vampires biting a victim's neck
is replaced by vampires biting the victim's chest ?!
not a good look, bro
I guess they used the chest to make the biting more sexualized, particularly with that ending
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MovieChat Forums > Nosferatu (2024) Discussion > vampires biting a victim's neck
Hey, I'm okay with lesbian vampires doing a bit of breast-biting, but otherwise it's neck only AFAIC!
shareIt's a bit strange, yes.
shareBelieve it or not, in most vampire literature, they don't actually need to bite the neck of a human in order to suck their blood. I've heard of them biting the wrist too, or even sucking on bleeding fingertips. The neck is just the most useful because it has the corroded artery and a ready supply of blood. The chest thing was purely for drama.
shareI do believe I've seen the chest sucking in some other movie as well. Might have been some old eastern vampire movie.
shareThere's an old [B-rated] Hammer production I heard about called "Twins of Evil," where at least one of the two main female leads became a vampire, and I saw a photo of her biting another female vampire on the chest. Only reason I know about it (never watched it) is because Frock Flicks talked about the costumes (and snarked about the mixed-up, confusing time periods shown) on their website.
https://frockflicks.com/tbt-twins-evil-1971/
'Only reason I know about it (never watched it)...'
You haven't missed much. It's the third part of Hammer's 'Karnstein Trilogy', based on Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. The first part The Vampire Lovers (starring Ingrid Pitt) is very good, the second part Lust for a Vampire is okay, and Twins of Evil is the weakest of the bunch (does have a good performance from Peter Cushing, though).
That pic (Madeleine Collinson biting Luan Peters - both sadly no longer with us) is probably the most famous still from the film.
It's not about how it looks. He did his research and went back to the original vampire folklore. He actually explained the reason for this:
"Now obviously you can't pierce a breastbone, so it doesn't really make sense. It makes much more sense to drink someone's blood from their neck," Eggers told SFX magazine.
He continued, "But in folklore, when people are experiencing vampiric attacks it's similar to old hag syndrome [a colloquial term for sleep paralysis] where you have pressure on your chest, so people interpreted it as vampires drinking blood from their chest.
So Orlok feeds through the victim's chest because that's what legendary vampires from some of the old folk traditions were believed to do. It's also why Orlok looks like a rotting corpse; that's also from the original vampire lore. And in fact that this looks so grotesque and repulsive probably serves Eggers' storytelling purposes better anyway -- this is not the romantic, seductive, or tragic antihero vampire we've become so used to over the past few decades; this is vampires the way the people who actually believed in them looked at them: as repellent, disgusting, malevolent, and terrifying monsters.
In fact, this is really the key to understanding Eggers as a filmmaker. He only makes movies with historical settings, and he is always trying to get you to see the world he shows the way the people of that time saw the world, and more importantly, the show it as real. So in the VVitch, there really is a coven of evil witches serving Satan, killing babies, blighting crops, etc., all the things 17th-century puritans feared. In The Northman, Odin truly favors bold warriors like Amleth, and when he dies in combat and is carried away by a Valkyrie to Valhalla, that is a great victory to a man like him, not a tragic, early death. In this film, Orlok is a fiendish, reanimated corpse who would make you recoil not just in fear, but also in disgust. share
Why go after pld folklore when he is doing Nosferatu? Stupid decision IMO. Just like the look of him, that isn't Nosferatu!
shareSorry, just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's stupid. There's nothing wrong with going back to the original folklore. Quite the contrast, I'm glad he did. It's about damn time someone did. We've had more than enough of the other kind of vampire: the romantic, seductive, or tragic antihero vampire, or vampires as effete metrosexuals. In the original folklore, vampires were terrifying and utterly malevolent fiends. It's refreshing to see someone finally portray them that way again.
As for the complaint that this "isn't Nosferatu." Nonsense. It's just another way of depicting Count Orlok, and Robert Eggers is perfectly at liberty to do it. Just because a character becomes iconic portrayed a certain way doesn't mean that all subsequent versions of the character have to be depicted that way. Not all depictions of Frankenstein's monster have to look like Boris Karloff's version. Dracula doesn't always have be dressed in white tie and tails, with a red-lined opera cape, just because that's what Bela Lugosi's version looked like. By the same token, Orlok is under no requirement always to look like Max Schreck.
F.W. Murnau plagiarized the story anyway, so I think it's pretty rich to demand rigid adherence to his variant.