oh, no, nosferatu looks like my bad ex-boyfriend and i am having a weird time

or: going to the movies alone is SOMETIMES a fun time!

This piece was originally written and performed for Write Club Atlanta in January 2025. The prompt was “dark.”

***

“Succumb to the darkness” commands the tagline of the film Nosferatu. Well, alright, I think to myself, and so I order my ticket ahead on the AMC app, don a bow tie (I’m feeling spiffy this Friday afternoon), and take myself out for a spooky little treat.

Movie theatre darkness is my favorite form of darkness. Movie theatre darkness has rules: Silence your cell phones, dispose of all trash in trash receptacles, be heartbroken; it feels good here. When I crave darkness, I crave it like this: with clear parameters and boundaries. Whatever feelings the story I’m about to watch may provoke in me, no one else has to see. They’ll be safe in their own seats. I keep my head facing forward and crunch buttered popcorn between my jaws, and in this silver-tinted darkness, my grief, my fury, and my heartache are safe to rise to the surface. As that good Dolby pitch blackness falls around me, I sip on my Cherry Vanilla Coke Zero and turn off my phone and let my mind turn to vampires.

When Nosferatu ends, I can’t decide how I feel. I know I can’t stop thinking about it, but did I like it? As always when trying to sort out my immediate reactions to any art, I turn to Tumblr. I sift through horny and beautifully detailed fanart until I begin to find “the takes.” Wouldn’t you know it, but there is DIVISIVE DISCOURSE to be found on Tumblr regarding the film Nosferatu. One user says, “This movie is an allegory for abuse, Count Orlok started grooming Ellen when she was a teenager!” Another says, “No, this is about Ellen’s repressed sexual desires coming to the surface, this is gothic romance! Media literacy is DEAD.” Still someone else says, “Polyamory would have solved it!” Which is roughly every third Tumblr take on everything.

Is it abuse or did Ellen want the Count? Someone on my phone screen says, quite daringly, “Um, maybe both.” And just as I let that thought sink to my stomach like a rock in a harbor, someone else on my phone screen– this time a very close friend– responds to my wishy washy immediate review of the film.

“I don’t know how I feel,” I had typed. They respond, “The Count is quite similar to one of your own life's monsters. I can see that being a lot.”

Ah. There it is. There it always is.

The young girl dreams, begs, and prays for someone to rescue her from her loneliness, and the answer comes from a tall and manipulative vampire with a controversial mustache. I know this story; this story erupts like hives on my skin when I don’t give it enough attention. I allow the connection to land, but immediately there is a familiar hideous whisper in my head that says, “Oh, stop it. He never wanted you like that.” In my repulsed recognition of myself within the vampire story, I still cut myself apart first. He never wanted you, you begged him. You, the 17,18,19, 20-something-year-old, why, you must have made it impossible for him, the 30-something, to walk away. This is the version of the story I know: You seduced him, but how could it have even been that? You’re so disgusting. There are such plot holes in my own history of self-loathing. Make up your mind, Dani! Was I a conniving slut or was I a child taken advantage of?

Both. Neither. Something else entirely

I was the cavernous insatiable thing in the dark. At that peak of my teenage yearning, I felt so ugly and misunderstood, and I wanted to be wanted so badly that it didn’t matter that only a monster took my call. I didn’t even recognize him as a monster. I just thought he was the only person who would ever want me, so if I lost him, I would be alone forever.

This is my dark shame: I asked. I begged, I pleaded. I would have done anything. Even within the smoky depths of the Highland Ballroom only so far back as the summer of 2019, I recognized the claws for what they were and I longed to be clasped within them. “You are not of humankind,” Count Orlok says to Ellen, and I thought so of myself. I was so awful, and this pain was what I deserved. This monstrousness is the only thing which could recognize me for what I was and treat me accordingly. Love, or whatever was close enough, happened to me in the dark.

[Quick pause, time out, direct camera address here:] Team, I truly didn’t want to go “dark” for “Dark.” I mean, come on! I wanted to surprise you with a truly fresh and surprising take on this prompt “dark,” and instead I am giving you: “Oh, no, I Got Triggered By the Mustache in Nosferatu!” To be fair, I definitely did, but that’s not fun, my bad.

(We’re sticking with this pivot for a second, so hold tight for me:)

I believe there is a misconception about how to be successful at this show. “Oh, you only win Write Club when you spill your guts and trauma dump onstage.” That sentiment deeply annoys me, because it’s just not true. Pay more attention to the depth and diversity of topics these writers bring to you each month. I have told hard stories and spoken of hard feelings on this stage many times, and the darkness of my subject matter is never what makes me win or lose. You do not have to bleed as an entry fee to do this work. You do not have to tell your most painful stories at all to believe you are worth something artful. Your joy is worth the telling, your mundanity is worth the telling. The story is a story simply because you choose to tell it.

The mutual literary and, yes, therapeutic value of writing from your darkness is not only in exposing it. I have been in therapy for over a decade, and I told some of the same stories for years and years and years and never felt like I was gaining any ground. But ah, maybe a different turn of phrase here? What happens if I cut this paragraph and the narrative actually starts here? What do I uncover if I investigate this truth of mine through another genre, perhaps the vampire film? I have crawled my way out of my personal darkness through curiosity, determination, and precision, and I construct my best Write Club pieces the same way. This is the opposite of movie theatre darkness; here is my grief, my fury, and my heartache wrapped up in seven-ish minutes. Look, here it is. I know you see it, no amount of popcorn can distract you or turn it into something else.

[Okay, back to the main thing.]

Last Friday afternoon, I took myself to the movies. I bought myself a ticket and the snacks I like the best, and I sat alone in my favorite darkness. I gave myself this little gift, because I know I’m not so awful. Because I love myself and that is honestly, breathtakingly enough.

Nosferatu ended. I went back home and I let the uncomfortable puzzle pieces of how the movie made me feel fall into place. And maybe this is where the story lives: I let that sadness and shame and anger sit with me. I felt all of it, and I understood where it came from and I did not say to it, “You’re silly and small, and you shouldn’t be here.” I huffed and puffed, gave myself a little, “Grrr, fuck that guy!” And then I moved on. I acknowledged the darkness and decided not to be swallowed, which was not always something I could do.

I was groomed into a sexual relationship with an adult man when I was a teenager, and it hurt me for a very long time. I’m 35, and I still think about him sometimes. I am not ashamed to tell you so.

“Succumb to the darkness” commands the tagline of the film Nosferatu.

In your motherfucking dreams.