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The vampire is one of the most enduring figures in fiction. With another retelling of “Nosferatu” around the corner, a Northeastern psychologist explains why we are drawn to these horrifying, enthralling creatures.
There are very few concepts that have endured as long in our culture as the vampire, and right now fans of these fictional bloodsuckers are eating well.
From a sexy update to “Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire” to the sitcom shenanigans of “What We Do in the Shadows,” it’s impossible to escape vampires these days. Soon, they will be joined by another retelling of “Nosferatu,” a remake of the classic 1922 German film that was, in turn, based on Bram Stoker’s seminal vampiric text, “Dracula.”
With fangs, bats and blood dominating our screens, it’s worth asking, why are we obsessed with vampires? What does it say about us that we can’t get enough of these monstrous, yet clearly enthralling, creatures?
William Sharp, an associate teaching professor of psychology at Northeastern University and practicing therapist, says the answer might go all the way back to Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.
“There’s always a dark side to us, for Freud,” Sharp says. “When you get some kind of entertainment like a movie or a really good book, it speaks to that part of us that is being suppressed, repressed, denied. We can watch this monster go around and do whatever it wants to whoever it wants and literally just suck the marrow of life out of everybody.”
Monsters like vampires also play into the Jungian idea of the shadow, the part of ourselves that we unconsciously hide or repress, kind of like a psychic blind spot, because it stands apart from our ego, or the way we would like to see ourselves.
“These movies … tickle our unconscious or they allow a part of us that we don’t give a lot of air time to to literally have air time on the screen in front of us,” Sharp says.
But movies are filled with monsters. Why has the vampire, specifically, persisted to the point where “Nosferatu” is once again hitting theaters in 2024?
Sharp argues that the vampire has always represented ideas –– repressed desire, sexuality, control –– that are both taboo and appealing, ideas about relationships that have not always been discussed openly. It’s not a coincidence that Robert Eggers’ new rendition of “Nosferatu” focuses on the idea of what happens when women are forced to repress their sexuality and positions the infamous Count Orlok as an obsessive lover.
Even the most integral part of vampiric lore –– that they need to bite a person to draw life and pass on their vampiric curse –– comes with inherent intimacy as well as danger. It plays into classic Freudian understandings of psychosexual development, Sharp says, including Melanie Klein’s idea of oral incorporation.
“[Klein] says that the infant’s mind knows that there’s a caregiver in the way that an infant would know that there’s a caregiver, but the caregiver eventually goes away,” Sharp says. “The infant is stuck with, ‘I don’t want my caregiver to go away. How do I get the caregiver [to be a part of] me?’ I do wonder if there’s not some really archaic kind of connection to the idea of the vampire bringing the other, in the form of blood, into them. In the lore, if you happen to get turned into a vampire, they own you.”
Unlike a zombie, which is mindless, or a werewolf, which is animalistic, a vampire is a creature sustained by relationships, just like humans. If the vampire is a constantly evolving symbol for societal fears, Sharp says it’s telling that this version of “Nosferatu” is coming out at a time when people, especially young people, are still figuring out how to reconnect after an isolating global pandemic.
“I wonder if it speaks to the desire for relationship and connection,” Sharp says. “Is there something in shifting the focus to a relationship as opposed to killing the bad guy, good over evil?”
“It isn’t just another vampire movie. It’s another vampire movie now because something from the unconscious is calling for it or receptive to it even,” Sharp adds. “What is it that’s calling Nosferatu out right now? Why is it here? I don’t think we can definitively know, but it’s a great question.”