Ferrying nothingness : the Charon motif in Murnau’s Nosferatu and Dreyer’s Vampyr

Abstract

In a trenchant comment on Nosferatu’s literary origin, Robin Wood intriguingly suggests that what attracted F.W. Murnau to Dracula was the fact that “[t]he vampire myth and Bram Stoker’s development of it easily coalesce with the Descent myth”. What could have inspired Wood’s crucial connection is that Stoker labels Dracula’s schooner “the Demeter” - a world which, as Evans Lansing Smith explains, recalls “[i] n Greek myth […] the name of the mother of Persephone whose yearly abduction into Hades was re-enacted during the Classical Mysteries of Eleusis”. Significantly, Wood develops his fascinating Nosferatu article in terms of the seminal parallel he draws between Hutter’s (Harker’s) and Persephone’s innocent ritual of flower gathering that initiates their tragic descent into what he calls “the terrible underworld”. But this is only half the mythic point, for Wood oddly fails to mention that this katabasis or descent unleashes what may be termed a vampiric variation of the Charon myth in reverse. Like Stoker, in fact, whom Marinella Lorinczi rightly sees “structur[ing] tales of a mythological nature or fables […] on the basis of reversal”, Murnau refracts the classical Charon trajectory through a vampiric glass inversely. The aesthetic potential of inverting Charon’s kátabasis as the ferryman of the dead into that of a self-ferrying vampire’s Lucianic ascent to the realm of the living can hardly be exaggerated. For not only is Murnau’s revising of this weird Stokerean concept the lifeblood of Nosferatu, but it is evidently Dreyer’s weirder appropriation of it that makes Vampyr, his transgressive version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’, “the notable exception”. Wood sees to the exploitative debasement of most vampire films. Vampyr is indeed a variant of the Stoker/Murnau inversion of the Stygian vampiric descent upon which Le Fanu pivots the Carmilla/Laura lesbian relationship. But this statement can be viewed in truer perspective if we first analyse how Murnau moulds Nosferatu in terms of Stoker’s Lucianic vision of Dracula as an ascending Charon figure that mutates into a Homeric bloodlusting shade, and then examine how Dreyer deepens Le Fanu’s Stygian preoccupations through his stunning revision of the Stoker/Murnau synthesis of these mythic Hadean creatures.