroi] household, his family, and his live stock, and possibly even the live stock of the whole village, die off rapidly […] He comes back in the night and speaks with the family […] The vampires that are reanimated corpses [strigoi morti] or spirits of the dead disappear, like all evil spirits, at [first] cockcrow.”

— Agnes Murgoçi; “The Vampire in Roumania” (1926)

“It was once believed that one could detect the presence of a vampire in the grave by attempting to lead a horse across the grave. If the horse balked, the grave contained a vampire.”

— Paul Barber; “The Vampire: A Casebook” (1998)

“They took counsel together, and resolved to take a white horse to the cemetery one night, and see if it would pass over all the graves of the wife’s relations. This they did, and the horse jumped over all the graves, until it came to the grave of the mother-in-law, Joana Marta, who had been a witch, renowned far and wide. Then the horse stood still, beating the earth with its feet, neighing and snorting, unable to step over the grave. Probably there was something unholy there.”

“As the powerful mover of blood and essential element for life, from the earliest times the heart has been considered the receptacle of the soul and its powers: thought, feeling. will. Thus the expression “A witch will eat his heart” should be interpreted to mean that she will steal off with his life, extract his soul from him, and turn him into a bloodless body. […] According to their folk beliefs, one's strength and vital force are lodged in the heart […].”

— Jan L. Perkowski; “Vampires Of The Slavs” (1976)

In his adoption by the West European public, the [Eastern] vampire was robbed of his identity, but nevertheless continued to serve as a contrasting foil. […] As a result, vampirism, as the expression of superstition and popular folk traditions, was an unwelcome phenomenon for the elites of the European Great Powers, that is, Britain, France, Prussia, and the Habsburg and Tsarist Empires. […] The [literary vampire] animates their [victim’s] bodies to vampirism. This is already an implicit reference to the ‘threat from the East’ that was to be cultivated, at the latest, by Bram Stoker. In this way, entire communities in southern Hungary and northern Bosnia were condemned to a neverending existence as [vampires].

[…] the purpose of [Emily] Gerard's book [“Transylvanian Superstitions” (1885); which inspired “Dracula”] was not by any means to provide ethnological insights into a multicultural region, but rather to cater to the tastes of a broad readership who wanted to learn about the ‘hillbillies’ of Transylvania, which had been settled by German-speaking colonists since the Middle Ages. The bite of the revenant was contagious and meant eternal damnation [vampirism] claimed Gerard, in her portrayal of the region as an exotic realm.”