Spoiler alert! We’re discussing important plot points and the ending of “Nosferatu” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
The climax of “Nosferatu” is unlike any love scene you’ve ever seen before, a marriage of death, blood and sacrifice with definite emotion and a touching final shot.
Oh, right, plus a naked vampire corpse.
Director Robert Eggers’ remake of the original 1922 horror classic centers on Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), a 19th-century German wife who desperately sought a connection in her youth and pledged herself to the extremely undead Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård
). She has nightly dreams of him, he yearns to be with her, and Orlok makes his way from Transylvania – carrying rats and the plague with him – to consummate his obsession.
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What happens in the ending of the new ‘Nosferatu’?
While Ellen’s husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult) leads the effort to find and kill Orlok, Ellen lures the vampire to her bedroom and welcomes him wearing a white dress and a wedding-like veil. “You accept this of your own will?” he asks. “I do,” she answers, before he towers over her and their lips finally touch.
“I want people to go, ‘Is he going to bite her face off?’ And then it turns into a kiss,” Skarsgård says. “Nosferatu” is “a very heightened fairy tale/dark story, but also it’s two people potentially falling in love. It isn’t love, it’s something else, but love is maybe the closest thing to it that you can kind of relate to. If it’s not love, it’s a craving and it’s an appetite and it’s lust and desire to devour.”
“Death and the maiden” is a popular motif in art history, Eggers says, and “when you see Lily-Rose looking like a doll and Bill looking like a skull with a mustache, it’s a powerful contrast.” Depp adds that they wanted both “real sensuality and real desire” between Ellen and Orlok, “which makes the scenes all the more engaging and scary. This young woman is repulsed by him and petrified and horrified, but at the same time, there is a longing there.”
To consummate the “oath” to be together, they take off their clothes, get in bed and he sucks blood from her chest. But she keeps him there as the sun comes up, thereby dooming him: As light shines through the window, Orlok lifts his head, Ellen smiles and she holds his head tenderly as blood gruesomely pours from his eyes and mouth in his dying moments. Then Thomas shows up and she, too, succumbs after getting one final moment with her husband.
How does the 2024 movie’s finale differ from the original ‘Nosferatu’?
The movie closes with an overhead shot of Ellen holding the skeletal Orlok in a naked embrace, a change from the original “Nosferatu”: In the 1922 movie, Orlok crouches over Ellen and drinks her blood, with both fully clothed, and he disappears into smoke in the sunlight.
The remake’s end scene is “heartbreaking and kind of bittersweet in a way because she’s doing a good deed and she’s breaking the curse, but she’s also indulging in a dark desire that she has,” Depp says. “We wanted all of those things to be palpable, to feel real.”
When reading the script early on, Skarsgård wrote a note down that the finale was “death and ecstasy,” he says. In his last moments, Orlok is “seeing the sun for the first time in hundreds of years. So he’s mesmerized by it and fear and all of these different things.
“And in a way, maybe that is what Orlok wanted all along.”
