Sin, Sickness, and Shadow: How Dracula and Nosferatu Help Us See Evil

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‘Tis the Season

In October, I enjoy revisiting the old monster stories. As a child, I watched many of the classic monster films like Frankenstein, The Wolf Man, and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. With Nosferatu reaching its 100th anniversary in 2022, there were re-releases and new editions of the classic story in the last few years. Discovering that Amazon Prime had lots of classic monster movies available, I recently watched Nosferatu and Dracula in tandem, and it got my mind churning on the nature of Evil, particularly as it is portrayed in the embodied presence of vampires.

Two Faces of the Same Darkness

The first time I watched Nosferatu, I was startled not by what I saw, but by what I felt.

There was no velvet cape, no hypnotic accent, no aristocrat whispering across candlelight. Instead, there was silence, and not merely because it was a silent film. A ship adrift in fog. Rats pouring from its hold. A gaunt figure ascending a staircase, his shadow stretching unnaturally across the wall. There are continual references to the breath of Nosferatu spreading as the deathbird hovers in the growing darkness.

Nosferatu is not the seductive vampire of popular imagination — he is pestilence in a human-like form. And yet, he is somehow Dracula all the same.

Or rather, it is another version of him — a version that had crossed through war and despair, emerging as something less human but more elemental. Watching Nosferatu after Dracula is like looking at the same sin from a different angle. One story shows evil as seduction, the other as contagion. Together, they reveal what theologians and poets have long known: that evil does not simply change through time — it always comes in more than one form.

Evil entices the soul and infects the world. It tempts, and it taints.

The brilliance of these two tellings — Stoker’s Dracula (1897) and Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) — is that they show both facets so clearly. The former, written at the height of Victorian moral confidence, imagines sin as a personal and moral struggle: temptation, rebellion, the corruption of the will. The latter, born from the wreckage of World War I, envisions sin as something deeper and more cosmic: a sickness that seeps through nature and history, beyond anyone’s control.

What happened between these two works was not a change in evil itself but in how humanity perceived it. Between Stoker’s England and Murnau’s Germany lay the trenches of the Great War — a spiritual and cultural collapse so profound that it redefined what people believed about life, death, and even God. The vampire myth, retold across that chasm, became a mirror reflecting both the moral seductions of sin and the systemic infections of a fallen creation.

The Moral Universe of Victorian Faith

Let’s begin with the book. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula in 1897, near the height of Britain’s confidence in its own moral order.  The world seemed intelligible: reason reigned, science advanced, and the British Empire imagined itself a civilizing power under God.  Religion, though increasingly strained by modernity, still served as the scaffolding for ethics and meaning.  To sin was to break faith with an ordered creation; to repent was to return to it.

Within that world, Stoker’s vampire arrives as the ultimate intruder.  Count Dracula is not merely a monster but a perversion of everything sacred.  He drinks blood instead of offering it, parodies communion without grace, and turns intimacy into violation.  His evil is moral and volitional—a conscious rebellion against divine life.  The heroes of the novel—Van Helsing, Harker, and the others—fight him not by magic but by faith, discipline, and courage.  Crosses and moral resolve become their weapons.

The structure of the novel reinforces this moral clarity.  Told through diaries and letters, it is a chorus of self-examination.  Each character documents, confesses, and reasons.  Evil must be named and resisted, not simply endured.  In Stoker’s world, the darkness enters through desire but can be driven out by light.  Sin is still temptation that can be refused; salvation, a matter of steadfast will.

To read Dracula now is to hear the last confident voice of Christendom before the world cracked.  The novel assumes that reason and virtue still hold; that when faced with evil, humanity can choose rightly.  Within a few decades, that assumption would shatter in the trenches of Europe.

The World Unraveled: World War I and the Death of Moral Confidence

Within twenty years of Dracula’s publication, Europe’s moral scaffolding collapsed.  The Great War began in 1914 as a confident march of nations and ended in mud, gas, and silence.  Industrialized warfare devoured a generation.  Empires that had seemed ordained by Providence crumbled; faith in progress and rational order drowned in the trenches at Verdun and the Somme.

At Verdun, France and Germany fought for ten unrelenting months.  The Germans sought to “bleed France white,” choosing a symbolic fortress the French would never abandon.  Seven hundred thousand men died or were wounded for a few miles of pulverized ground.  At the Somme, British troops advanced after a week-long artillery barrage that failed to break the German lines; fifty-seven thousand fell on the first day alone.  For months, machines replaced heroism—guns and shells replacing will and virtue.  The war revealed the mechanization of evil: industrialized death with no visible villain, only systems grinding human beings to dust.

When the guns fell silent, the world that had produced Stoker’s moral universe no longer believed in its own virtue.  The language of sin and redemption felt hollow beside the language of trauma and plague.  The 1918 influenza pandemic swept through the weakened populations, killing more than the war itself.  If evil had once been the domain of moral choice, it now seemed to float in the air—an infection that even the innocent could not escape.

All struggled to name what had happened, though many attempted to.  Some called it the death of optimism; others called it the end of Christendom.  What was clear is that evil no longer appeared as the act of a single willful sinner but as a systemic rot, a sickness within creation itself.  In the devastated cities of Germany, filmmakers turned to shadows and distortion to express what words could not.  Out of that atmosphere came F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu—a film haunted not only by a vampire, but by the sense that the whole world had become his host.

Nosferatu and the Paracelsian Imagination

When Nosferatu premiered in 1922, Germany was still gasping from the war’s devastation. The Weimar Republic staggered under reparations, inflation, and grief. Faith in political, scientific, and even spiritual order had been replaced by anxiety and decay. Out of that disillusionment, F. W. Murnau created a vampire who was no longer human enough to seduce. Count Orlok moves like a plague through the frame—thin, silent, and insect-like. Wherever he goes, disease follows. His arrival on a ship filled with rats is not incidental; it is a theology.

Murnau’s film draws unconsciously on a much older stream of thought: the Paracelsian worldview, named for the sixteenth-century physician-mystic Paracelsus. I’ll confess, I had never heard of this concept until, as I was watching the movie, I noticed the character Professor Bulwer claimed to be Paracelsian. Certain that such an esoteric reference must be important for understanding the movie, I began reading up on it and found my assumption was correct. There were significant connections to this fresh vision of the vampire’s terror.

Paracelsus saw sickness not merely as a physical malfunction but as a symptom of imbalance between human beings and the cosmos. Disease revealed the corruption of the elements themselves—an echo of the fall written into nature. In that sense, Nosferatu is a profoundly Paracelsian story: evil is not an act to be repented of but a contamination to be endured. In Eggers’ 2024 remake of Nosferatu, Count Orlok speaks the line, “I am an appetite, nothing more.” Sin is not what a person does but what has already infected the air they breathe and what seeks to consume them.

Every visual choice reinforces this theology. The angular shadows and distorted architecture of German Expressionism make the world itself look warped, as though creation has become complicit in the vampire’s hunger.  When Orlok rises stiffly from his coffin, he does not transgress moral law; he emerges from it—the inevitable product of a corrupted order.  The sunlight that finally destroys him is not justice served but contagion burned away.  It is purification, not victory.

In Stoker’s England, evil could be rebuked by faith and virtue. In Murnau’s Germany, faith and virtue have already perished, leaving only endurance and sacrifice. The heroine Ellen’s self-offering, which–spoiler alert!–lures Orlok to his death, feels less like triumph than atonement.  She absorbs the sickness into herself, giving her life so that the light might return.  The cross no longer conquers; it merely redeems through suffering.

Nosferatu thus transforms the vampire myth from a moral drama into a cosmic lament.  Evil is no longer rebellion—it is ruin.  And humanity, for all its virtue, can only hope to be a brief candle burning in the fog.

The Bridge: Lugosi and the Rise of Psychological Evil

When Universal Pictures released Dracula in 1931, the world was suspended between wars.  The trenches were silent but not forgotten; the Depression had begun; totalitarian movements were gathering strength.  The movie inherited the shell of Stoker’s story but filled it with the mood of the age—anxious, fascinated by control, unsure of the connection between human beings and free will.

Bela Lugosi’s Count is no plague-spreader like Orlok.  He is cultured, poised, and terrifying precisely because he does not need to chase his victims—he commands them.  Evil here is neither moral temptation nor cosmic infection; it is psychological domination.  With a glance or a word, Dracula dissolves the will of others, turning them into extensions of himself.  The film’s horror lies not in blood but in possession—in the loss of self before a mesmerizing power.

This shift mirrors the spirit of the interwar world.  The 1920s and ’30s were captivated by Freud’s new language of the unconscious and by the rise of mass politics.  Crowds could be hypnotized; propaganda could shape reality; strong men could bend nations to their will.  In that atmosphere, Lugosi’s Dracula became a symbol of something more modern than medieval: the seductive tyrant.  His victims do not sin or sicken—they submit.

Seen through a theological lens, the film marks the midpoint between Stoker’s moral clarity and Murnau’s cosmic despair.  Evil now works through influence, not plague; through persuasion, not infection.  The vampire is no longer an external threat but an invasive psychology.  In this sense, Dracula (1931) prophesies the century that followed—an age in which evil would wear the face of charisma and make its home in the crowd’s surrendering gaze.

From the Trenches to Transylvania: Evil Between the Wars

Between the two world wars, Europe lived in a strange twilight—haunted by what it had endured and terrified of what might come again.  The same generation that had seen the Somme and Verdun also watched Germany’s fragile Weimar Republic crumble under debt, inflation, and despair.  Into that vacuum rose new ideologies promising purity, order, and renewal.  The machinery that had once annihilated soldiers in the trenches would soon be turned upon civilians in the name of national destiny.

In that interwar tension, the vampire myth remained a kind of mirror.  Stoker’s England had imagined evil as moral temptation; Murnau’s Germany had felt it as pestilence.  Now the world began to sense evil as something collective—a contagion of will.  The same spiritual surrender that gave Lugosi’s Dracula his hypnotic power would soon characterize entire nations enthralled by charismatic leaders.  Crowds, like victims in a gothic parlor, yielded their agency to those who promised them greatness.

Seen this way, the journey from Dracula to Nosferatu to Lugosi’s suave count is not merely cinematic but civilizational.  The myth traces how evil moves through history: first seducing individuals, then corrupting systems, and finally possessing societies.  The vampire no longer hides in a coffin; he stands on balconies, speaks into microphones, and feeds on obedience.

What the filmmakers could not have known is that their gothic imagination was prophetic.  Within a decade, Europe would again be consumed by the same darkness they had tried to portray.  The vampire was always both seduction and contagion, and in the 1930s those two forms merged—evil that charms and infects all at once.

What These Vampires Teach Us About Sin

Across three tellings of the same story, the vampire exposes the full anatomy of sin.  In Dracula, evil is moral—a will that chooses corruption and preys upon the weak through temptation.  In Nosferatu, it is cosmic—a sickness in creation itself that spreads through no single person’s fault.  In Lugosi’s Dracula, it becomes psychological—a loss of agency, the surrender of the will to an enthralling power.

Each vision reveals something the others conceal. 

• If we treat evil only as moral choice, we risk ignoring how deeply it infects our systems and bodies. 
• If we treat it only as contagion, we forget human responsibility and the possibility of repentance. 
• If we see it only as domination, we despair of freedom altogether. 

Together, these portraits remind us that sin is never one-dimensional.  It is at once temptation, infection, and captivity—personal and structural, seductive and systemic.

For Christians, this composite view makes sense.  The New Testament describes sin as rebellion (hamartia as “missing the mark”), as bondage (“slaves to sin”), and as decay (“creation groaning in eager longing”). Stoker, Murnau, and Browning simply give those metaphors flesh.  Their vampires show us what happens when love becomes appetite, when vitality turns parasitic, when the image of God is drained of will.

If the vampire myth has endured, it may be because it tells us something about ourselves.  We, too, are capable of both seducing and infecting—tempting others toward our desires while spreading the consequences of our own brokenness.  Redemption, then, must involve both repentance and healing, both confession and cleansing.  We need the moral courage to resist evil’s charm and the grace to be cured of its disease.

The Light Still Rises

At the end of Nosferatu, the count withers as the first light of dawn fills the room.  The film’s closing image is not triumph but cleansing: disease meeting its cure.  Watching it, I think of how Scripture names Jesus not only as Savior but as the Great Physician.  Where evil drains life, He restores it; where corruption spreads, He touches the unclean and makes them whole.  Every story of healing in the Gospels—from the leper to the bleeding woman—is a miniature reversal of Nosferatu’s world: light entering the infection, life returning to what death had claimed.

If sin is both seduction and contagion, then Christ’s redemption must be both deliverance and healing.  He resists the Tempter in the wilderness, breaking evil’s charm, and He bears our sickness on the cross, absorbing the world’s corruption into Himself.  The victory of Easter is not merely moral but medicinal: a creation restored to health.

The vampire myths remind us that evil can be beautiful or filthy, persuasive or pestilent—but always parasitic, living only by what it steals.  The gospel tells a different story.  The true Light does not consume; it gives. It enters the world’s contagion, conquers the grave, and still rises over every shadow.

I Could Keep Going…

Of course, the vampire didn’t stay buried in the 1930s. He kept reinventing himself for every age in need of a moral mirror. Interview with the Vampire, Buffy the Vampire Slayer—and, dare I mention, the Twilight saga?—each reflects its own culture’s longings and fears. How we portray evil always says something about how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. I’ll leave those reflections for another post.

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