It’s not hyperbole to suggest that Robert Eggers has spent decades thinking about Nosferatu. In elementary school in New Hampshire, the filmmaker saw a picture of Max Schreck as Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and “lost my mind.” After he became obsessed with the film on VHS, a teenage Eggers directed a black-and-white stage version of Nosferatu, complete with actors painted in black and white. In 2016, after Eggers’ breakout film, The Witch, immediately made him a name to watch among cineastes, Eggers said he hoped to make Nosferatu his follow-up feature.
However, almost a decade passed before Eggers made Nosferatu. The wait has been worth it for the filmmaker and fans.
“The reaction has been pretty overwhelming. Even before the movie was released, it has just been a lot bigger than anything I’ve ever been involved with in terms of marketing, the amount of promotion, and everything,” Eggers tells Gold Derby. “So it’s been a bit of a wild and exciting ride. Because this is also a project that I care about very much. So I don’t hate the movie. And I feel more vulnerable.”
Since its release on Christmas Day, the Focus Features film has grossed over $100 million worldwide, making it the biggest hit of Eggers’s career. Based on Murnau’s film, which was written by Henrik Galeen, Eggers’s Nosferatu stars Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a lonely young woman who, as a youth, prays for someone to ease her solitude. Unfortunately, Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the vampire known as a Nosferatu, answered that call. The toxic bond formed between Ellen and Orlok has deadly consequences for everyone in her life and city.
Eggers, who went to drama school and has a certification for working with actors, has previously called his collaborations with performances one of his superpowers in terms of communication. But the filmmaker says he was blown away by what Depp does in Nosferatu, mainly by how she blends Ellen’s inner torment with outward physical manifestations of horror.
“It’s just a jaw-dropping performance,” Eggers says of his lead actress. “I don’t feel like I’m saying that just because of the movie and our collaboration. Nosferatu needed the performance to be good enough for the film to work. When I met Lily, she understood the script and character completely. And she’d seen every major version of Dracula and some more obscure versions. She immediately bought up Possession and Andrzej Żuławski, so I knew she knew what I was after specifically for this.”
Eggers says he was ready to give Depp the role after that initial meeting but still felt an audition from the young star would help seal the deal. Depp crushed the read. “There was no doubt in my mind that she was going to be amazing because the audition left me, the casting director, and even the videographer — who is, you know, a neutral party — all in tears.”
Eggers also knew Depp would have chemistry with his Count Orlok, actor Skarsgård. The It star casts an imposing shadow in Nosfertau, almost literally — the 6-foot-4 Skarsgard grows to 6-foot-7 as Orlok once his costume and prosthetics are in place. Like Depp, whose physical contortions during Ellen’s possession scenes were achieved without digital enhancements, Skarsgard lowered his voice an entire octave, according to Eggers, to speak as the undead Orlok. The bespoke performance touches, and Eggers’ use of thousands of live rats create an overall aesthetic that prioritizes realism over computer effects.
“I think, especially because audiences are so familiar with the CG artifice and grown accustomed to it when they see something that has a practical, tactile quality, they notice a difference,” Eggers says when asked if his old-school approach perhaps is part of the reason audiences have responded to the film. “I think that’s part of why Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus really worked for audiences. You can feel the difference, and oftentimes, you can even see the difference. So, I believe it brings the audience in more closely because they can believe in the world more without exposure to the artifice. It also helps the actors because they don’t have to imagine being in a German port city; they’re in this massive backlot set we’ve made.”
Eggers worked with several frequent collaborators on Nosferatu, including cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, production designer Craig Lathrop, and prosthetics makeup designer David White. When creating the look for Skarsgård’s Orlok, Eggers says he knew the film needed to separate itself from the famous Shreck design while ensuring Orlok himself was scary.
“The most appreciated contemporary vampire, Edward Cullen from Twilight, is not scary at all,” Eggers says. “So I wanted to go back to the folklore because the early Balkan and Slavic vampire lore is written by or about people who believed that vampires existed and were terrified of them. So clearly, there must be something scary there. And these early folk vampires looked like rotten corpses — more like how we think of zombies in current cinema. So that was exciting theory.”
From there, Eggers says the design answered the simple question: What does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? So Eggers and the team created a look for Orlok that combines folklore with some intuitive touches, like facial hair. Skarsgård’s Orlok has a mustache that at least some online have responded to negatively.
“The facial hair, not everybody’s a fan of. But it is, in my opinion, essential,” Eggers says. “I mean, if you look at pictures of Transylvanian noblemen, if you can find one without a mustache or a beard, let me know. I suppose he could have had a beard, just as likely. But, you know, Dracula in the novel has a mustache. Vlad the Impaler had a mustache. It’s a very common Eastern European facial hair style. So it felt to me that it helped him fit into that world and be a part of it more than anything.”
He adds of some backlash to the ’stache, “Somebody said something about Stalin once, and it’s like… that’s not a bad thing, right?”
At 41, Eggers is part of the next generation of budding auteurs, alongside filmmakers like Brady Corbet, Damien Chazelle, Barry Jenkins, Ari Aster, and Coralie Fargeat. As part of the promotional tour for Nosferatu and its trek through awards season, Eggers has been feted by Oscar winner Guillermo del Toro and Oscar nominee Todd Field. He says the embrace from the filmmaking community has been “incredible.”
“It’s nice to have other filmmakers you can talk to about issues and problems and confusions and how to navigate things,” Eggers says. “But it is also great when other filmmakers like the work that you’re doing. I wanted to touch the teenage kid with a black metal T-shirt who likes this movie, and I hope it inspires them. That’s the most exciting thing for me. But, you know, Todd Field knows what goes into the sausage. So to have his or Guillermo’s positive response is a different kind of vindication.”
Now that Nosferatu is finished, Eggers can take some time to reflect on his development as a filmmaker. This month marks 10 years since The Witch debuted at the Sundance Film Festival (it was eventually released in theaters in 2016), and the director says he had just one simple hope for the film back then.
“I just hoped we got enough good reviews that someone would let me make another film,” he says of The Witch, which won Eggers the festival’s best director prize. “It completely changed my life. I am shocked that it changed my life so much.”
And as for what’s next? “I mean, I always have a lot of scripts in the works because you never know what the studio will go for,” he says. “But I’d like to do something original.”
Nosferatu is in theaters now.
