Nosferatu

I found Nosferatu to be a very intriguing film. While I did not initially really see the connections between the "Monster and the Homosexual" reading and the movie, our discussion on Thursday helped me think more about it. One thing that resonated with me from this reading was how Benshoff quotes Alexander Doty saying "everyone's pleasure in these genres is 'perverse,' is queer" (Benshoff 94). I think this is interesting because Nosferatu in this film is depicted to be incredibly mysterious, strange, and abnormal. He is tall, lanky, bald and has many unhuman qualities like his pointy ears, incredibly long fingers/nails, and sharp pointy teeth. I think that this otherworldly-ness given to Nosferatu helps distance him from the audience, almost as a way of saying "He's not like us." In turn, I feel like this is what allows Nosferatu to act in such an intimate manner with the main character Jonathon (biting his neck). Because Nosferatu is not a human, it makes these displays more acceptable to the audience. As Benshoff states "the narrative elements themselves demand the depiction of alien 'otherness' which is often coded (at the site of production and/or reception) as lesbian, gay, or otherwise queer" (Benshoff 94). Thinking back to Clover's discussion of the horror genre being a place to invite audiences to safely question gender identity or sexuality - Nosferatu, I think, is an example of that.

I think that this also relates to the Production Code because if Nosferatu was more human and less vampire, some scenes in this film would have been thought to be as obscenity or "sex perversion." By creating Nosferatu to be so non-human, it takes away the ""scandalous"" interactions with Jonathon. It is also interesting that the production code mentions how multiple problematic things (adultery and murder), if depicted, should be depicted unattractively. This links back to Benshoff's idea of non-straight characters being turned into a monster to parallel the general thinking of the audience at the time.