Monster Makers: Monster of the Month

Nosferatu: The Bald, The Bad, and the Boundaries He Breaks

Hey Monster Makers!

Shifting shadows. Clawed fingers. A silhouette that could curdle your blood before your morning coffee.

This month’s monster is the one who haunts every shadowy stairwell: Nosferatu.

🎬 A Symphony of Horror (1922)

F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror is one of the most famous Dracula adaptations in cinema history. The name “Nosferatu” itself likely comes from the Romanian nesuferitu (“the insufferable one”), which, frankly, is a mood. 🤨

Count Orlok is the bargain-bin Dracula knockoff who’s somehow scarier than the “real” thing. (Thanks, copyright lawsuit!)

He’s long-fingered, rat-toothed, bald as a peeled egg, and steeped in an atmosphere of otherness. Unfortunately, that otherness leans hard on antisemitic stereotypes—hooked nose, hunched posture, pestilence-bringing foreigner. His monstrosity isn’t just supernatural; it’s political, feeding into xenophobic fears.

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💀 Nosferatu Reborn (2024)

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake still leans into the uncanny and abject, but shifts the source of “otherness.”

The new Count still lives in the land of “you don’t look like you’re from around here,” but this time the otherness comes wrapped in Eastern European folk aesthetics, cultural traditions, and a heightened theatricality—more mythic fever-dream than hate propaganda.

The antisemitic coding has been scrubbed, but the fascination with the foreign and abject still fuels his allure.

🤮 The Abject Appeal of Nosferatu

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the abject isn’t when something is just “a little off” (that’s the uncanny). The abject is about disgust due to transgression—crossing the borders between life and death, human and animal, self and other, until your sense of order itself starts to rot.

Orlok doesn’t just spook us because he’s unfamiliar; he disgusts us because he violates boundaries. He seeps into bedrooms like someone else’s shadow, sucks the life from the young and beautiful, and lives in a body both corpse-like and animate.

We recoil because he reminds us that the borders we cling to—between purity and contamination, us and them, life and death—are porous, fragile, and maybe imaginary.

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🖋 Writing Exercise: Building a Stereotype-Free Vampire

Many vampires rely on cultural shorthand to signal “different” or “dangerous. Dahling, that’s so cliché (and, you know, xenophobic)! But what if your vampire’s otherness didn’t lean on race, ethnicity, or nationality at all?

Your challenge: invent a vampire whose otherness feels powerfully abject, but without borrowing from real-world marginalized identities.

[Pro tip: This exercise works well for drawing vamps as well--same idea, different medium.]

1) Pick a vampire that you enjoy from popular culture

Example: Nosferatu (1922)

2) First think about that vampire: What is it about their appearance and behavior that makes people uneasy? Rather than cultural stereotypes, try to think about things like texture, movement, silhouette, exaggeration, and so on.

Example: Count Orlock is completely hairless, unlike most mammals; he rises up from the coffin in a way that defies physics and is exceedingly creepy; his skin is textured like a corpse.

3) Apply your analysis to your own vampire figure. How can you use exaggeration, texture, movement, silhouette, etc. to generate a figure that is abject (or uncanny)? How can you manipulate their physical traits in new ways? What kinds of movements and rituals can they exhibit to cross boundaries? How can you give them an alien logic or morality that makes them unpredictable and disgusting?

Example: Focus in on the behaviors that defy the physics of human movement. Heighten so that the vampires can't even pass for human because of how insect-like their movement is—crawling, fluttering, skittering—which is why they hide in the daytime. (Think The Fly meets The Grudge.)

Push yourself to build your abjection from scratch — no cultural shorthand, no borrowed identities — and see what strange, fresh bloodsuckers you come up with. 🧛🏻

🖤 Over to You

What’s your take—do you think horror creators can completely separate their monsters from the cultural fears and prejudices of their time? Or do monsters have to carry the baggage of the era they were born in?

Hit reply and spill your graveyard thoughts. Or show me your amazing, stereotype-free vampire. I’m dying to hear from you! 🪦

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💋 Until the bats come home,

Heidi (comicsbyheidi.com)
Monster Mentor | Countess of Creepy | Mistress of the Macabre 🦇🖤
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