Oh dang so Ellen doesnt really know who Orlock is and only says its a demon because of Von Franz??
Yes! This is whole reason the mainstream interpretation of this film is all wrong and is baseless in film canon. Plus why Eggers himself never retracted from saying his version is a “demon lover story” and a Gothic Romance between Ellen and Orlok, and kept bringing up “Wuthering Heights” in the face of backlash. Or why Bill Skarsgård so confidently called Orlok the “romantic lead” to “Fangoria”.
And that’s exactly what Willem Dafoe explained, as well: “This [Nosferatu] had a real sacrifice and obsession to it, and I liked very much my relationship to the understanding of what Lily-Rose Depp's character must do, the kind of sacrifice she must make, her willingness and her understanding of it, and her passion for this force that she can't quite identify.” And to “Deadline”: “And then on the other hand, you have this demon lover that attracts her, and she doesn't know why, but somewhere there is a deep understanding there and a deep attraction.”
Ellen doesn’t know who the shadow at the window is (prologue), she calls it a “presence” to Von Franz. And, exactly, it’s only after the Professor says she’s possessed of some spirit, perhaps a daemon, she will insist there is a demon. In her scene with Anna (“Professor Franz said a demon!”) and Thomas, on arrival, also told her; “He has your locket.” Then, while Friedrich is out and Thomas kicks her out of bed, she dreams of meeting/facing this demon, and accuses him of possessing her: “I felt you crawling like a serpent in my body”, which he denies saying it’s her nature. The next day, she tells Harding the Professor was right, there is, indeed, a demon. It’s not her nature, it’s a demonic force who’s to “blame” for her “behavior”, which Harding dismisses because he sees right through Ellen. I really prefer the interpretation where the supernatural is real (otherwise this is bleak as hell) but once you go down the rabbit hole of the collective psychosis is hard to see anything else because it’s all very clear.
So when Ellen says “he took me as his lover, then” (connecting this to her dreams, when Orlok enchanted her to dream only of her lost husband) is like Thomas says: “impossible”. The narrative of the film says so, she can’t possibly be talking about the 19th century, and she isn’t because this is Folk Horror (that’s literally Eggers brand) and Count Orlok is a folk vampire based on Balkan and Slavic vampire folklore. The vampire of European folklore doesn’t target random people like the pop culture or literary vampire, it targets their living relatives, and their haunting type is more similar to Western ghosts. Their goal is to kill their living relatives, and that’s exactly want Orlok wants from Ellen. He wants her soul. This is already dark as it is, but for some reason, the mainstream decided it needed to be darker.