“Wouldst thou like to live deliciously?”
When Robert Eggers’ debut feature The Witch was released in 2016, this quote quickly became the film’s most popular tagline. Uttered by Satan (in the form of the goat known as Black Phillip) to Anya Taylor-Joy’s Puritan teenager Thomasin, the question is posed as an invitation for Thomasin to sign away her soul in exchange for freedom from the religious and sexual repression thrust upon her by 17th-century New England society. Thomasin’s simple response? “Yes.”
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]Eggers once again focuses on a lonely, young female protagonist who embraces darkness in the hopes of assuaging her innermost desires in his fourth feature, Nosferatu, in theaters Dec. 25. Although, this time, the Faustian bargain is struck in the movie’s opening scene rather than its climax. “I’m not trying to cannibalize my own work,” Eggers says of the parallels. “But there are obviously themes and motifs that interest me.”
His much-anticipated remake of German filmmaker F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent horror classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror begins with Ellen Hutter (a phenomenal Lily-Rose Depp) crying out from her childhood bedroom for “a guardian angel, a spirit of comfort…anything.”
Unfortunately, the being that answers this call is not one for compassion or benevolence. Still, when the monstrous visage of the undead vampire Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) appears at her window and demands Ellen “surrender” to him, she reacts in a manner that toes the line between distress and pleasure. This psychosexual connection between Ellen and Orlok is what differentiates Eggers’ take on the Nosferatu story from its predecessors, and, according to the writer-director, arose from the 19th-century belief that women who were prone to sleepwalking—like Greta Schröder’s Ellen Hutter does in the Murnau film—were in touch with another realm.
Eggers takes things a step further, positioning his Ellen as a young woman whose depressive and otherworldly nature has led to her ostracism among her 19th century peers. “She’s an outsider. She has this understanding about the shadow side of life that is very deep, but she doesn’t have language for that. She’s totally misunderstood and no one can see her,” he says. “Because of this gift, in her teenage years, she ends up reaching out to this demon lover, this vampire, who is the one being who can connect with that side of her. But then that other, sensual, erotic world is connected to this evil force, which only increases her shame.”
Following that fateful first meeting, Nosferatu jumps ahead “years later” to 1838 Germany. In her home in the fictional town of Wisborg, a newlywed Ellen awakens from a nightmare on the morning that her estate-agent husband, Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), is set to learn whether he’s received a promotion. Upon meeting with his boss, the suspiciously jubilant Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), Thomas is tasked with traveling to a secluded castle in the Carpathian Mountains to obtain a Transylvanian nobleman’s signature for the purchase of a decrepit Wisborg mansion. Little does he know this mysterious Count Orlok is the living manifestation of his wife’s so-called “melancholy”—and he has no intention of letting the couple live out their lives in wedded bliss.
If you’re thinking this all sounds a bit similar to the premise of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, you’re right. In fact, when Murnau’s Nosferatu, starring a viscerally terrifying Max Schreck as Orlok, came out, Stoker’s estate successfully sued the movie’s producers for copyright infringement and the court ordered every copy of the film be destroyed. Fortunately for horror fans, some bootleg prints survived and, in 1981—two years after Werner Herzog’s 1979 Klaus Kinski-led remake, Nosferatu the Vampyre, was released—concerted attempts to restore the original began. Nearly 20 years later, Shadow of the Vampire, Elias Merhige’s fictionalized 2000 account of the making of the 1922 film earned Willem Dafoe an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Schreck. Dafoe, who starred in Eggers’ 2019 psychological thriller The Lighthouse and also appeared in his 2022 revenge epic The Northman, returns in the new Nosferatu as the zany Van Helsing-analog Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz—bringing the saga full circle.
As for what sparked Eggers’ interest in Orlok, the filmmaker remembers being 9 years old when he watched a degraded version of Murnau’s Nosferatu on VHS for the first time. “One of the spectacular things about that unrestored version is that it seemed more real,” he says. “Max Schreck obviously has this iconic look and this incredible performance, but you couldn’t see the bald cap and the grease paint. He seemed like a real vampire.”
That early fascination with a vampire that lived outside the realm of “the pale, handsome, aristocratic seducer” stuck with Eggers, leading him to put on a Nosferatu play in high school—which was later staged as a professional production—and eventually embark on a 10-year-journey to bring his vision for the film to life. “For whatever reason, whether it’s Edward Cullen or Blade, the vampires that have been the most popular are these relatable outsiders,” he says. “That’s not so much what I’m interested in.”
While there is “some pathos” to Orlok’s existence, according to Eggers, he wanted his vampire to be a true villain. “I went back to folklore that was written by people who believed vampires actually existed,” he says. “And these early folk vampires from Baltic and Slavic areas were usually putrid, rotting, maggot-covered corpses, not a suave guy in a dinner jacket. I knew that if I could understand what a dead Transylvanian nobleman would look like and make him this masculine, phallic, demonic figure, I could have a vampire that might actually be scary and not sparkling.”
The aura of pure malevolence that emanates from Skarsgård’s Orlok only heightens the intensity of the connection between the vampire and Ellen, forcing her to continually confront the part of herself that is drawn to his darkness. “Does evil come from within us or from beyond,” she mournfully asks von Franz after a particularly violent episode.
“You can see her in the film physically fighting against it,” Eggers says. “Both with the ‘hysterical fits,’ as they would have been termed in the 19th century, and then what becomes basically downright demonic possession.”
While Ellen’s counterpart in Stoker’s novel, Mina Harker, has to rely on the men around her to physically hunt down and kill Dracula, Murnau went a different route in 1922 and chose to make Ellen the self-sacrificing heroine of the story. Eggers follows suit, setting Ellen on a morbid crash course to ultimately recognize the inevitability of her situation and make the decision to give herself over to destruction.
“Thomas thinks he’s the hero but really his wife, who everyone is calling crazy and telling to shut up and tying to beds, is the only one who can solve the problem,” Eggers says. “That’s much more interesting.”
