Nosferatu, the Angel in the Dark - Desire, Repression and Pluto in the 12th House

A meditative review of the acclaimed 2024 horror film Nosferatu

By Alejo López

© Alejo López - published by The Astrological Journal, 2025 / The Astrological Association of Great Britain / 03.06.2025

(Please, bear in mind that this article includes spoilers)

Hell is empty, all the devils are here.
- Ariel (quoting Ferdinand) in Shakespeare's "The Tempest", Act 1, Scene 2.

Nosferatu by Robert Eggers is a remake of an old classic, the 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror movie by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau (inspired by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula). This updated version stands out for its stunning aesthetic, which takes us back to the 1800s and a psyche infected by darkness and horror. The photography and the magnificent soundtrack carry us on a journey where reality and fantasy merge and the states of dreaming and wakefulness cannot be distinguished.

With its dark colour palettes, its ghouls and gothic, romantic atmosphere, every symbol in this film points to Pluto. Count Orlok is dead but alive; he feeds from the living, and he kills others to prolong his life. He represents an invisible, devouring force. Ellen Hutter (played by Lily-Rose Depp) is having obsessive nightmares. And everyone is fixated on denying the true cause of evil. Obsessions are also typical of Pluto. As we will see later, I think denial as well. Ellen’s vow of being Nosferatu’s for eternity also has a reminiscence of plutonic, passionate love that demands the whole life of their bearers. And her dream about marrying Death is another manifestation of the plutonian character. The presence of mystical, esoteric, mysterious and hidden powers is also palpable. There is evil in this movie…and cruelty.

But as we shall see, in the darkness, there may also be salvation.

For those who have not seen the movie yet, it starts with Ellen calling out for an angel to accompany her in her loneliness. She is unaware that the spirit who answers her prayer is a dark, deathly entity that sustains itself on the living. Awakened by her, he makes her pledge to him eternally. Time passes, and Ellen grows and marries Thomas Hutter. It is all going well until he is sent to visit Count Orlok in a faraway land to seal a contract to buy a decaying property in Thomas and Ellen’s town: Wisborg.

Meantime, Ellen starts to experience nightmares. In the first one, she marries Death. The story continues (and I will not spoil it for you here), but you can guess that Count Orlok (or Nosferatu) – the dark angel that answered her calling – will want to reach Ellen as she had promised to be eternally his. But he cannot take her forcefully: she must voluntarily give up her love for Thomas. As she postpones her decision, a wave of decay sweeps through the town while the love triangle intensifies.

The dream in which Ellen sees herself marrying Death is not just a premonition of the movie’s ending but also works as an echo of Persephone’s myth in which Hades takes and marries her. I imagine that Persephone also felt lonely under her mother’s protection and longed for a companion. She asked for an angel to take her to a place in which she could have power of her own. But Ellen’s loneliness is different. I wonder whether it may be mirroring a feeling that people with a strong Pluto in their charts might often experience. That incredible, destructive power, humming like soft, low music in the back of consciousness, must be hard to deal with. And I’m particularly thinking of Pluto in the 12th and the elusive collective memory of the dead. The mysterious ability to engage with invisible forces and to naturally grasp and know secrets might be a difficult burden. For Ellen, it was. She sees the future, yet she is judged as too sensitive and a slave to the same anxiety she experienced when younger.

As the movie progresses, we learn more about Ellen’s loneliness and backstory. Her mother had recently died, and her father did not understand her and was not supportive of her gifts. She had psychic powers that others did not recognise or accept. Not only could she see what the wrapped Christmas presents contained before they were opened, but she awakened Nosferatu from his slumber. And she engaged with him. As an adult, she buried these memories, these sexual encounters with a creature of the dark. We can only imagine the treatment she might have been exposed to (we only get some glimpse of them), to control her hysterical anxiety attacks.

Does evil come from within…?

she asks in guilty agony.

The movie is set in a time in which science and superstition are at odds. Her powers are denied by the masculine voice of reason. The amazing actor William Dafoe plays the only character who seems to understand that there is some truth in her inner visions. As the ambiguous Prof. Albin Eberhart von Franz, he portrays the possibility of creating a bridge that unites the two worlds. He confesses not to understand the logic behind it, but he respects Ellen’s powers.

In heathen times you might have been a priestess of Isis

he says admiringly to her.

Pluto in the 12th house may feel like an invisible power that threatens to take all life away and bring to earth the bizarre, grotesque bodies of the world of the unseen. Images that both represent this Pluto placement, and the movie, are the unnatural perversion of extending a life that has reached its natural conclusion and the terrifying backlash that this causes, together with the sense of impotency before such a power and the huge magnetism that this mysterious force creates. How not to be ashamed or repulsed by having such thoughts when feeling unable to stop them from growing further? Pluto in the 12th may have a life of its own.

The gifts and burdens of the 12th house might seem like they do not come from within. Acknowledging and owning them forms a constituency of our identity. But this requires facing our shadow, that neglected part of ourselves, often perceived as evil. In the movie, its hideous nature is made manifest by the repulsive yet extremely familiar body of Nosferatu, who could be seen as a symbolic manifestation of the shadow. Pluto, ruler of the underworld and all that is hidden, as well.

Pluto in the 12th people can often feel that there is a powerful side to them that needs to be shut down by reason. To open the gates of this house might feel like opening the gates of Hades: and all demons may be left wandering lost in the world. A good defence might be to apply reason. But what is repressed suffocates. And as the movie shows us, repressing power can rotten the soul and all around us. Death is seen as unstoppable, and the transformative power of Pluto as well. But, if Pluto is allowed to express itself, it may manifest as redemption and not as death.

The 12th house is the house of self-undoing. It is a place in which planets often feel unseen or ignored. Tradition claims that it is an evil house that weakens planetary force. But psychological astrology adds the idea that a planet in the 12th house has the memory of all its manifestations. The 12th connects us to the collective unconscious and, in doing so, with all expressions of a planet there. Can you imagine? Being able to remember all the possible ways in which power, control, destruction, and death have been experienced by the whole of humanity? These flashbacks are the soil on which the more personal memory gets built for a person with Pluto in the 12th. And this can be terribly scary or, in some cases, dangerously empowering.

Contrary to Ellen’s case, the myth of Persephone tells us that she was allowed to accept a heavy burden and became Queen of the Underworld. Conversely, Ellen, in this time of reason, logic and science, does not have such a chance. Repression seems to be a satisfactory solution. In the movie, we see her being tied, contained, and locked in a corset to restrain her so-called hysterical episodes. But they are simply the expression of her power, or, better said, these symptoms are the sick manifestation of the repression of her powers. Ashamed of her own sexuality and her attraction to darkness, the full question she poses to her doctor is:

Does Evil come from within us, or from beyond?

What was first? Her calling of a dark angel? Or a dark angel willing to respond to such a summoning? Did she engender this evil? Did she only unleash a vicious force that was already out there? Or is she a victim of this sinister angel?

As the doctor demands that she be free to experience whatever she wants, she starts to accept and admit her attraction to Nosferatu, a naïve love, of a lonely girl who is afraid of being alone, having to manage such a tremendous psychic ability. But it is also a lascivious draw to something darker, mysterious, evil, and deadly.

Contrary to the Nosferatu in the 1922 movie, depicted with a crumbling, decaying body, in the 2024 movie he is extremely strong and masculine. Robert Eggers leaves the moustache on Bill Skarsgårdas (the actor who plays Nosferatu) as a sign of his virility and of his sexual, dominating power. And Ellen eventually comes to admit that she loved that angel when she felt alone. She loves him still. Out of guilt, she had tried with all her strength to lock this experience behind her, to repress who she was. She had fallen in love with sweet, gentle Thomas, who offered the opposite kind of masculinity: tender, caring, and respectful. But Ellen loved both: the magnetism of the darkness (though it produced guilt) and the soft aegis of Thomas’ illuminating love (though it required repressing aspects of herself).

The fantasies of unleashing the destructive power of Pluto in the 12th can be strong. How or why to allow this dark energy to emerge? Pluto in the 12th people may feel forced to repress not just sexuality but also their mysticism and a certain kind of spirituality – considered to be too intense, deepening, sick, obscure, or dangerous. In the movie, it is a woman’s body that must be repressed. No one seems to know how to stop Ellen’s episodes of hysteria, so they try to sedate and bind her. If this were a dream, and one of my patients told me of this, I would wonder how the anima of this person might be feeling. For Jung, the anima is about feelings, emotions, and sensitivity and often associated with female figures in a dream. Jung’s own mother was described as a priestess by him, and it is known that she became a medium. But in a society ruled by reason and science, men repress the anima. Emotions and intuition are ambiguous; their methods are uncertain. So, logic and reason (the so-called animus) take charge. Repression is the only form of control.

Pluto in the 12th people can feel that there is a wild nature inside them, hiding, waiting to be unleashed. And this nature could be both demonic and celestial. Pluto in the 12th might mean that the person is immersed in collective fears of destruction. In the movie, this finds a physical manifestation – as a dangerous scourge unleashed in Wisborg town. The more Ellen is repressed or tries to repress her plutonic calling, the more that death manifests outside of her.

In my own practice, a client with this placement once confessed to me that he often feared that if he let the evil out, he could become a monster. He could not avoid it but repressed this fear. And then he remembered that, as a kid, he had felt responsible for some deaths of family members and pets, because at some point he had wished them dead. Pluto in the 12th people might feel that there is an angel of death hovering around them, but they may be unaware that this spirit is seen as deadly because its true nature is denied.

It is about transformation, going deeper, power, control, and mysticism. Its power is so vast, its invisible presence so palpable, that it takes the scary shape of death. But, if it is welcomed instead of being denied, it could be life-giving. I imagine Pluto in the 12th people doing Reiki or having healing sessions, seeing spirits; or, as therapists, navigating the dark waters of the unconscious with an inner compass that does not get scared easily. But these tasks are not taken lightly, of course. They demand a huge level of commitment.

SPOILER AHEAD. In the movie, Ellen finds no other solution than to stop repressing herself and surrender to Nosferatu. She embraces death. In doing so, she also embraces her darkest desires. And she saves the world. But the truth is that, through death, she also saves herself and escapes from the struggle. And even more so, she saves Count Orlok.

Every addict knows that their addiction will only cede to death. Nosferatu is addicted to Ellen, and he lives a soulless life. Ellen is his saviour, his redemption. She chooses to embrace her desire even if it means self-sacrifice. After all, Nosferatu may seem all-powerful, but he is subjected to this young lady’s choice. By embracing her dark desires, she gives him redemption from his obsession. Light comes back to the world as the sun, a symbol of rebirth and purification, rises while Ellen and Orlok make love. Both of their suffering ends; order is restored to the world. Because she has repressed herself so much, the only way to counterbalance that is now to fully deliver herself to the mysterious world of the night.

As daylight comes, she and her night lover fade away. Egger’s Nosferatu presents us with a case study of repression and its ultimate consequences. To me, the question lingers: Is the shadow a beast that grows stronger in the dark, or a part of ourselves longing for the light?

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Author: Alejo López

Alejo López is a licensed psychologist with a BA in Performing Arts. He holds the Diploma from the Faculty of Astrological Studies, where he currently serves as a tutor. He has an MA in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology from the Sophia Centre at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, where his dissertation on gender and astrology was awarded the Alumni Association Dissertation Prize for 2023/2024. Alejo is training to be a certified Jungian Analyst by the International Association for Analytical Psychology. He enjoys working as a consultant astrologer, a psychologist and a tutor of astrology. He is also an AA board trustee.
www.liminalcosmos.com, Instagram: @liminalcosmos