But it's Nosferatu who responds, turning from his prey and gazing offscreen in a perfect eyeline match, confirming the film's insistent subversive implication that the pure at heart are as much on the monster's wavelength as those already given over to perdition.
Much of the writing of Lao Khamhom (Khamsing Srinawk), for instance, focuses on rural people, often carrying a subversive political implication.
I ask if the pictures, with the implication that government is nihilistic, could be described as subversive.
Falstaff and, by implication, Shakespeare ask: is there such a thing as a redemptive wickedness, a healthy subversive wickedness, and at what point does it stop being charming and become something worse?
The scene is Pinter at his most astoundingly subversive: the cruelty and irrationality of human behavior pushed to such absurd extremes that our only release from its grotesque implications is the defense — or is it the complicity?
It was hostile, subversive.
