I must admit that I did not immediately realize that Nosferatu is, in fact, a work of folk horror; I only understood it after reading about it on the blog @nosferatu-roberteggers. Meanwhile, knowing that Orlok is actually a folkloric strigoi-lover who pursues his widow would have helped many more people understand the film correctly. Recently I came across a short novella that could quite confidently be called a “Guide to Folkloric Vampires.” The story is brief, but it literally describes all the characteristics of the folkloric vampire that Robert Eggers tried to recreate in his film.
The novella is called The Family of the Vourdalak (1839), written by Alexei Tolstoy. The story is narrated by a French diplomat who becomes stranded in the wilderness of Serbia and is forced to spend some time living with a simple peasant family. Before setting out to hunt a bandit, the old man Gorcha orders his children to wait for him for ten days, and on the tenth day to arrange a funeral service for his soul. But if he returns later—then under no circumstances are they to let him into the house, and they must drive an aspen stake into him, for it will no longer be he, but only what remains of him… Here the author makes a digression, giving a rather precise description of the folkloric vampires of Southeastern Europe.
“Here I must tell you, gracious ladies, that vourdalaks, as vampires are called among the Slavic peoples, are in the view of the local inhabitants nothing other than the dead who have come out of their graves in order to suck the blood of the living. In general they have the same habits as all other vampires, but there is one feature that makes them even more dangerous. Vourdalaks, gracious ladies, prefer to suck the blood of their closest relatives and their best friends, and those, when they die, also become vampires, so that eyewitnesses even say that in Bosnia and Herzegovina the populations of entire villages have turned into vourdalaks.”
Among the signs is not only the persecution of loved ones. The description says that an “epidemic” of vampirism could devastate entire villages—that is, we are dealing with something like an infection. This completely coincides with what is shown in the film: Orlok brings the plague to Wisburg; and speaking of the second sign, it is not difficult to guess in what way Ellen was connected to Orlok when he was still alive.
The narrator refuses to believe in the existence of unclean forces until the very end and tries to explain what is happening through fatigue, fear, and the superstitions of the peasants. But rational explanations gradually fall apart: the house empties too quickly.
The fate of Zdenka — a young girl from Gorcha’s family — is especially tragic. She becomes the last victim of the vourdalak, and afterwards attacks the protagonist — because she fell in love with him while he was living in their house… She attacked the one who was dearest to her in all the world.
This motif is one of the most terrifying in the entire folklore tradition. The vourdalak does not attack like a beast; he calls. He comes to the window, speaks a familiar name, reminds the listener of love or kinship. And that is precisely why defense is almost impossible: one must not only fight the monster, but also suppress one’s own memory, one’s own sense of attachment. The folkloric vampire exists precisely on this boundary — between the human being he once was and the creature he has become.
And here an unexpected echo with Nosferatu appears once again. In both cases the horror is built not upon an external monster, but upon a connection that already exists between the characters. The vourdalak returns to those who know him; Orlok comes to the one with whom an invisible thread already binds him. "Remember, how once we were? A moment. Remember?"
The folkloric vampire is not a random predator.
It is someone of your own, returned from the world of the dead.
