The script of Nosferatu is a mesmerizing tapestry of gothic horror, poetic dread, and existential terror, making it a compelling and unforgettable adaptation. Robert Eggers’ dialogue pulses with an eerie, otherworldly cadence, blending archaic language with haunting philosophical inquiries into love, death, and the nature of evil. Every exchange drips with foreboding, painting a world where reality bends under supernatural forces, and fate is inescapable. The script masterfully explores obsession, sacrifice, and the corrupting power of darkness, while its rich, atmospheric dialogue deepens the psychological torment of its characters. Nosferatu is not just a horror story—it is an operatic descent into doom, where love and monstrosity intertwine, and the night is ruled by an undying hunger.
Quotes from the movie Nosferatu by Robert Eggers (2024) with Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, and Bill Skarsgård.
Come to me.
Hear my call.
Come to me.
Your delay is providential, my boy.
A new husband requires new wages.
Allow me to extend my congratulations to your wife.
A… a nonpareil.
Almost a sylph.
He wishes to acquire ahome here in our Wisburg. To retire here.
He has one foot in the grave, so to speak.
– I have already selected. Grunewald Manor.
– Forgive me, sir, but is it not a ruin?
– He requested an old home, and he will pay most generously.
He lives in a small country, east of Bohemia, isolated in the Carpaleon Alps.
He insists we offer him an agent in the flesh, and he will reward you handsomely, my boy, handsomely.
– And what was the Count’s name?
– Orlok.
Why have you killed these beautiful flowers?
It was our wedding. Yet not in chapel walls.
Above was an impenetrable thundercloud outstretched beyond the hills.
The scent of the lilacs was strong in the rain, and… when I reached the altar you weren’t there.
Standing before me, all in black, was… Death.
But I was so happy. So very happy.
We exchanged vows, we embraced, and when we turned around, everyone was dead.
Father and… everyone. The stench of their bodies was horrible.
But I’d never been so happy as that moment as I held hands with Death.
Never speak these things aloud.
It is a trifle, a foolish dream, just as your past fancies.
– Lord.
– Pardon me, sir?
– Your lord. I will be addressed as the honor of my blood demands it.
– Yes, my lord. Forgive me, my lord.
I am most impatient to bring my eyes on your covenant papers.
And my correspondence with your proprietor, Herr Knock. I have long awaited them.
– I have, my lord… uh, I have questions about the, um, unfamiliar customs of the peasantry and the errant wanderers.
Last night, I saw… or, rather, I believe I saw a band of gypsies.
They ventured to a small birch grove and…
– I fear we yet keep close many superstitions here that may seem backward to a young man of your high learning.
– These gypsies, they exhumed a corpse.
– It is their filthy ritual.
– What manner of ritual…
– Speak not of it again!
How I look forward to retiring to your city of a modern mind who knows nothing of nor believes any such morbid fairy tales.
I might ease your wound. Come by the fire. Your face shows you unwell.
Do you ever feel at times as if you were not… as if you were not a person?
What I wish to say is that you are not truly present nor alive, as if you were at the whim of another, like a doll, and someone or something had the power to breathe life into you, to move you.
And your signature as solicitor.
The language of my forefathers.
A maiden’s token, I see. Your bride?
I pray… you will indulge my pardon. I durst not neglect your commission. Herr Hutter.
Now are we neighbors.
It is a black omen to journey in poor health.
I am disposed to recommend that she sleep in her corset. It encourages correct posture, calms the womb and revives circulation.
And, uh, if her stirring escalates, you can always tie her to the bed.
– Friedrich, in public?
– I cannot resist you, my love.
– Can you tell me your name, Herr…?
– I am no one. I am his servant.
– His lordship?
– He is infinity. Eyes shining like a jeweled diadem.
And then putrescence.
Asphyxience.
And devourence.
And he shall cast upon you curses, confusion, afflictions, rebukes, for you have forsaken me, and he shall reign over all of your empty corpses.
Devourence.
Devourence!
And, Friedrich, he… well, the wretched fellow, while inflamed with some sort of religious mania, he shares a similar motto to Frau Hutter: “He is coming.”
– You see, he… von Franz is the most learned in the field, his mind staggering.
– I’ll spare no expense.
– No, you misunderstand me, Friedrich. It has fallen hard on me to recommend him. He was tossed out of the university, laughed out of his home country.
-What?
-Grieves me to say it, but… he became obsessed with the work of Paracelsus, Agrippa and the like.
– I am a shipman, Sievers.
– Alchemy. Mystic philosophy. The occult.
I miscalculated the stars. Hermes will not render my black sulfur gold this evening.
Nolite dare sanctum canibus.
Neque mittatis margaritas vestra ante porcos.
A young woman exhibiting protracted fits of somnambulism.
I always knew the contents of my Christmas gifts.
I knew when that my mother would pass.
Father, he would find me in our fields within the forest as if I was his little changeling girl.
But as I became older, it worsened.
I frightened him.
My touch.
I was so very alone, you see, and I wished for comfort.
Then a presence and the nightmares, the epilepsies, I…
At last, Papa found me once laying.
Unclothed, I was. My body, my… my flesh, I…
“Sin.” “Sin,” he said.
He would have sent me to that place. I… I shan’t go.
Does evil come from within us or from beyond?
Forgive the grotesque tediousness of this demonstration.
The needle.
However, I must impress upon you that this child is not with us.
She communes now with another realm.
– Enduring night. A specter of death. He… he spreads his shadow, and he… he… he is coming.
– Who? Who is coming to you, my child? Who, damn you? Speak!
I command you, hearken to my voice. By the protection of Chamuel, Haniel and Zadkiel, impart your speech unto me.
In the name of Eligos, Orabas and Asmoday, impart your speech unto me.
I shall persist to join you every night– first in sleep, then in your arms.
Everything will be mixed with abomination, and you’ll be knee-deep in blood.
Everyone will cry.
There will be none to bury the dead.
– This dear young creature is possessed of some spirit. Perhaps a demon.
– I beg your pardon. I assure you, Harding, the professor means this as hyperbole.
-No, I mean a demon.
Demonic spirits more easily obsess those whose lower animal functions dominate.
I do not wish to dispute you, Professor, but I myself have witnessed women of nervous constitutions invent all manner of delusion.
– Sit with her. Observe her. Report her behavior.
Sievers, no more ether.
– But she will rave all the night.
– Then rave she must.
The blood is the life!
Your entreaties grow insolent.
You shall crave of me nothing.
Daybreak draws near.
Anon, the bells of dawn shall toll in despair of my coming.
And I shall taste of you.
He exhibits all the signs of a blood plague. Sepsis, ophthalmic discharge. Even flagrant rodent bites here and here.
I fear this ship has brought the plague to Wisburg.
And what is confounding is his body is entirely absent of blood.
Look at this curious mark here.
I’ve seen some leviathan-like pests in our canals, but tell me, Professor, what rat has jaws of such size?
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
It is no mere ghost, for it can manifest physically and with the most foul intent.
Like every plague, its soul desire is to consume all life on Earth.
This creature is a force more powerful than evil.
It is Death itself.
I have seen things in this world that would’ve made Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb.
We have not become so much enlightened as we have been blinded by the gaseous light of science.
I have wrestled with the devil as Jacob wrestled the angel in Peniel.
And I tell you, if we are to tame darkness, we must first face that it exists.
Meine Herren, we are here encountering the undead plague carrier, the Vampyr Nosferatu.
– Love is inferior to you. I told you, you are not of humankind. You are a villain to speak so.
– I am an appetite. Nothing more.
– O’er centuries, a loathsome beast I lay within the darkest pit. Till you did wake me, enchantress, and stirred me from my grave. You are my affliction.
– I care nothing of your afflictions.
– Yet even now we are fated. Your husband has signed his name
and covenanted you to my person for but a sack of gold.
– You cannot love.
– I cannot. Yet I cannot be sated without you.
Tonight you denied yourself, and thereby, you suffer me to vanish up the lives of those you love.
Upon the third night, you will submit, or he you call your husband shall perish by my hand.
Till you bid me come shall you watch the world become as naught.
Ellen, tell me, what is this insufferable darkness?
Then I stood on the sand by the sea.
And I saw a beast rising out of the sea.
And the serpent gave the beast authority to speak of great names in blasphemy.
And the beast had the form of a leopard, the feet of a bear, the mouth of a lion!
A beast with seven heads and ten horns!
On each horn a crown, on each head a blasphemous name…
All your fine lectures are mere regurgitations from bloody books!
The means of repelling and destroying vary greatly from region to region. Their efficacy is plainly unknown.
Yet there is one invariable fact that interests me most.
In every account, the Nosferatu must return to the earth wherein it was buried by first crow of cock.
It must sleep in its grave by day.
The night demon has supped of your good wife’s blood and shall return for the rest.
He is my shame. He is my melancholy.
He took me as his lover then, and now he has come back.
He has discovered our marriage and has come back.
He stalks me in my dreams.
All my sleeping thoughts are of him every night.
Have you repaid him with this plague that infects his wife?
You could never please me as he could.
Kiss my heart. My heart.
Let him see. Let him see our love.
He will murder you if I do not go to him.
We will be torn apart, and the world will be despair.
“And lo, the maiden fair did offer up her love unto the beast and with him lay in close embrace until the first cock crow.
Her willing sacrifice thus broke the curse and freed them from the plague of Nosferatu.”
I can weep no longer, for I have no more tears to shed.
The grim reaper wields his heavy scythe with every change of wind.
Friedrich, these nightmares do exist! They exist.
We shall sanctify the earth wherein he is buried and destroy the sarcophagus. Then he can have no sanctuary at cock crow.
– And when we uncover the body?
– I will drive a spike of cold iron through him.
I am but an able tourist in this occult world. You were born to it.
His pull to me is so powerful, so terrible, yet my spirit cannot be evil as his.
We must know evil to be able to destroy it. We must discover it within ourselves. And when we have, we must crucify the evil within us, or there is no salvation.
Ellen, let us make haste. In heathen times, you might have been a great priestess of Isis.
Yet, in this strange and modern world, your purpose is of greater worth.
You are our salvation.
Let this, your tender embrace, keep me now in bliss, away from everlasting sleep.
“In the Name of Jehovah, and by the power and dignity of these three Names, Tetragrammaton, Anexhexeton, Primematum, cast thee, O thou disobedient Spirit Nosferatu, into the Lake of Fire, there to remain until the Day of Doom and not to be remembered before the face of God who shall come to judge the quick and the dead and the world with fire.”
I should have been the Prince of Rats, immortal.
Die, you accursed mis-birth of hell!
In vain! In vain! You run in vain!
You cannot outrun her destiny!
Her dark bond with the beast shall redeem us all, for when the sun’s pure light shall break upon the dawn, redemption!
The plague shall be lifted!
Redemption!
“And lo, the maiden fair did offer up her love unto the beast and with him lay in close embrace until the first cock crow.
Her willing sacrifice thus broke the curse and freed them from the plague of Nosferatu.”
