Wait. Ellen and Orlok had an oath? Is that why she spoke of a covenant?
Yes, both Ellen and Knock have a covenant/compact with Count Orlok, that’s why Dr. Sievers and Professor Von Franz recognize a connection between their cases, and these characters are in somewhat parallel arcs. Actually, Eggers gave his Ellen some of Renfield plots from the “Dracula” novel (here, here, here and here), although the cats and the rats from the 1922 original probably come from Renfield’s monologue. The covenant between Ellen and Orlok is mentioned in the film:
Ellen’s oath is at the prologue, and comes full circle in the end.
Summary: Friedrich Harding descends into the damp, suffocating silence of the family vault to keep a silent vigil over the ruins of his heart.
But the crypt is no longer a place of rest.
In the rhythmic, wheezing breath of the darkness, the small, pale shapes of Clara and Louise stir beside their mother, their movements jerky and unnatural.
As Anna's eyes snap open with a predatory hunger, Friedrich realizes that the plague has not taken his family—it has merely invited them back, and they are famished.
Ao3 version
Enjoy!
The darkness in the Harding vault was absolute, a thick and suffocating weight that seemed to press against Friedrich's very skin.
There was no lantern to guide him and no moonlight to offer a silver lining to the gloom.
As he reached the spot where his family had been entombed, his hands searched blindly through the dark, only to find the jagged, empty edges of stone boxes.
His heart plummeted as his fingers brushed the caskets.
The lids had been heaved aside, discarded in the pitch-black as if they were nothing more than paper.
A sharp, clicking sound echoed from the corner of the room, vibrating through the floorboards.
Friedrich turned his head slowly, his eyes straining to make sense of the shifting shadows.
In the deep, unyielding black, he saw them—the small, pale shapes of Clara and Louise stirring with a jolting, insect-like logic.
They crouched at the feet of a towering figure that rose slowly, its height seemingly impossible in the cramped confines of the vault.
Anna's eyes snapped open.
Even in the dark, they possessed a famished, predatory light that seemed to burn with a life of its own.
Her skin was the color of salt, her limbs elongated into something lithe and lethal—a strigoi that had reclaimed its place among the living.
A cold shiver of terror raced down Friedrich's spine, but as he stared up at the sharp, commanding line of her jaw and the terrifying majesty of her new form, a traitored heat flooded his face.
He was a man of Victorian starch and logic, yet he found himself helplessly blushing.
He was horrified for his children and terrified for his soul, but he couldn't deny that his Anna had never looked more breathtakingly powerful.
...
The heavy stone doors of the vault groaned open, the seal of the crypt breaking to admit a rush of biting cold and a flurry of pale, dancing snow.
The natural, grey light of the winter afternoon spilled, illuminating the interior of the tomb in a flat, ghostly wash.
Thomas, Professor Von Franz, and Dr. Sievers stepped inside, their boots crunching on the frost-dusted stone.
They did not find a scene of carnage, but rather a sight of delirious, lovesick ecstasy.
Friedrich was on the floor, clinging to the elongated, marble-pale form of Anna.
His face was flushed with a terrifyingly misplaced warmth as he looked up at them with glassy, frantic eyes—his mind finally unraveled by the plague.
"Thomas!" Friedrich cried out, his voice airy and cheerful. "A miracle from God! My Anna—my sweet girls—they have returned to me. Is she not more magnificent than ever?"
Beside her, Clara and Louise crouched with their small, twitching limbs, their eyes reflecting the flat light with a predatory glint.
Anna let out a high-pitched, metallic screech that rattled the stone walls. She leaned down, pressing a cold, bloodless kiss to Friedrich’s burning cheek, before effortlessly tossing him aside like a discarded toy.
Friedrich collapsed into a dazed heap, still smiling.
Anna and her children began a slow, rhythmic advance toward the three men, their movements jerky and famished in the pale light.
"What do we do?" Thomas stammered.
Von Franz reached into his coat, pulling out three heavy wooden stakes. He shoved them into the hands of Thomas and Dr. Sievers with grim efficiency. "The only thing we can do, Hutter. We fight."
He leaned in, his voice dropping to a low, clinical growl. "A strigoi possesses two hearts. Only one pumps their foul lifeblood. That is the one you must stake for their destruction to be successful."
Thomas looked at the stake, then at the towering creature that used to be his friend's wife.
He wanted to save Friedrich, even if it meant destroying the miracle he clung to.
He nodded, his face pale with terror.
"Good," Von Franz said, his eyes already tracking Anna's movements.
"Once we win this battle, I shall celebrate by opening a cat cafe for the town's stray cats. It is my greatest ambition."
Thomas blinked, his fear momentarily replaced by utter confusion. "A... cat cafe? Professor, don't you mean we go back to saving Ellen?"
Von Franz paused, his brow furrowing as he momentarily struggled to bridge the gap between the monsters in front of him and the woman they were trying to "save".
"Huh?" He looked at Thomas, then let out a sharp, distracted breath—the sound of a man trying to juggle two different crises at once.
"Oh! Yes, yes. Saving Ellen. Quite right. But we cannot save the living if we are devoured by the dead. First the hearts, then the cafe, and finally Ellen."
The screech of the strigoi family filled the vault once more as they lunged into the grey light.
Watching nosferatu with the subtitles on, and I've seen some people defend Friedrich by saying that he only tied Ellen up because he thought it was the right thing to do. I argue he did it because he wanted to.
In the subtitles, when the Dr suggests this, it says that Friedrich 'chuckles'. That is not the reaction of someone who is doing what they have to even if they worry it might be wrong. That is someone who sees amusement in the idea of tying up a woman who annoys him.
Robert Eggers saying his agent would love for the “Nosferatu” novella to be out there, and he’s not the only one. Mr. Eggers release the novella, already, and put us out of this misery and the trainwreck that’s the mainstream interpretation of “Nosferatu” (2024).
We don’t care it’s “poorly written” (my guess he’s being humble) hire a novelist to expand on it or something. Guillermo del Toro did the same with “Crimson Peak” (published in the same year as the film release, if I’m not mistaken), and he didn’t based his film on it, unlike “Nosferatu” which was entirely based on this top-secret novella. Also, giving us a strigoi lover folktale with half of the story missing is kind of wild.
In this context, “spells” [plural] don’t mean “magic spells”; although it does carry that double meaning due to Ellen being an seeress/enchantress, but the narrative makes that distinction when Thomas Hutter says he’s not yet “free from his spell” [singular] (meaning Count Orlok).
In medical language, “spells” were considered recurrent and repeated symptoms of a disease.
Nevertheless, the term appears in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) in association with Lucy Westenra’s degeneration into vampirism, as she writes (Ch. 11):
“I have a dim half remembrance of long, anxious times of waiting and fearing, darkness in which there was not even the pain of hope to make present distress more poignant. And then long spells of oblivion, and the rising back to life as a diver coming up through a great press of water.”
“These hysterical spells come over her at nightfall, like clockwork.” // “Dr. Sievers tells me you have had these spells since childhood?”
