It becomes clear that this dandy, alone and half-naked in a vampire’s castle, is playing the ingénue role of the Count’s victim-all the way into a bed, no less. In a relatively suggestive sequence for its time, Orlok watches Hutter undress to bathe, pulling his nightgown down to his midriff. Even still, Max Schreck’s rodent-like Orlok demands to be seen as something more than a vile caricature. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok emigrates from Eastern Europe and brings a plague with him, mirroring the real-world racist fear-mongering Hitler attributed to the Jewish and Romany people who sought refuge in the Weimar Republic. Caligari (1920) follows a carnival showman whose sleepwalking main attraction takes the blame for murder until it’s revealed the showman, like Hitler, has been manipulating his patrons’ fears-and his sleepwalker-to get away with murder. They create a monster meant to defend the ghetto until it begins attacking Christians, only to be stopped by a lone blonde child signifying the promise of an Aryan future. And, as film theorist Siegfried Kracauer proposed in From Caligari to Hitler, multiple horror films of the era predict the country’s inevitable shift into darkness.ĭer Golem (1915)-one of the cinematic Frankenstein’s foremost influences-depicts a ghetto of wizard-like Jews living underground in Prague.
Succumbing to post-war economic collapse and Hitler’s scapegoated hatred for Jews and immigrants, the Weimar Republic eventually gave way to the Third Reich. It’s important to recognise that Nosferatu was a product of the Weimar Republic-that golden era of German history where art, sexuality, and surprising liberalism flourished where Magnus Hirschfeld studied and philosophised the twentieth-century identity of homosexuality. The genre’s obsession with otherness the questioning of a monster’s humanity the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives. Luckily for the genre it helped establish, Nosferatu proved resilient and, like its namesake, returned from the dead. As an unlicensed retelling of Bram Stoker’s classic text, the film was mercilessly hunted down by Stoker’s widow who sought to sever it from history. Orlok returns to Germany, bringing with him a plague of rats and death, until Hutter’s noble wife, Ellen, sacrifices herself by tricking the vampire into drinking her blood past sunrise. A salesman-named Hutter instead of Harker-travels to an Eastern European country to arrange a real-estate deal with the nocturnal, rat-faced Count. Murnau called his vampire Count Orlok instead of Dracula (the role which would make Bela Lugosi a household name), but the story remains the same. It’s a cobwebbed queer primordial soup that has generated both the Halloween costumes we wear and the sexual identities we live.ĭracula’s first-ever cinematic depiction in the German silent film Nosferatu (1922) establishes the bloodline that disseminated horror’s queer DNA. The construction of queerness and horror films as we understand them today are firmly grounded in tangled, coded roots tracing all the way back to the classic monsters in black and white. The genre’s obsession with otherness the questioning of a monster’s humanity the flamboyance and detail and danger by which its villains live their lives and the threat they represent to the living, decent society, and decency itself, is absolutely a queer representation of the world and what it means to exist differently.
The construction of queerness and horror films are grounded in tangled, coded roots tracing back to the classic monsters in black and white. Making a Monster: The Creation of Queer Horror