To the surprise of absolutely no one, Nosferatu is a pretty dark movie. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s absolutely chilling at times.
Director Robert Eggers is a master at crafting scenes that feel like a nightmare you’d wake from in a cold sweat. As such, the horror movie has plenty of scary scenes.
I jumped out of my seat when the vicious vampire loomed out of the dark to exsanguinate (not a word I get use often) that poor sailor and the less said about Thomas Hutter’s (Nicholas Hoult) encounter with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in the basement of his castle, the better.
Still, of all the scenes that made my blood run cold, the scariest was one that didn’t involve any creatures of the night, or not directly, at least.
Knock knock…
In the middle of the film, while Thomas is trapped in what is explicitly not Dracula’s castle, strange things are happening in the town of Wisborg. Specifically, Thomas’s employer, Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), has gone quite mad and is ominously babbling about his master coming to town.
In fact, Knock’s so deranged the local Doctor, Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson), is forced to lock him away in his asylum for his own safety. And it’s during a visit to Knock’s cell that the creepiest scene in the film transpires. While Dr. Sievers is talking to the insane estate agent, Knock keeps playing with a pigeon that’s somehow found its way into the asylum.
As Knock warns the doctor of his master’s imminent arrival, he takes the poor pigeon and, with savage glee, bites its head off. It’s a genuinely horrifying moment, not because it makes you jump or cry out in terror but because of how sudden and grisly it is. Of course, this is an Eggers movie, so there is more to this scene than just visceral thrills.
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You see, while more modern interpretations of vampirism have made the affliction seem like an easy way to become super sexy (thanks, Twilight), that wasn’t always the case. In the past, vampires were associated with disease and corruption. That’s something Eggers is clearly aware of as, during the film, he links Count Orlok’s arrival in Wisborg to the outbreak of a new plague.
Vampire’s bite
Knock then represents the way disease can rob us of our humanity. Reducing us to little more than savage beasts, our mask of civility is robbed from us by the reminder that, at the end of the day, we are as vulnerable to sickness and plague as any other animal.
That’s what makes Knock devouring the pigeon so scary; it’s a reminder that your humanity is a veil that can be ripped away at any moment, and vampires might not exist in the real world, but disease does.
Or maybe it’s just a gross scene in a horror movie. I don’t know, but what I do know is how Eggers brought that horrible scene to life, and if you’ve just eaten… maybe don’t read anymore. It’s going to get a little gross.
“It was filmed with a real pigeon to begin with,” Eggers told our own Vampiric scholar, Jasmine Valentine. “Obviously, there’s a quick swap out with a pigeon that can be edible and has a little bit of special effects cleanup. But when Simon [McBurney] first does a gentle gnaw on the bird, that’s the real bird, which was brave of him. We were not expecting he was going to do that, but it’s cool because it sets up the tension because you kind of know what’s coming.”
Thank the dark lord Simon didn’t mix the prop and the bird up during filming! If you love things that go bump in the night check out our list of the most violent horror movies ever made or our guide to the scariest horror movie villains.
