"Vampire Hunter D" (2001 anime) is yet another story about society trying to “cure” a woman of her passion for a monster who understands her better than anyone else. Another Eggersian Nosferatu — or rather, one of the earlier incarnations of Ellen and Orlok.
The story begins with the aristocratic vampire Meier Link abducting a young woman in a carriage drawn by black horses. Naturally, my first association was Count Orlok’s carriage — but then I remembered Ulpiano Checa y Sanz’s The Abduction of Proserpine.
The young woman’s father and brother hire a vampire hunter to bring her back — dead or alive; in fact, her brother explicitly asks for her to be killed if she turns into a vampire. Very soon, the anime confirms what any lover of Gothic romance would have suspected from the start: the girl left with the monster of her own free will. And suddenly her brother’s demand that she be killed appears in a different light: female sexuality has slipped out of control and must be punished, exactly as the good old patriarchal order demands. At this point, Lucy Westenra seems to wave at us from a distance — another heroine whose sexuality found its outlet in vampirism and immortality, and who was punished for it by the male characters around her. The anime unfolds in a world that looks like a strange hybrid of the Wild West and cyberpunk, yet it still inevitably calls Victorian Europe to mind.
Where, then, is the monster taking his girl? The film keeps it deliberately vague: in Countess Carmilla’s castle there is a spaceship that can carry them to a “city of night among the distant stars” — the only place where they can be happy. An utterly wild combination of spaceships and medieval castles. Respectable storytelling manuals would strictly forbid mixing fantasy with science fiction. But the Japanese animators broke that rule — and were absolutely right to do so.
What matters is not so much what this starry city is, or where exactly it lies. What matters is the tragic impossibility of the girl and the monster being together in the human world — at least in the form in which they exist within it. And here, once again, we find parallels with Nosferatu — and with Wuthering Heights, too: another realm, death, transcendence as the only possible way for two souls, desperate to merge, to become one.
Of course, one cannot simply place Meier Link and Orlok on equal footing. Orlok is predatory, chthonic, bestial sexuality; a masculinized death ready to devour all living things. Meier is only his mournful, ceremonious echo: the archetype of the classic aristocratic vampire in an elegant suit. And yet the scene in which Meier steps into the agonizing sunlight for the sake of the woman he loves unmistakably recalls Nosferatu. In much the same way, Orlok at the end of Eggers’s film does not merely fall into a trap: he knows exactly what he is doing, and endures torment in order to unite with Ellen in death.
However, the scene of stepping into the sun is not the ending: the vampire survives. After a long journey, the lovers finally reach the castle — only to be met there by betrayal. The girl dies. Her last words are: “Freedom… Finally!” Does that not remind you of something, once again? Is this not Ellen Hutter all over again — for whom death was the only escape from a society trying to drag her back into “normality,” a normality far deader than the monster himself?
Many thanks to the wonderful @darklinaforever for recommending this anime to me.
