Count Orlok

I remember going to see Nosferatu, the film by Robert Eggers with my ex-girlfriend. I was excited to see this as I love the folklore themes which embody this directors work. We ended up at the Newcastle Cineworld for the late Friday night showing. The experience was appalling and why I’ll never go to another cinema again. The screen itself was akin to a 55-inch TV parked in a broom cupboard. Every 5-minutes or so, some fat cunt would get up to refill their Pepsi or buy another hotdog and their bulbous, normie heads would obscure the screen as they tentatively crept out of the cinema. The whole set-up was shambolic. It was fucking appalling – I pissed away almost £50 on that debacle.

This week, I upgraded my home TV with a new 4K LG G5, Panasonic 4k HD BluRay player and surround system. I bought the 4K Ultra HD version of Nosferatu and watched it on Saturday night (and again yesterday). It has left a deep mark on me. My interpretation of it probably differs somewhat to the ‘weak men BUT PATRIARCHY’ contradiction or femboss interpretation of the movie some hold.

The gist of the movie sees a young woman, who, in her teens, most likely had some form of mental/physical relationship with Count Orlok (whether imagined or for real is never made clear). It suggests she had supernatural/witch-like powers and in the confines of her teenage bedroom, fantasised, manifested and summoned Orlok. Some years pass, and through whatever means, she manages to break the connection with him and go on to meet another man and get married. Orlok, some years later, engineers events so that her husband will visit him in Romania to exchange some legal papers to secure a property purchase in Germany (where they now live).

This development coincides with the re-emergence of her repressed desires from her earlier experience with Orlok, leading to her lust-trauma dichotomy. For me, this is where the femtard argument breaks down – Ellen wasn’t a girlboss fighting against the dual-evil of normie blue-pill men (her husband and his best pal) and the deep, chemical connection with evil/raw love in Orlok. The reason for this is that she was too cowardly to ditch the former and fully-immerse herself in the latter – a true feminist icon would have submitted herself to her freewill, and, ergo, to the alter of Orlok – and by doing so went all-in on the Hard Patriarchy. In the end, she chose to sustain the former (the weak patriarchy of city gents and posh behaviour) and deny herself the latter – by killing herself and Orlok in the process. Strong Independent Woman, indeed.

Anyway, I don’t want to get too bogged down in a movie review here but this film in particular really did leave its mark on me – specifically in terms of how Orlok (not the traditional seductive vampire of Hollywood) is ‘an appetite’ (a brilliant line from the movie)*. He is basically an engine of death, a plague-bringer whose presence corrupts everything it touches. He literally carries rat infestations with him, who in turn spread a blood-born bubonic plague to humans – who Orlok then feeds on. A genius but unappetising strategy. I’ll come to why this is relevant to daygame, soon¹.

Orlok was probably a living man – once – but whose capacity to display any molecule of semblance to basic human empathy dissolved hundreds of years ago. Clearly, though, he still has some capacity to “love” through a warped, obsessive filter that feels more like a curse than affection. He explicitly tells her he’s incapable of love, yet he’s irresistibly drawn to her, describing it as a force he can’t escape. I’ll also come why to this is relevant to daygame, soon².

Orlok represents the monstrous underside of male desire: a folkloric vampire who’s less of a beautiful, seductive aristocrat and more a broken man, once masculine and dare I say ruggedly handsome, but is now the definition of a folk horror entity in 16th-century Transylvanian military garb, complete with a mustache (think Gen 1 PUA/Thomas Crown style here, but without the presence to carry it). His capacity for “love,” then, is the faint, corrupted echo of whatever human soul he once had—warped by centuries of undeath into something that craves connection but can only express it through destruction. This is why it is more than a beautiful nod to male loneliness, cynicism, anger and repressed desire – and after all the centuries of rot, death, murder and squalor – he still has an unexplainable connection to the most quietly ignored ingredient of real love – obsession. Again, I’ll come to why this is relevant to daygame, soon³.

The “filth” of his existence—his need to kill—appears to almost equal to the purity of his human longing for love. Orlok’s capacity for love is the last ember of his soul, fighting against the rot of his vampiric nature. Orlok’s isolation, and the mutual obsession that binds him to Ellen is not a clean or romantic love but a desperate, primal impulse to reclaim something lost—a purity that can’t survive his cursed existence. I’ll explain very soon why this is relevant to daygame below⁴. Orlok’s not just a monster, but a being who knows what he’s lost and can’t escape the filth of what he’s become.

The end

I watched the death scene several times: those final seconds of Orlok’s life as the sun comes up and he implores Ellen to stop letting him feed. In those next few seconds you see an incredible camera angle, his face side-on, his eyes in cataract as he looks toward the sun. You see it for a second – the knowing – that he was about to lose more than his life – he was about to lose love.

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*An appetite. An ungovernable need to feed, to predate in order to propagate an existence alone and in the shadows. Think +1s here. LOL.

¹ Think of Orlok as a daygamer with online presence. Every new city he moves to, he carries with him a plague of rats that disembark his ship shortly after him and pollute the streets with their nuisance, chirping, scurrying and filth. The rats are other daygamers and they are vermin – they are the corollary to imagination.

² Think of this part part of Orlon’s psyche as his own need for validation, but beneath this is a true, deeper need – a quest for that one woman who validates his existence – a meta-chemical symbiosis – wrong. but right for all reasons, and none.

³ Think of this as being state-drunk from cycling through an endless round of 8s, until the 8s no longer want to cycle through you.

⁴Draw your own conclusions here.

BroodingSea, October 2025