Arts & Culture
Folk Magic and Hermeticism in “Nosferatu”
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With its right hand Eggers’s Nosferatu points at all the sex it can, but its left invokes the imagery and the uncanny nature of folk magic.
The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/author/melison)
With its right hand Eggers’s Nosferatu points at all the sex it can, but its left invokes the imagery and the uncanny nature of folk magic.
There are those who say a witch is born and others who insist a witch is made. This film suggests a third option: that witchcraft can come upon a person as unbidden and inevitable as puberty, and as impossible to understand.
Dickens expressed a general mistrust for organized religion, an admiration for Jesus Christ, and a social commentary that pointed out the corrosive effect of the Catholic church on personal liberty. Does this remind anyone else of every Pagan they’ve ever known?
“Nearly everyone in this film is obsessed with the Rome that was, where the emperor was a scholar instead of a syphilitic club kid in a toga,” writes Meg Elison in her review of Ridley Scott’s new film. “It is much easier to complain about a bad government than to build one that works. See Virgil for more on this. See Hannah Arendt. See Marija Gimbutas. See all of human history. See the news.”
“As a nation, we love to cast our projections on the witches of Salem,” writes Meg Elison as she examines America’s favorite film about witches. “What we want from the real people who died by state violence, the places where they hanged, the hysteria that killed them, is fun. We want Salem to be a theme park, to amuse us and titillate us.”