With Trump’s impending inauguration, the cold dread of Nosferatu nears

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Shutterstock / Wangkun Jia

Return of the living dead: President-elect Donald Trump has zero convictions (except for the judicial sort), and his movement is animated entirely by grievance, fear, ignorance, and greed.

A cold, pulse-less darkness spreads across the frozen landscape. Superstitious peasants shutter their hovels and pray to ward off frightening evil. Plague empties the city and fills the graveyard. The ancient sinister figure’s long, black shadow draws across the horizon as the fragile light finally fails. The chilly gloom is inescapable as the inevitable tragic fate descends and the pale winter sun is extinguished, bringing doom.

But enough about Trump’s dismal return.

Let’s talk about Robert Eggers’ cinematic horror blockbuster Nosferatu, which opened on Christmas Day. Or fuck it, we’ll talk about Trump, too. After all, the archaic, rotting vampire is cut from the same poisonous dead wood as the movie’s Count Orlok.

I was eager to see Nosferatu as soon as I heard it was green-lit for production, and I got Dec. 30 tickets for the heated reclining seats at Emagine Royal Oak — the only way to fly. While I’m not a film geek and utterly unqualified to bring you an eloquent review steeped in Pauline Kael’s language of cinema, I can tell you the movie was:

• Frightening without cheap jump scares or overwrought body gore

• Hauntingly ethereal, visually captivating dread

• Loud as fuck

• Longish but well-paced

• Cat-friendly

I’m glad I saw it, and it was worth the money and the wait … but I have no urge to see it again. Once was enough. Perhaps that’s a function of me getting old and losing interest in death, terror, and being repeatedly frightened. My own horizon is coming into sharper relief, so I see little need to add to life’s actual horrors.

Nosferatu is a one-and-done. I wanted to see what Eggers did with the source material, which not only included German filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s original 1922 film (itself lifted from Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel), but also the DNA of the 1979 Werner Herzog remake; the 2000 horror-mystery-dark comedy Shadow of the Vampire that was a clever take on the ’22 film; and Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 batshit-gonzo classic Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

He did well. I’ve not seen Eggers’ previous films but am familiar with his basic style, where the cinematography and scenery establish his signature melancholy tone and feel of dread, this time in a fictional German town in 1838. Nosferatu is said to be his triumph, his dark magnum opus, when it comes to the visual and vibe aspects of filmmaking. No argument from me.

You can find innumerable professional and semi-pro Nosferatu reviews all over the internet, including an incredibly strange one from The New York Times that includes B-52s song references and the author’s stated urge to fuck the vampire.

I did not leave the theater with any desire to come within a continent of Bill Skarsgård’s literally rotting vampire, much less fornicate with it. Much has been said about the moral terror and the lust that repel and attract the vampire and the film’s co-star, Lily-Rose Depp. That aspect felt slightly underdeveloped to me, despite the film’s 132-minute running time. But overall, Nosferatu is an accomplishment in an age of lazy A.I. horror dreck churned out by the studios and streamers.

Still, I did not wanna copulate with the count.

Leaving the theater, my strange mind couldn’t help but make a connection between the film’s early 19th-century Germany and early 20th-century Weimar Republic. The imaginary Wisborg is a bustling seaport in the years where Germany was rebuilding after the Napoleonic Wars, and its own sense of nationalism and shared destiny began to coalesce among the various principalities, duchies, and kingdoms, allowing for a thriving intellectual, artistic, and cultural scene, but planting the seeds of a future apocalypse.

Weimar, on the other hand, lasted less than 15 years before that apocalypse consumed it via an evil more sinister than any vampire.

It’s almost trite by now to compare American democracy’s collapse into Trumpian neo-fascist oligarchy to the Weimar Republic that was extinguished by Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in 1933.

There are troubling parallels, to be sure, particularly our ruling class industrialists and Silicon Valley billionaires financing Trump’s return to power. Weimar, however, is preserved in a sort of nostalgic amber that feels different from our reality today.

Germany of the 1920s and early ’30s is remembered for its permissive avant-garde culture, cosmopolitan Berlin in particular. It was the age of neon jazz nightclubs and the decadent cabarets memorialized by Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories. It was the era of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill and agitprop, of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger, Walter Gropius and Bauhaus, Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, Max Planck, George Grosz and Dada and the New Objectivity, the Frankfurt School, Fritz Lang — and Murnau.

Weimar also was a hothouse of competing ideas and ideology, and when it wasn’t unfolding on stages and canvases, there were ferocious street clashes between the Left and Right. We all know who came out on top.

Fast-forward a century, a decadent America rots in the failing twilight of its imperial glory, paying the emptiest lip service to its noble but unfulfilled founding ideals while teetering on the razor’s edge of collapse into what I’ve previously called a fascist neo-Confederate Gilead oligarchy.

Instead of sophisticated, provocative, iconoclastic Weimar culture, we have Hawk Tuah girl, the Rizzler, Baby Gronk, Jake Paul, crypto scams, TikTok, Luigi the Assassin, Timothée Chalamet lookalike contests, Twitter becoming a Klan rally, colleges conspiring with the FBI to bust student protesters, the Pop Tart Bowl, Earth-killing AI bullshit, Moo Deng, and whatever in the living fuck Skibidi Toilet is.

Certainly, American high culture also endures, but it’s been decades since it dominated as pop culture does today. And don’t get me wrong, I love resurgent indie sleaze, meme culture, Kendrick humiliating Drake, and WNBA beefs. It’s me; I’m the problem, too. I’m with the barbarians in the front row of this squalid community theater Götterdämmerung.

Weimar low culture just seems so much cooler than ours, no?

Meanwhile, it’s enraging that anyone advocating for a just, fair society where the ruling class is brought to heel and you don’t suffer and die amid medical bankruptcy is labeled a communist suffering from the “woke mind virus” by the wealthiest and most divorced man in human history. Fuck Elon Musk. There’s a simmering resentment against the ruling class and crony capitalism that I hope is a groundswell leading to a Popular Front that topples MAGA. The divine right of kings died out, and so can American excesses.

For now, however, America is about to enter night. And it’s doing so with its usual tacky, sleazy, embarrassing anti-intellectual style, evangelical self-righteousness, and its crude, savage vindictiveness.

Fuck, I sound like cranky Mitch Albom. But we should all be embarrassed. Is America even capable of shame anymore?

Trump’s inauguration is just days away, and I’ll say this: I have vastly more respect for the beastly Nosferatu because the vampire at least lives the courage of his evil convictions. Trump has zero convictions (except for the judicial sort), and his movement is animated entirely by grievance, fear, ignorance, and greed. Still, I feel the movie’s cold dread in real life as Trump again nears.

And on this bummer, thus ends my brief residency as Metro Times’ second-string Joe Lapointe. It was fun, and I hope they’ll have me back before independent thought and criticism are outlawed.

I hope you had an excellent holiday season, and I hope it’s not our last. My only 2025 resolutions are to finish my book and to keep making the right kind of enemies.