In Robert Eggers’s new film Nosferatu (2024), Nosferatu is the dark Count Orlok, whom the socially alienated young Ellen summons as spiritual company, and the force her older, betrothed self must confront, navigating both attraction and repulsion. After her mother’s death, Ellen sought solace in the count, who appeared in dreams and trances that contemporary doctors labeled as epileptic fits and melancholy. These episodes temporarily subside after her marriage to Thomas Hutter, but during his six-week journey to Transylvania, her fits, dreams, and sleepwalking resumed, creating a sense of danger for her friends. Doctors are called into her sick room to observe her symptoms: her labored breathing and panting, her rapid heartbeat, her rolled-back eyes, her sense of suffocation, and her contractions and convulsions. They debate her condition, taking note that she has too much blood (with liberal menses) and a fanciful, albeit melancholy, mind. Doctor Wilhelm Sievers bleeds her and gives her ether to calm her delirious ravings.

Set in 1838, Eggers’s remake captures the cultural fear surrounding women’s sexual desire. Nosferatu and Orlok represent external manifestations of Ellen’s so-called nymphomaniac hysteria and onanism. However, Ellen’s eventual reclaiming of her sexuality overturns the historical idea that women’s sexual desire stems from a lack of will.

During one of Orlok’s visits to Ellen in Wisburg, he reveals to her that he represents her own appetite, embodying the sexual desire inherent in her nature. According to Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a Swiss metaphysician, Ellen’s vulnerability to Orlok—her own sexual desire—stems from her strong animal instincts and an alleged lack of willpower. Historically, “[i]n the healthy condition, the will was credited with exercising a supervisory function over all activities of the mind–and over so-called lower impulses, or instincts, of humanity’s animal nature as well” (Oppenheim 43). In their medical theories of nymphomania, or uterine........

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