Count Orlok Is 2024’s Sexiest Man
HE’S SIX FOOT four, with an oval contoured face, deep-hued eyes, and looks that could kill—and frequently do. He’s 2024’s sexiest man alive. No, not inveterate goof John Krasinski, who won People’s title this year, but the shambling, towering, blood-sucking villain in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Count Orlok. (Although whether or not “alive” applies here may
HE’S SIX FOOT four, with an oval contoured face, deep-hued eyes, and looks that could kill—and frequently do. He’s 2024’s sexiest man alive. No, not inveterate goof John Krasinski, who won People‘s title this year, but the shambling, towering, blood-sucking villain in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Count Orlok. (Although whether or not “alive” applies here may lie in the eye of the beholder.)
Horror fiction, on both the page and screen, popularly characterizes vampires as irresistibly attractive. Twilight’s sparkly mopes, to Interview with the Vampire’s tragic fops, to The Vampire Diaries’ brooding, feuding sibling hunks, Blade‘s naughty vampire god wannabes (or Blade himself, if pale goth men don’t get you percolated). No matter the variations, vampires are primed to stir our thirst, so they can quench theirs without the hassle of a hunt. We associate other monsters in the classic horror canon with carnal instincts too, like werewolves, but bloodsuckers seem to have a monopoly on the erotic temptation of good looks.
Nosferatu, a remake of the iconic 1922 vampire film which was in turn an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, leans partly into this trope: Orlok’s victims can’t repel his presence. At best, they can merely tolerate his influence, as Eggers’ lead, Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), has done for most of her life when Nosferatu begins in earnest. The film opens on Ellen in her youth, weeping, lonesome enough to call out for succor from a “guardian angel; a spirit of comfort; a spirit of any celestial sphere; anything.” Orlok certainly is one of those things! Ellen’s plea set off his alarm clock, rousing him from “an eternity of darkness,” and so he answers, mildly crabby over the inconvenience.
“You are not for the living,” Orlok booms at Ellen, invisible save for his silhouette, slicing against a set of sheer white curtains as they flap in the wind. “You are not for human kind.”
Kinky!
Moments later, Eggers shows us what kind of party we’ve come to when Ellen winds up outside her family’s sprawling estate. She swears a vow to Orlok to be one with him “ever-eternally,” then, lying in dirt, begins mewling and gasping with pleasure that’s cut short when the Count abruptly materializes over her and clamps one of his grungy claws around her throat; he is hulking and misshapen, gore slicked over his mustache, capped by an exaggerated, uneven hairline that adds to his asymmetry. He roars. Ellen screams. This is not what she thought the man of her dreams would look like.
Orlok is played by Bill Skarsgård, known best for playing Pennywise the Dancing Clown in It: Chapter One and Chapter Two. Like Orlok, Pennywise is a living nightmare. Unlike Orlok, Pennywise can be thwarted by workaday displays of will. He feeds on fear. (Also, children.) If you check your fear, he’ll shrivel into a corn cob. But Orlok feeds on you. He does not care what you think about his appearance, manner, or diet. If it’s your heart he craves, your heart he will have. It’s typical for vampires to go for the throat, but Eggers, inspired by recorded folklore, embraces the atypical: Skarsgård’s Orlok pins people down and slurps blood straight from their chests instead.
The good news for the squeamish is that the effect isn’t as disgusting as you’ll imagine. The bad news is that it’s worse. By far one of the most effective aesthetic stimuli Eggers has conjured in any of his movies; this, in conjunction with the effects and makeup that transform Skarsgård from a man into a shambling, mauled carcass, seemingly sloughing off flesh with every passing moment, is fundamental to Nosferatu‘s potency as a work of horror cinema. In Orlok, Eggers and Skarsgård hit new depths of visceral sensation. The character is appalling by nature, and revolting to behold.
But we can’t turn away. For one, Eggers’ typical audience member knows they’re not in for lighthearted moviegoing; raw stupefaction is a core part of the appeal of The Witch and The Lighthouse, and is backgrounded in The Northman’s brawny mythmaking. If it does not please you that Orlok speaks with a liquid, raspy bass and an alveolar trill, or that he’s a walking rejection of “pretty vampire” clichés, then a refamiliarization with Eggers’ work might be in order. He makes impeccably constructed movies about ugly subjects, where awful fates befall even the most innocent characters. This is as true of The Witch as it is in Nosferatu. But none of Nosferatu’s shocks and chills match the movie’s most terrible revelations: that Orlok can’t be refused, by Ellen, her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), or her friend Anna (Emma Corrin), and moreover, that they like it.
Orlok visits Thomas and Anna both in due time, in distinct, captivatingly frightening sequences. But Skarsgård invokes the contrasting element of submissive desire in these scenes, alongside Hoult and Corrin, who react to him with fear, yes, and with the same pleasure Depp expresses in the introduction. They are exposed. They are helpless. In their weakened states they enjoy these sensations, in stark opposition to the reality of their characters’ circumstances.
Orlok is a standout achievement in 2024 horror simply from a creative perspective: a thing that should not be, loathsome and vile and utterly dreadful in each fiber of the character’s conception. But just as importantly, he is the greatest modern embodiment of vampiric allure, though he does not look the part. Sexual rather than sexy, dominant and undeniable, Nosferatu caps off 2024 by striking terror into viewers. They’ll be expecting that. They might not expect the movie, or Orlok himself, to leave them uncomfortably stirred.