Historically accurate vampire hunt in Nosferatu

Nosferatu 2024 movie poster © Focus Features

In the latest adaptation of this iconic vampire story there’s one scene that really stood out to me because it shows something I haven’t seen before - a historically accurate vampire hunt. Thomas, a German man, goes to a Transylvanian village in winter, where he observes a band of Romani people using a virgin woman on a white horse to help them find the grave of a vampire. One of them stabs the decomposing corpse in the heart and blood come gushing out of its mouth.

Scene from Nosferatu 2024 © Focus Features

Now, let's uncover some Slavic Lore.

I want to read you a short passage written by Vuk Karadžić, a famous 19th century Serbian philologist, anthropologist and linguist, who recorded many folk traditions of the southern Slavs.

He uses the words vampire and werewolf interchangeably, as did the people he spoke to. To prevent confusion I'll only use the word vampire.

"Vampires usually appear in winter, from Christmas to Spasovdan. When people start dying in large numbers in a village, rumours swirl that a vampire is in the graveyard (and some will swear that they saw him, wearing his funeral shroud draped over his shoulder at night), and they start guessing who became a vampire. Sometimes they take a young black stud-horse without patches on its hide, and they lead him to walk over graves in which they suspect the vampire could lurk. They do this because they say that such a stud will not and could not walk over the grave of the vampire. If they are convinced that they've identified the grave, it happens that they open the grave. All the villagers gather with hawthorn stakes, and then they open the coffin. If they find a man who did not decompose, they run the stakes through him, throw the remains into a fire and let it burn."

The choice made for the movie to have a virgin on a white horse, I think serves both a cinematic and a symbolic purpose - a black horse would’ve been lost in this dark scene, and the woman may have been added to visually emphasize the importance of the ritual. Symbolically they might represent the “clean” living side clashing with the “unclean” spirit of the undead.

Thomas asks Count Orlok (or Nosferatu) about the unfamiliar practice of the people. Orlok dismisses them as superstitions.
He says “How I look forward to retiring to your city of a modern mind, who knows nothing-of nor believes in these such morbid fairy tales.”

Scene from Nosferatu 2024 © Focus Features

I think he’s frightened of the people because they know how to defeat him, having centuries of knowledge and practice on others of his kind.

Robert Eggers, the writer and director of Nosferatu, said that he’s been interested in the story since he was a child, and that he’s been researching the topic and working on the movie for about 10 years, and I think it really shows.