HMN 2025: Excavating the history of madness with ‘Nosferatu’

In the new Dracula movie nosferatuThe Vampire Count Orlok (both named in honor of the 1922 film) nosferatu), it really is a monster. Rather than a dapper and charming nobleman, these beasts are rotten, hulking creatures straight out of our nightmares. His low, slow voice and menacing gaze epitomize his evil demeanor. He doesn’t seek love. Rather, he feeds on the blood and souls of his victims.

nosferatu There’s a lot to do. One of the things of deep interest here is the way director Robert Eggers evokes 19th-century beliefs about madness and the treatment of mental illness.

Orlok’s primary target is Ellen Hutter (played by Lily-Rose Depp), a woman haunted by horrific visions of a dark figure wanting her. She finds herself sleepwalking, writhing and screaming. Dr. Wilhelm Sievers, a competent doctor and hospital director, straps her to a bed and administers ether. Eventually, Dr. Sievers decides to bring in an expert, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Defoe).

Franz is not only a genius doctor, but also a researcher of mysticism. Assessing Ellen, he determines that this is not a case of insanity, but rather a case of demonic possession. It is here that Eggers delves into the history of mental illness.

Prior to Franz’s intervention, Ellen is diagnosed with hysteria. This was a very common diagnosis in the 1800s, mostly for women. Hysteria is a kind of comprehensive condition characterized by a wide range of symptoms, as scholar Andrew Scull explains: Obvious organic substrate.”

Hysteria is a diagnosis derived from the ancient Greek word hysteria. uterus. For thousands of years, many authorities believed that it was caused by the uterus “wandering” around the body in search of “water.”

In the movie, Ellen violently turns over on her bed and at one point bends violently into an inverted U shape. As Eggers probably knew, this was the “classic” hysterical position recorded by the French physician Jean-Martin Charcot, a 19th-century expert on hysteria. Charcot had hospital patients demonstrate hysteria in front of an audience. The U-shaped posture was photographed and recorded as “evidence” of insanity.

twist in nosferatuBut Dr. Sievers’ diagnosis was wrong. Ellen is not suffering from any illness. She has a vampire problem.

in the book draculaBram Stoker gives us Renfield, a madman in a mental hospital controlled by vampires. Herr Knock played the role in this film. Like Ellen, he is “mad” not because of mental illness, but because Orlok attacked his mind from afar. When he is seen killing a sheep, he is thrown into a cell in the basement of Dr. Sievers’ hospital.

Like Ellen, Dr. Sievers also starts with routine medical examinations. He is nervous about putting Knock in the basement cell because, as he tells the staff, it is no longer appropriate to lock up a crazy person. He was, in 19th-century parlance, an “enlightened” man. However, it soon became clear that Knock was completely out of control. He was placed in a restraint chair, much like the sedation chair developed by 19th-century psychiatrist and psychiatry pioneer Benjamin Rush.

Professor Franz was right again. Knock’s is not a mental health issue, it’s a supernatural issue.

nosferatu It is neither an attack on modern medicine’s model of mental illness nor a historical account of psychiatry. Rather, it is a quasi-feminist fantasy that evokes the past of psychiatry and shows how wrong patriarchal medical authorities were and how right women’s insight was.

In the end, the so-called ‘hysterical’ woman, not the doctor, defeats the monster. For Eggers, the underestimation of Ellen’s power is an indictment of “nineteenth-century society” in which she is “closed, corseted, bedbound, and etherically silenced.” Her defiance of those constraints presents audiences with a new kind of hero: the Victorian female rebel.