“Are girls born freaky, or do they have freakiness thrust upon them?” Actress Hari Nef posed this question in her Letterboxd review of Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu. Eggers’s remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic is a more explicitly psychosexual interpretation, where a young wife (Lily-Rose Depp) and a vampyr (Bill Skarsgård) have a telepathic connection that she feels “crawling like a serpent in [her] body.”

Nef’s existential inquisition could just as easily apply to same-day premiere rival Babygirl, writer-director Halina Reijn’s erotic thriller about a high-powered tech executive (Nicole Kidman) who begins a torrid affair with a much younger intern (Harris Dickinson). Dubbed “Babyratu,” the double feature presented a yet-unseen titillation combination of a period piece horror and an office-set sexual romp (with a Christmas Day release no less). After the success of Barbenheimer and Glicked, Babyratu worked because it asked, “What if, on Christmas, we fuck?”

And fuck they both do, albeit in different tones. In Nosferatu, anticipatory visions, ecstatic moaning, even full frontal from the vampyr himself pervades the erotic vision around Ellen Hutter (Depp), who has had visions of “death,” i.e. Count Orlok (Skarsgård), since she was a child. The sensual world of Babygirl is filled with the phallic Midtown cityscape, sweaty Brooklyn raves, and a score composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer that is breathier than a Lamaze class. Kidman’s Romy Mathis is an icy yet insecure CEO who hasn’t had an orgasm in her nineteen-year marriage to her playwright husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas), instead finding the animal magnetism of new-hire intern Samuel more stimulating to her own baser urges. Nosferatu puts forth the societal constraints of 1838 Germany; Babygirl examines the constraint of the nearly two-decade marriage and the male-dominated board room in 2024.

Despite this tonal clash—and entirely different eras—both Nosferatu and Babygirl offer portraits of freaky girls come undone by their sexual appetites. They are not like other girls in that they are not comparatively but innately weird in the context of traditional femininity: Ellen is described by Count Orlok as “not of humankind,” his henchman affirming her as a “silph” and “nonpareil.” Romy alludes to a cult upbringing and repeatedly tells her husband that she “isn’t normal,” a notion which he affirms through shooting down her (quite frankly, tame) fantasy of watching porn together. Both are sartorially restrained: Ellen is adorned with bows and hat ties, always corseted, even at times tied up. Romy, too, wears bows in a high-strung Amazon office siren way, her corporate gala evening gowns cinched and slashed with constricting cutouts. Most telling, both endanger those around them by pursuing their sexual appetites: Ellen unwittingly summons Count Orlok, who brings bubonic plague to Visburg when she fails to give into his demands. Romy destabilizes her working, marital, and familial lives through pursuing a sexual relationship with Samuel, reinforcing the narrative that she is, in fact, other, and must pursue her desire outside “normal” societal bounds.

Initially, their worlds reaffirm their dangerousness. Ellen’s visions and possession episodes are portrayed as downright terrifying: Depp specifically was inspired by fellow-Frenchwoman Isbabelle Adjani’s performance in Possession and used her work as a blueprint for her unsettling movements. When Ellen acts out, she’s met with physical restraints, drugs, and social ostracization. When Romy at first comes clean to Jacob, she is met with disgust not only for her transgression but also her “abnormal” sexual interests. Through Samuel, however, Jacob learns that his anxiety is not necessary: in one of the film’s better flourishes, Samuel and Jacob go from fighting to forehead-pressing, the homoerotic tension an animalistic signal of man-to-man understanding. Seeing this, Romy is left with a choice: to let Samuel be a fling, or to use the transgression to better understand herself.

Where the films greatly diverge is in their consequences. To vanquish the vampyr—and conquer her appetite—Ellen must sacrifice herself. Occult expert Professor Von Franz (Willem Dafoe) diagnoses the young frau as someone “whose lower animal functions dominate. Demons like them.” There was never any hope of escaping Count Orlok—himself “an appetite, nothing more.” Freakiness is Ellen’s divine curse—and it costs her her life. Romy, however, suffers from consequences of self acceptance. Externally, she remains intact; she keeps her job, her husband, her family. Samuel is sequestered at a new job in Tokyo. Romy even stands up to a lecherous board member; she tells him to fuck off, with no retaliatory action. Yet she must reckon with her own “lower animal function” and its domination; she is the vulnerable “bitch” for Samuel. By the standards of normal womanhood, freakiness is thrust upon her—in claiming it, she accepts this function as a strength.

Babygirl’s message about a woman exploring her sexual desire and fantasies has received the “empowering” treatment, and for the erotic thriller genre, Reijn’s vision is progressive. In worlds of Adrian Lyne and Paul Verhoeven—two of Reijn’s influences—bi-girls die in fiery car crashes and rape is just par for the course. Yet the film’s feminist messaging runs closer to Michael Haneke’s The Piano Teacher (2001) in that freaky girls, now freaky women of a certain age, should be allowed to behave badly on screen, pursuing preternaturally confident younger men over which they have workplace power. Without any consequences, Babygirl becomes a cautionary tale about a woman who waits nineteen years to tell her husband that she needs to get finger-banged from behind. It’s the internal transformation at stake—the choice to understand and express her inner “bitch”—that allows Romy to sink her teeth into her own sexual appetite. Nef’s original maxim is incomplete: When the options are to originate in freakiness—and die for it—or have freakiness thrust upon oneself, there lies a hollowness. Agency is shirked. Desire is compulsive and reactive, not learned and understood.

It is cheeky timing that two stories centering feminine sexuality—and the ways it is at once reviled and championed—hit the big screen during peak holiday season. Coming out after the likes of Anora, a sex work Cinderella story that pulls the fairy tale rug out from under the audience after act one, Nosferatu and Babygirl indicate that while mainstream cinema may be becoming less prudish on the surface, it isn’t without conservative undertones. For the freaky girl, the options of origination and force remain. We can only hope that cinema and those who create it will expand Nef’s query to its full Shakespearean breadth: “to achieve freakiness” as agents of one’s own desire.