Nosferatu & Substance Dependent Cinema

INFINITE REGRESS is a series of cultural criticism that unfolds over time

Jan 06, 2025

SOMEHOW WE MANAGED to find two seats in the middle of a larger group who had, among other things, brought a handle of vodka in a purse to the Christmas screening of Nosferatu (2024). Their hot, intoxicated breath carried over our noses, bragging about how high they were from their THC gummies. Someone was already regretting taking a microdose of shrooms as the mercurial bloom of Robert Eggers’ cinematic experience touched their ocular curve and pushed further deep into their gray matter. I was expecting a party, but they were fairly tame; bored, if anything, maybe even asleep. At the end of the film, all I heard was “That was a fucking trip,” and “Lily-Rose Depp ate.”

At this point in time, it is more common than not to experience cinema stoned, drunk, or somewhere in between. Films like Eggers’ Nosferatu respond to this trend, its content and style catered to an audiences’ inebriated perception. Developed from this state, Eggers’ cinema and other films, many of which have been produced by the production company A24, have established a new logic of entertainment, one that ultimately reflects a cultural moment defined by detachment and sensory consumption.

This creates a kind of cinema-as-event, where the primary goal is immersion, not interpretation.

As audiences seek sensory immersion over narrative complexity, filmmakers respond by crafting films that cater to altered states of perception. At the same time, these films reinforce audience expectations, creating a cycle wherein boundaries between sobriety and intoxication blur. In traditional cinema, filmmakers aimed to provoke intellectual engagement or emotional catharsis, encouraging audiences to reflect on themes and narratives beyond the theater. In new films, the act of consumption itself is centered, shifting from what a film means to how it feels—how it envelops the viewer in its sound and imagery. This creates a kind of cinema-as-event, where the primary goal is immersion, not interpretation.

I might call this new form of cinema Substance Dependent Cinema (SDC): films that do not require viewers to be intoxicated but are crafted to mimic, enhance, or complement the experience of altered states. Through hypnotic pacing, immersive soundscapes, and disorienting visuals, SDC reshapes how audiences engage with cinema, prioritizing feeling over meaning, and confined experience over historical engagement.

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Growing up, I was obsessed with horror movies. In high school, I’d casually drop titles like Cannibal Holocaust (1985), A Serbian Film (2010), and Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009) into conversations—a deliberate provocation akin to pricking my finger as a child to scare off others with the flourish of blood. Morbidity can be a coping mechanism. In the cavern beneath my lofted bed, handmade by my father, I consumed these films voraciously. Despite their gruesome content, they shuddered me out of my troubled existence into a place that, paradoxically, felt safe.

My affinity for horror films was later bolstered by my use of marijuana. Stoned, the carnality of gore reverberated through my body in a way that felt profoundly existential. Violence on screen—blood seeping and coagulating—was no longer repulsive, but resonant, an evocation of my own corporeality. Violence became almost sensual: an aphrodisiac. Contained on screen, violence has the potential to feel like liberation, a portal to somewhere else entirely.

Falling asleep as a child, I always imagined the nothingness of death because I liked the sensation of vague, vertiginous panic. There was something lulling about this; attempting to fathom the infinity of non-existence was kind of like counting sheep. Cinematic violence captivates one similarly. More than satiating one’s morbid curiosity, it is a way of confronting the void.

In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger describes shuddering as a sensation of experiencing the void, the groundlessness of being. The original German Erschrecken means most literally “to be so shocked or surprised by something that you find is difficult to believe or accept.” Death is the primary truth that shocks us: gory images or performances like the Japanese Butoh are analogs of its omnipresence and can shudder us into knowing.

Heidegger elaborates: “The shudder is not mere trembling, but rather the shock of the abyss of the world.” Unlike Kierkegaard’s trembling, associated with the confrontation of the absurd and the individual’s struggle with faith, freedom, and ethical responsibility, shuddering pertains specifically to nothingness and the contingency of existence.

Shuddering is a kind of revelation, where the concealed structures underpinning our existence such as identity, family, and society, are momentarily exposed. Horror films face us with the ruthless, inevitable abjection of our lives. When you’re high at the point of this confrontation, you can feel death most vividly. Nothing is solved by this interaction, merely revealed. Much cinema that induces shuddering is often poorly scripted, plotless, or at least brutally clichéd. Interestingly, by tripping away the comfort of narrative resolution or visual familiarly, audiences are left in a tête-à-tête with their own fundamental vulnerability.

While the medium has the potential to enhance empathy, the reliance on cinema for shared experiences and narratives can simultaneously reduce the autonomy of individual memory and imagination.

Content has become secondary to medium, and medium itself has shifted—it is less about how a story is told and more about how it saturates the audience’s sensorium with the film’s essence. Made porous by substances, audiences are already tuned to this calibration.

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At its core, Substance Dependent Cinema has reimagined how we engage with screens. For French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, cinema is not just a representational medium but an affective and sensory experience that engages the viewer’s emotions and perceptions.

Sound, image, and editing are all a type of technics that help extend the human mind, allowing viewers to experience time, places, and emotions beyond their immediate reality. Stiegler is critical of this industrialization of cinema, for while the medium has the potential to enhance empathy, the reliance on cinema for shared experiences and narratives can simultaneously reduce the autonomy of individual memory and imagination.

Those who have used substances might recall the claustrophobia of experience, in which objects and sensations feel so saturated with meaning that they overwhelm: Panic ensues. SDC uniquely dissolves this semantic claustrophobia, making it particularly suited for inebriated viewing. Films like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) counteract this overwhelm through their openness, offering the sensory world room to breathe. This expansiveness is embodied in Dune’s vast desert, while Hans Zimmer’s score deepens the immersion, pulling the audience into a realm unburdened by rigid interpretations.

Unlike films by, for instance, Bergman or Pasolini, who lock audiences into tightly controlled symbolic frameworks, Dune embraces ambiguity. Through silence, vastness, and scale, it attempts at evoking a sense of awe rather than focus. This openness alleviates the pressure to extract meaning, instead allowing viewers to drift within its narrative current—leaving the theater with no clearer memory of its contents than of a deep dream. For me, one IPA in, I fell asleep.

Blurring the boundaries between sober and altered states, SDC is a kind of prosthetic that heightens engagement—or, at the very least, serves as a lullaby. In this way, our capacity to experience is extended: “The image, the recording, and its temporal structure are not only memories, but prostheses for thought,” writes Stiegler. Yet Stiegler warns of mass media, including cinema, which often “short-circuits” attention. By conditioning audiences to consume rapidly, cinema risks replacing deep reflection with fleeting absorption. Viewers may drift in the coruscating currents of sensation rather than plunging into its depths.

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Sound design is essential to Substance Dependent Cinema and forges a connection to a lineage of other substance dependent media, particularly music. From Dune to The Green Knight (2021), soundscapes create an immersive grip that aligns cinema with the history of rave culture and the improvisational ethos of the Grateful Dead. In these traditions, sound is not merely heard; it is felt, absorbed, and inhabited.

These musical experiences cultivate an altered state where sound transcends its functional role, immersing the listener in a liminal space where time and self blur into uncertainty.

Take techno and MDMA as an example: The genre’s repetitive beats, paired with the drug’s ability to heighten sensation, dissolve the boundaries between self and other and transform music from a passive auditory experience into a visceral, all-encompassing phenomenon. Similarly, the combination of ketamine and drum & bass fragments time and perception in a kaleidoscope of disjointed sensations and reassembled realities. These musical experiences cultivate an altered state where sound transcends its functional role, immersing the listener in a liminal space where time and self blur into uncertainty.

The Grateful Dead’s live performances were a precursor to this form. Their long, improvisational jams, designed for audiences often under the influence of LSD, prioritized atmosphere over structure. Sonic journeys dissolved traditional boundaries between performer and listener, fostering a communal experience of shared rhythm and collective emotion. The music became not a series of songs but an expansive, evolving universe, enveloping audiences in an environment that mirrored the altered states of consciousness facilitated by psychedelics.

What’s particularly fascinating about SDC is how it positions cinema as the inheritor of these sonic traditions while evolving them further. Unlike music, which relies on sound as its sole medium, cinema can integrate a broader arsenal of technics—visuals, editing, and narrative—to construct immersive environments. In SDC, sound design often becomes the anchor that binds these elements together, constructing a sensorial framework where the film unfolds less as a linear narrative and more as an experiential landscape.

This multimodal approach enables cinema to shape experiences with unparalleled complexity, positioning it as uniquely capable of creating Stiegler’s “open spaces:” spaces that are not confined to a single sense but instead invite the audience to inhabit an experience fully, engaging on sensory, emotional, and intellectual levels.

In Robert Eggers’ films, the “open space” manifests as shadowy and liminal; time stretches, sound engulfs, and meaning becomes optional. Yet, this is where the comparison to communal experiences like raves or Grateful Dead concerts becomes fraught, and Stiegler’s critique of technics gains relevance. While those communal spaces thrive on mutual ecstasy and consciousness, SDC, as exemplified by Eggers, often becomes a solitary immersion. Watching his Nosferatu is isolating; its heavy style was ensnaring rather than seductive, entrapping instead of communal.

Twice remade, Nosferatu and its archetypal figures—Count Orlok and Ellen Hutter—have long been etched into the cultural imagination. Their mythologized status makes them an ideal match for Eggers, whose films frequently strip characters of psychological complexity, rendering them as symbols rather than fully dynamic individuals. In Nosferatu, Count Orlok is not a man, nor even a vampire; he is a shadow, a hunger, a pure embodiment of dread. Ellen Hutter, portrayed Lily-Rose Depp’s facsimile of her predecessor Isabelle Adjani, functions less as a person and more as an icon of sacrifice, purity, and, on a meta-level, theatrical tradition.

Here, the claustrophobia becomes not only semantic or spatial, but existential. A claustrophobia of the ego. We are immersed, but not connected, and this amplifies our alienation.

Using archetypes has its merits. By abstracting his characters, Eggers creates a canvas for audiences to project their own fears and desires, amplifying the film’s universal resonance. However, the limitations of this approach are equally apparent. Archetypes, by their nature, allow little room for evolution or surprise. The tragic arc of Nosferatu’s narrative, in turn, becomes almost paradoxical: The film’s heightened atmosphere is nullified in its predictability.

For SDC, atmosphere comes at the cost of connection. Here, the claustrophobia becomes not only semantic or spatial, but existential. A claustrophobia of the ego. We are immersed, but not connected, and this amplifies our alienation. Nosferatu exemplifies what Stiegler calls the industrialization of memory. As an early process, primitive technologies enabled humans to externalize and standardize memory through rituals and writing; but this has been further diminished with technological advancement.

History is now reduced to aestheticized fragments, foreclosing deeper engagement with its truths. This industrialization isolates individuals from collective traditions, conditioning them to passively consume prepackaged narratives rather than critically reflect on them.

Central to both the power and limitation of Eggers’ Nosferatu is the automation of memory. The film’s meticulously curated aesthetic conditions attention, drawing viewers into its shadowy world while simultaneously constraining their engagement with its themes. By relying heavily on gothic tropes and archetypal structures rooted in cultural memory, Eggers commodifies the past, transforming it into a cinematic artifact that reflects, rather than interrogates, its historical origins.

The desires and beliefs Nosferatu elicits are, therefore, not born of revelation but of recognition—less about opening new interpretive possibilities and more about reaffirming a familiar, preconditioned sense of dread and awe. In this way, Nosferatu exemplifies the dual role of cinema as both a repository of collective memory and a tool for its industrialization, leaving the viewer caught between the illusion of choice and the inevitability of preordained affective responses.

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The ultimate takeaway of Substance Dependent Cinema is that it is never as profound as it seems to be in the moment. Such can be said about substance use in general. I scarcely remember all the poetry and revelations of mushrooms; the cringy prosaic diary entries written while stoned. A similar feeling lingered after experiencing Nosferatu.

In recent years, for some of us, substance reliance has shifted to sobriety. For me, this shift stemmed from heartbreak over the empty promises drugs offer: exceptionalism, genius, connection, and fun. Drugs mediate, often with pleasure, our engagement with the world; yet in doing so, they distance us from the actual matter of our temporal lives: the enduring, psychedelic experience of being.

Stiegler’s assertion that “the industrialization of memory, through technologies such as cinema, conditions the attention of individuals, shaping their desires and beliefs,” underscores the unsettling nature of films like Nosferatu. There must be something unethical about reducing history to atmosphere and utilizing the past without reinvigorating it; such an action leads to a widening temporal schism between the present and history.

In this way, those enacting such unethics perpetuate the loss of the “primordial temporality” that connects individuals to the rhythms and realities of lived experiences. Instead of fostering understanding, filmmakers like Eggers risk engendering disconnection from knowledge, memory, and the capacity for genuine critical engagement.

What is most disturbing about Nosferatu is not its evocation of dread, but its tendency to foreclose meaning. This nihilistic drift is a disorientation of our desire, pulling us further from understanding the forces that shape our existence. As I sat in the theater, I thought about how cinema has the power to move us deeply into our bodies—but also out of them. For years, horror films grounded me, the sensation of violence reverberated in my marrow, connecting me to something primal and raw. But SDC blurs this connection. Nosferatu lures us into a cloud, offering not an anchoring confrontation with reality, but a seduction into detachment.

Heidegger’s notion of shuddering as an encounter with groundlessness becomes, in SDC, a carefully curated simulation of shock, stripped of its transformative potential. Perhaps the most unsettling truth of Nosferatu is how perfectly it mirrors the disoriented desires of our time. We are like Dionysus, frantically dancing, drinking, and fucking—not to embrace life, but to flee from the truth of who we are: Hades in disguise, forever bound to the underworld of our making.

Thank you for reading the first installment of INFINITE REGRESS by ISABELA CERVANTES. Each essay picks up threads from the last, letting ideas evolve, expand, and take on new shapes as they draw from one topic to the next. Discursiveness and the live essay expose the messy, dynamic, and always in progress process of critical thought. Here, you can follow along as one piece on substance-dependent cinema leads to another on something unexpected and entirely unrelated.