Nosferatu: A Caste Analysis Recently a second (or by some counts third or fourth!) remake of the 1922 horror classic Nosferatu has been released. The film is directed by Robert Eggers, who previously directed the excellent The Northman, a film rich in metaphysical symbolism. I would like to treat the occasion of this film’s release as an opportunity to offer what I will call a ‘caste analysis’ of its original source material. Marxists often provide class analyses of art, and we might benefit from adopting, mutatis mutandis, this practice. Nosferatu is an adaptation of the famous novel Dracula by Bram Stoker. The novel was a product of Victorian Britain and is symptomatic of those times in that it represents the perspective of the Vaishyas in rebellion against the Kshatrias. The villain of the book, the vampire Dracula constitutes a demonized vision of a Traditional Kshatria, who is to be combatted and eventually vanquished by the novel’s cast of modern, (mainly) bourgeoise protagonists. Dracula is an aristocrat, Count Dracula (modelled on an historical 15 th Century prince, Vlad Dracula of Wallachia). Everything about the Count signifies his premodern origins. His supernatural nature betokens a time when reality was not quite so solidified as it is now. He is of Transylvanian origin (Eastern Europe being, in the late 19 th Century, still largely Traditional). He inhabits a derelict Gothic castle, whose medieval architecture speaks to his identification with Tradition and its dilapidation symbolizes the status of Tradition as relegated to the past. The peasants and Romani on whom Dracula feeds, and who in turn live in terrified subservience to him, are an hyperbolized image of the lord-serf relationship as it exists in the modern, bourgeoise imaginary. Gothic architecture is the symbol of Western Tradition. The lower orders looking up in fear at the Gothic castle inhabited by a powerful aristocrat is a deeply Traditional image. But in Dracula its connotations are inverted. Traditionally, this fear is a fear of righteous punishment, in Stoker’s hands it becomes a fear of something evil and deviant. Dracula’s opponents are not only mostly bourgeois, but from the vanguard societies of modernity; the Dutch Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the American Quincey Morris, and the English psychiatrist John Seward, solicitor Jonathan Harker, and schoolteacher Mina Murray. Only Sir Arthur Holmwood and his fiancé Lucy Westenra are aristocrats. It is a commonplace to observe that Dracula’s predation is sub textually sexual. He enchants young women, entering their bedrooms at night, bites their necks and transfers an infection to them by an exchange of bodily fluids. Added to this is the matter of his plurality of “brides”. He lives with three female vampires described in the novel as “coquettish” and usually depicted as buxom in film adaptations (although they do not feature in the Nosferatu films). This speaks to the moralism of the early moderns, which was nowhere stronger than in the bourgeoisie. The Victorian preoccupation with ostensibly Christian morality reflects the decline of Christianity in this period. Religion is a disclosure of primarily metaphysical truth, and only secondarily moral truth, morality being posterior to metaphysical verity. The moralism of the Victorian era, contrary to what one’s first impressions may be, is indicative not of the strength but of the weakness of Christianity at