My first impression walking out of Nosferatu was that it was a story about how your past trauma and mental instability will destroy your relationships with everyone around you, but after some time and reading some interviews, that’s not an entirely fair reading of the film. While it is about past trauma sabotaging your relationships, it’s primarily about how puritanical society transforms any abnormal desires into a problem to be solved, the resulting shame leading to the trauma in the first place. In other words, this is a story about sexual liberation, about how we must allow everyone full bodily autonomy to save ourselves from a society that continually forces its citizens to repress all their emotions until they inevitably blow up, with all the shrapnel piercing everyone around them.  As many reviewers have already pointed out, this makes the film a clear Jungian one that explores the danger of not confronting the shadow self, parts of a psyche that are repressed and hidden. In one scene in the film, scientist Von Franz, arguably the moral center of Nosferatu, tells the doctor to “untie this poor child” after seeing Ellen (Nosferatu’s vessel/victim) tied to a bed to try and treat sleepwalking and seizures. This scene acts as a microcosm for the whole film – men in Ellen’s life try to control her and she never gets “better”, only by giving her her autonomy can the trauma society has bashed into her disappear. What Nosferatu ultimately conveys then, is that to take away control may be an easy option, but it is never the correct one. The film asks the trite nature vs nurture question (“Does evil come within us, or from beyond?”), and the answer, as always, is that the real evil is society.