Rebecca Hamilton, VJ René, and Megan Nash reflect on the genre’s potential to voice the unspeakable
In our recent post on the boom in neo-Victorian horror novels, Shannon Scott reflects on the cathartic potential of enacting revenge in and on the past and the refusal to let the global nineteenth-century’s violences stay buried during a present that feels increasingly ‘unhinged’. Indeed, it must be a sign of the times that Virginia Feito’s slasher hit Victorian Psycho, only released last year, is already getting a very promising-looking adaptation.
Whereas neo-Victorian fiction has always bravely reckoned with the failures of the past, satirizing Thatcherite politics through Gothic hauntings or excavating queer and feminist counter-narratives, horror seems to seek new and more radical forms of articulating and reckoning with the worst forms of gendered and colonial violence. Whereas neo-Victorian fiction has always bravely reckoned with the failures of the past, satirizing Thatcherite politics through Gothic hauntings or excavating queer and feminist counter-narratives, horror seems to seek new and more radical forms of articulating and reckoning with the worst forms of gendered and colonial violence.
How productive that can be has been evident in AMC’s The Terror (2018), BBC’s The North Water (2012), or the (post-Victorian) film Pearl (2022). But as of 2026, neo-Victorian horror is clearly having a moment. In the following, three VPFA experts examine the genre’s potential to speak back to the Victorian past in unique and eerily resonant ways and what happens when we are denied the solace of forgetting.
Queer Sexual Violence in Nosferatu (2024)
Rebecca Hamilton
When, in Eggers’ adaptation of F. W. Murnau’s silent classic (1922), itself loosely based on Stoker’s Dracula (1897), Count Orlok attacks Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), he is naked, climbs on top of him, thrusts against him, and drinks blood from his chest. Eggers leaves no room to view this scene as anything other than a non-consensual sexual violation. Online discussions of the film’s sexual violence have foregrounded Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), rightfully arguing that her relationship with Orlok transforms the familiar vampire narrative into a story of grooming, sexual abuse, trauma, and coercive control.
Nosferatu gives us something that Stoker’s Dracula leaves much more difficult to see. In my own research on Dracula, I have become increasingly interested in Jonathan Harker’s experiences at Castle Dracula. His encounters with Dracula have often been interpreted as expressions of repressed homoerotic desire. But what if we read Jonathan instead as a victim of non-consensual sexual violence?
There are some clues in Stoker’s text. When Jonathan is imprisoned in Castle Dracula, he loses consciousness, and later awakens to find himself back in his room, speculating that Dracula “carried me here and undressed me”. Soon afterwards, his journal breaks off until he reappears six weeks later in hospital suffering from “a terrible shock” (or “brain fever”) and “raving” of awful things. Even after his recovery, Jonathan continues to describe himself as feeling “impotent, and in the dark”. “Impotent” can certainly mean powerless or helpless, but its sexual meaning is significant when we consider his preceding experiences. Later, when his wife, Mina, describes Dracula’s attack upon her, Jonathan “groans”, and Mina looks at him “as if he were the injured one”. Mina recognises Jonathan as the injured party because, in that moment, she sees something of her own experience in him.
Eggers takes the possibility that Stoker leaves for us to imagine and puts it directly on screen. Thomas, terrified, is physically overpowered by Orlok, and subjected to a sexualised attack. Later, he dreams of Orlok appearing above him in exactly the position he occupied during the assault.
This is one of the most interesting things Nosferatu does as a Neo-Victorian horror film. Eggers does not tell us what Stoker “really meant” by Jonathan’s encounters with Dracula. Instead, he shows us what becomes visible when we stop treating male vulnerability as evidence of desire. Perhaps that is why Victorian Gothic keeps returning to our screens in increasingly dark and “unhinged” forms. Its monsters have always known how to expose the violence hidden beneath respectable bodies, relationships, and assumptions about who can be a victim. Neo-Victorian horror is simply becoming less willing to look away.
Undying Yearning in No Rest for the Wicked (2026)
VJ René
‘Gender means nothing to me. Almost all vampires ultimately transcend gender concerns in their social and emotional relationships.’ So says Anne Rice, writing in character as Lestat, in response to a fan query. Given the popularity of AMC’s series Interview with the Vampire, which openly addresses the queerness of Rice’s characters in a way that prior adaptations of her work have not, the time is ripe for more explicitly genderqueer vampires onscreen. For this reason, I am eagerly anticipating Kasper Kalle’s upcoming No Rest for the Wicked, a Danish film adaptation of perhaps the original genderqueer vampire story: Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ novella Manor. Ulrichs is far better known for his queer rights activism and the many pamphlets he published on same-sex love, which laid the groundwork for sexologists including Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, than for his prose. But in 1884 he published a collection of Gothic short fiction entitled Matrosengeschichten (Sailor Stories), in which Manor is included.
Set in the Faroe Islands, the novella tells the story of Har, a fisherman’s son who is saved from drowning by a young sailor named Manor. The pair soon fall in love, sailing and swimming together and stealing out at night to meet in secrecy. When a whaling ship comes to the island to find recruits, Manor sails away on a two-month voyage while Har, a few years younger, remains with his mother on the island. Disaster strikes; on the day of Manor’s return a violent storm descends and the whaling ship is driven onto the reef and wrecked. The following day Manor’s lifeless body washes ashore, and a distraught Har buries him in the sand
dunes, beside the ocean. That night Har is awakened by the sound of his bedroom window opening. He feels Manor climb into bed with him: oceanically cold, with seawater dripping from his hair and a craving for blood.
Manor is, at is core, a tragic love story, and it has all the ingredients of a Gothic romance. Ulrichs’ vampire is a revenant, dead before his time, whose profound longing for life and warmth causes him to seek out the beloved from whom he has been parted. Readers used to Dracula, in which blood-drinking is presented outright as sexual assault, or even the erotic ambivalence of Carmilla, will be surprised by how consensual Har’s encounters with Manor are. That they strike the reader (or at any rate, this reader) as moving as well as horrifying owes a lot to the delicacy of Ulrichs’ descriptions: the loneliness of the grave, the chilly water, the lilacs outside Har’s window that by their soft rustle announce Manor’s approach.
Although it contains more than its fair share of queer yearning, to describe No Rest for the Wicked as a “gay love story” as reviewers including Dennis Harvey for Variety have already done, is understandable. But Ulrichs’ Manor is not straightforwardly a tale of homosexual love in the contemporary sense. Rather, it is an inversion narrative, and Ulrichs’ theory of anima muliebris virili corpore inclusa permeates the text. Manor is a story of female souls enclosed in male bodies which become steadily less male as the plot progresses; reading it always reminds me how much weirder and more erotic vampire stories were before their tropes congealed. The now-ubiquitous bite to the jugular is nowhere in evidence; Manor drinks not from Har’s throat, but from above the heart, “like an infant at its mother’s breast”.
What exactly is Manor doing here? Is he simply feeding from a bite wound that he has inflicted on Har’s nipple? Or is he actually suckling? Ulrichs’ framing (“aus der linken Brustwarze”) implies the latter: that Har has begun to lactate blood for Manor. It is impossible not to notice the softly and alluringly feminine language with which Har’s body is described; “the soft swelling mound” (“den sanft schwellenden Hügel”) of his chest. The translations I have used thus far are my own. It is worth noting that the most recent English translation I have been able to lay hands on, that included in Vampire Tales (published by Dark Chaos in 2019) uses even more feminising language to describe the encounter: “His chilly lips searched the soft swollen chest (…) Manor began to suck his teat”.
Will any of this gender ambiguity make its way into No Rest for the Wicked? I hope it does. To see Manor and Har’s queerness reflected in a way that honours their own historical period, not ours, would be wonderful. The film poster, which features Har with blood running from the nipple without any discernible wound, is a promising sign. No Rest for the Wicked premiers in Denmark on September 3rd, but tantalisingly, no international release date has been announced. Fingers crossed it’s in time for Halloween.
Harvey, Dennis. “No Rest for the Wicked’ Review: A Supernatural Gay Love Story in a 19th- Century Backwater.” Variety, July 26, 2026.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich. “Manor.” Matrosengeschichten: Buch 1. F. E. Fischer, 1885.
Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich. “Manor.” Vampire Tales. Dark Chaos, 2019.
Resisting Empire in Mārama (2025)
Megan Nash
In Helena Esser’s January post “Is neo-Victorian Fiction getting more unhinged?”, she contemplates whether the increasingly violent and unruly nature of this fiction might be “a way of foreclosing, even mocking, any spark of nostalgia”. Taratoa Stappard’s Māori gothic horror Mārama (2026) is a film that clearly weighs in favour of Esser’s hypothesis.
Indeed, Stappard didn’t set out to make a horror movie, but rather a Victorian period drama. Yet he found as he “started to research more and more around the history of colonisation of Aotearoa, New Zealand, it became obvious that this was a horror film…, about the horror of colonisation and also the horror of cultural appropriation.” The director thus specifically turned to a genre known for its violent extremity, because it felt like a more appropriate way to engage with Victorian colonialism. And in so doing, Stappard seems to consciously disavow that “spark of nostalgia” Esser was talking about.
The eponymous protagonist of Mārama – portrayed compellingly by Ariāna Osborne – is a young Māori woman raised by Pākehā, or New Zealanders of European descent. The film opens as she arrives in North Yorkshire, where she’s travelled after receiving a letter that promises information about her unknown parentage. But finding the man who wrote to her dead on her arrival, she stays on as governess in the gothic mansion of his employer, Sir Nathaniel Cole, in the hope of learning more about her relatives.
Mārama thus offers a reworking of the Thornfield section of Jane Eyre. And in an overt acknowledgment of this antecedent,
Cole is played by Toby Stephens, the same actor cast as Rochester opposite Ruth Wilson in the 2006 BBC adaptation of Brontë’s novel. But while in Jane Eyre the woman of colour was relegated to a secret chamber on Thornfield’s third story, in Mārama, she takes on the central role of governess and heroine. And while Bertha was never allowed to speak in the novel, Mārama is powerfully articulate, possessing a rage and defiance made palpable throughout the film. In one particularly memorable scene – singled out and celebrated by most reviewers – she breaks up Cole’s birthday celebrations by performing a furious haka of resistance. She does this while wearing the most resplendent red silk gown, whose colour, according to Stappard, symbolises Māori womanhood.
Perhaps coincidentally, it also gestures at Jane Eyre’s red room, another famous symbol of Victorian female rage.
Mārama’s employer, Nathaniel Cole, has amassed his fortune from whaling enterprises in the South Seas, and it was there that he developed a fascination – and troubling obsession – with Māori culture. He’s learned to speak te reo Māori (the Māori language) and filled his estate with appropriated Māori taonga (cultural treasures). Within its grounds, he’s even reconstructed a wharenui, or communal Māori meeting house. But Mārama is both a narrative of reverse colonisation and a revenge horror, so Cole of course gets his comeuppance, and Mārama gets to take back what’s been stolen. In fact, if there’s a weakness in this otherwise impressive debut feature, it’s that Mārama isn’t for a moment taken in by Cole’s attempts to charm her, and neither are we. From the time she arrives in Yorkshire, neither his depravity nor his destiny is ever really in doubt. There isn’t the fluctuation of suspense and relief viewers have come to expect from the most engaging horror. Instead, Mārama is tense from first to last, without respite until its bitter end.
But viewers are more than compensated for this by the film’s flawless visual style. Thanks to the work of production designer Nick Williams, the mansion’s interiors are at once elegant and inhospitable, rendered with blue-black walls and low-key lighting that make them cold, empty, and threatening. Paired with costumer designer Sarah Voon’s restrained use of colour and touches of lace, Mārama emerges as a figure of sumptuous vampiric beauty.
Though of course, it’s not she but Cole who turns out to be the monster walking these halls. Indeed, what proves to be the most unsettling thing about Cole’s character is that his reverence for Māori culture isn’t ever actually disingenuous. The problem is not that he says one thing and thinks another. The problem is that his admiration is so abhorrently misapplied. His love of Māori practices and objects is also the foundation of his desecrations and perversions, as well as of the harm and destruction he wreaks on Mārama’s family.
Quite by accident, I saw Mārama around the same time I was teaching Jane Eyre as part of the nineteenth-century literature syllabus at Waipapa Taumata Rau, the University of Auckland. As such, I had at front of mind just how strongly students still connect with Brontë’s heroine, how completely they get wrapped up in her journey of self-discovery and her happy ending, even though these can only take place at Bertha Mason’s expense. It served as a reminder that the need to forestall Victorian nostalgia is one that remains both real and pressing. By realising this in Mārama, Stappard gives us a governess whose lessons we’d do well to remember in such unhinged times.