Queer Desire in Nosferatu

Early on in the Harry Benshoff piece “The Monster and the Homosexual” the author mentions the AIDS crisis and how that linked fear of the homosexual to death and disease in the minds of many a homophobe. What was so striking about that was that if we take the queer reading of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu at face value, then the titular vampire of the title explicitly plays into the anxieties with his deliverance of disease and death onto a small German village. The fact that this film predates the AIDS epidemic by about six or seven decades is remarkable. 

Before writing this, I had a look at one of my classmate’s blogs on this film, wherein he spoke about the potentially magical brainwashing abilities of Nosferatu, and how those are most explicitly practiced on Renfield, the clerk, who loses his mind towards the end of the film and worships Nosferatu. I hadn’t thought about Nosferatu’s abilities to communicate beyond the realm of the real with his victims, but this also made me think about queerness and homosexuality as it relates to Benshoff’s writing. Benshoff makes clear at multiple points in his essay that queer can be defined as anything non-normative, anything that doesn’t fit within the boundaries of hetero-partriarchal capitalist priorities. The homosexual as a corrupter of the innocent via methods that are “magical,” like brainwashing, is one way that the film Nosferatu is an explicitly queer text, if we see Renfield as having been brainwashed by the Count. I’m using queer here as both explicitly homosexual and also anything that strays from the norm as I defined it above. 

Another thing I noticed in the film itself that I mentioned in class but want to try and expand on further is the idea that is presented in the film that the Count cannot pursue female victims. He is only able to pursue male victims, in this sense making him a predatory homosexual, while females must come to him if they so desire. This complicates the sexuality of the character somewhat, as Nosferatu is able to feed off of women but only if the women themselves wish it so. This assertion of female power does a great deal to emasculate, or castrate, Nosferatu, in a way that we see Clover discuss from last week’s reading. Although Jonathan’s wife is not a particularly consequential character, we see her actively desire Nosferatu at several points in the film, and he is almost powerless to refuse her before Jonathan comes to the rescue. In fact, we could see this as Jonathan “rescuing” both of them; her from an untimely fate, and Nosferatu from a desire that betrays his true nature.