Nosferatu

A lonely castle in the mountains, where strange things happen. Traumatized survivors, unable to recount what happened to them, while others have disappeared forever. Decades later, the story should finally be over and the past buried. And yet the howling continues in the woods, fingers scratch at walls. What happened to the girls behind these walls, who were considered “different” and “sick”? Harker, a young, naive real estate agent in Bram Stoker's Dracula, is a woman in Steinbuch's version. She returns to the place of her childhood, the sanatorium, of which she has only fragmented memories. Here she hopes to help others and find redemption herself. But the progressive place of science becomes a house of horrors for her. In its labyrinthine corridors and rooms, times and memories overlap. Strange creatures creep along the walls, and what has been repressed forces its way into the open.

Far removed from bloodsucker kitsch and gothic romanticism, Gerhild Steinbuch presents the vampire as a revenant, as the embodiment of what has been locked away and forgotten, yet continues to infiltrate the present.
«In Steinbuch's (linguistically brilliant) version, the 'beast' Nosferatu is given a voice. He is not only a projection screen, an object of observation by others (who in turn become the object of his violence), but also an acting, thinking, even suffering subject.» (Nachtkritik)
«The starting point of Steinbuch's haunting and precise text is the thesis that memories and experiences of violence are archived in bodies and landscapes and are perpetually passed on ... Real places of horror from Austrian Nazi history, as evidenced by Rechnitz, Wilhelminenberg and Spiegelgrund, come to mind.» (Kleine Zeitung Kärnten)