Ellen Hutter (an extraordinary Lily-Rose Depp) invokes him in the very first moments of the film: "Come to me. Come to me." And immediately afterward she tells us who he is: "He is my shame, he is my melancholy."

In these two lines lies the film's "secret" key.

Secret because, to our jaded eyes as spectators — shaped by a century of artificial visions produced by the seventh art, image-vampires no longer capable of astonishment (or horror) — Eggers' symbolic language risks remaining buried beneath the stereotyped mechanics of the vampire story.

But here Eggers averts that danger by inverting the paradigm: "Come to me. Come to me."

It is not the desire for recomposition — the lost love — of the vampire-man exiled in the remote mountains of Transylvania that constitutes the primal cause and driving force of the story. Rather, it is Ellen's invocation that awakens the abyssal being from an eternal disintegration, from a death without death.

From Ellen's first gesture, the vampire is deprived of his essential trait: the craving for life, which traditionally becomes — both materially and symbolically — the craving for the blood of the living.

The traditional vampire is a symptom of humanity's attempt to strike a balance between the forces of decay and those of life: a desperate will to remain on the outer diaphragm of existence, a radical attachment to life from the side of death.

Eggers' vampire, instead, is marked by Ellen's existential void. The melancholy from which she has suffered since childhood is generated by the anguish of a desire without object, by a radical sense of incompleteness, by an absence that fills all space. It is the lucid cognition of limit. The vampire is the desperate search for a name.

But this name is obscene, unpronounceable: "He is my shame."

It is a name that must be kept secret like a deformity, like a stigma of the soul. And if Ellen's speech has, over time, been educated, domesticated, and civilized by social constraints, her body constantly speaks another language — dark, archaic — and reveals the symptoms of melancholy.

Indeed, as soon as her guardian-husband Thomas Hutter leaves her, Ellen falls into a state of infirmity: prey to a nocturnal pulsional fever accompanied by incomprehensible delirium. She suffers from an illness that science cannot decipher.

Reason — embodied by Dr. Wilhelm Sievers — is confined to visible matter, bound to the positive link between illness and symptom, cause and effect. Powerless in the face of Ellen's excesses, the doctor resorts to moral judgment and imprisons her possessed body in a brutally tight, clearly punitive corset during her nocturnal fevers.

But Ellen's body is speaking for her — and it speaks with a radical, subversive voice. Through her body, Ellen violates the foundations of the civil pact: scientific knowledge as the beacon of reason, and moral normativity.

At this point the narrative summons the figure of the magician-professor: Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (given hallucinatory life by a magnificent Willem Dafoe), a heretic expelled from the institutions of knowledge of his time for violating positivist episteme and becoming an adept of an earlier form of knowing — Paracelsian knowledge, poised at the boundary between magic and empiricism. Von Franz is the one who opens a fissure above chaos, the one who shows.

What is glimpsed — once Ellen is released from the corset by von Franz's order — is a radical force on the verge of eruption.

Ellen is subversive in a non-political sense. Her voice and her behavior are not dictated by a script that can be negotiated with civil society (represented by the family of her friend Anna, who shelters her during her illness). The demands Ellen asserts are incompatible with any intelligible social form.

She should not be mistaken for a proto-feminist, a suffragette ante litteram, as some strands of film criticism have suggested — where Ellen would be a rebellious figure still comprehensible within society, hence political; nor should she be read as a witch, a regressive force still anchored to a social order, albeit an archaic one.

Ellen does not wish to overcome one social form in order to replace it with another, newer or older, more progressive or more ancient. Ellen aims at the loss of form itself. She wants to destroy the constituted order.

Hers is her titanic and solitary task. The existential solitude from which Ellen suffers — her Shame — condemns her to isolation and marginalization, and generates the need for the other: a secret, unnameable companion. Orlok.

Orlok is, at once, inside and outside Ellen. He is the one who consoles and the one who wounds; object and subject; damnation and curse. He is Ellen herself and also her double.

Orlok precedes form, precedes civilization. He is a gnostic evil, an active force of social disintegration: the one who devours.

Hunger is the principle that moves him — a pure principle, precisely because it cannot be civilized.

Inverting the perspective, Eggers suggests that civilization itself is born in order to exorcize hunger. Civilization, as the material and moral order of things, is what manages hunger, pushes it away, hides it — because hunger is a disintegrating force, wholly egoistic.

Here the two symbolic poles of Eggers' Nosferatu take shape. On one side, love as total empathy, as movement from the self toward the other, as a force that draws together, aggregates, gathers. On the other, its antithesis — not hatred, but hunger: supreme solipsism, the narcissism of a body without logos, an expulsive force that unravels the social fabric. Chaos.

But Ellen is also choice.

This explains the film's atrocious ending, which can be misread as Ellen's decision to offer herself to Orlok merely as a stratagem, a deception, destined to trap him until dawn breaks.

Ellen chooses Orlok. She voluntarily chooses fusion with Orlok's decaying body. She chooses horror — because horror is the point where the human ceases to protect itself, and Ellen is no longer capable of protecting herself from herself.

And yet, at the same time, she chooses to retain form.

She remains on this side of time, on the side of civilization and History.

Caught between disintegration and gift, between hunger and love, between non-form and form, Ellen chooses the gift. She chooses love. She refuses to become prey, to be reduced to food.

She retains within herself the symbolic value of life: the human.

In this, Eggers tells us, in the offering of herself, Ellen accepts her radical and subversive nature — but overturns it. She does not dissolve the social pact; she strengthens it through self-sacrifice and turns it toward us — in the final frame, in that vibrating, ecstatic embrace in which Ellen, arms outstretched, reaches toward the dying beast Orlok — and transforms us:

no longer spectators, but witnesses.

[1] The reference is to Luc Besson's Dracula: The Lost Love, a pop reimagining of Bram Stoker's original story. Besson achieves the minor miracle of making a horror film almost entirely devoid of horror — yet highly entertaining, with several unforgettable images, such as Count Dracula's "feeding" sequence in the convent.

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