“I think we deserve a scary, smelly corpse again,” grins writer-director Robert Eggers from under his baseball cap. “We’ve gone all the way to [Twilight’s sparkly antihero] Edward Cullen, where vampires are not scary. So how do we go in the complete opposite direction of that? Vampires were scary enough that people used to dig up corpses and chop them into bits and set them on fire.”
Welcome to Nosferatu, Eggers’ 1830s-set gothic melodrama that is, indeed, scary – so foul and frightening, in fact, that viewers raised on the tween-friendly likes of the Twilight Saga and The Vampire Diaries might regret inviting it in.
A remake of FW Murnau’s eternally eerie silent masterpiece Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (which was itself an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula) made in 1922, Nosferatu tracks the terrifying Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) as he moves from a castle high in the Carpathian Mountains, Transylvania, to the German city of Wisborg.
With him comes a plague, the cobbled streets soon clogged with corpses, and the city’s only hope against the blood-sucking fiend is a desperate group of ragtag heroes: Orlok’s estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) and their friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), who together enlist the expert help of Professor Albin Eberhart Von Franz (Willem Dafoe).
“It’s interesting because the first film came out a couple of years after the Spanish flu, and this is coming out a couple of years after Covid,” Eggers says from his home in Brooklyn, New York. Behind him, the bookshelf is crammed with tomes dedicated to vampires and their folkloric roots. “When I wrote it, initially, Covid wasn’t a thing, but the plague does play a large part of the film. Having been through it, hopefully we can relate to it.”
Eggers first watched the Murnau movie on VHS as a nine year-old. Riveted by the creeping shadows and by Max Schreck’s Orlok with his rodent features, angular frame and elongated talons, the New York-born director watched it on loop in his formative years, and then staged a version in high school.
He has been trying to make Nosferatu for the big screen since 2015. Originally planned as his follow-up to acclaimed debut The VVitch, Nosferatu’s funding crumbled on numerous occasions, meaning it now arrives as his fourth film, following bonkers psychosexual fantasy The Lighthouse and gruelling tale of Viking vengeance, The Northman.
As with his three previous movies, Nosferatu is a period drama built on painstaking research and craftsmanship in order to fashion a world of sturdy authenticity – all the better to ground any supernatural elements. Okay, so the principle cast speak in Received Pronunciation English (“I’m doing it Hammer horror-style!” chuckles Eggers) to offset the locals speaking Romanian and Romany in the Transylvanian scenes, but the location work, production design and desaturated palette offer a brutal beauty with a lived-in quality.
“Hopefully we have the atmosphere and the workings of a gothic horror movie that is actually scary to a modern audience,” says Eggers. “Could this not work? Of course. But I’m staring at a massive shelf full of books strictly on vampires. I’ve put enough fucking thought into it.”
One thought that struck him from the off was that all of his strenuous efforts to create a world of chilling verisimilitude would be for nothing without the perfect Orlok to walk through it. “Basically I was like, ‘What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like, for real?’”
His version nods to Schreck’s creature of the night but is also something altogether new. “Bill and I had a lot of conversations, then he did an audition that completely blew me away. Bill has the height and the figure for it. He lost a tremendous amount of weight. He’s so transformed in every aspect that I don’t know if people will give him the credit. You can see Bill in the It makeup [Skarsgård previously played Pennywise the Dancing Clown in the blockbusting adaptations of Stephen King’s horror classic], but you can’t detect any Bill here. He worked with an opera coach to lower his voice an octave. I think people are going to think we treated it digitally, but that’s his performance.”
Here at the black heart of the film is a horror icon reimagined into a force of frightful intensity. No mere neck-nipper, Orlok is rather the walking undead, a glowering, wrathful figure capable of devouring a city in its entirety. And while he has eyes for Thomas Hutter’s wife, Ellen – she is effectively Mina Harker from Dracula, though Eggers is careful to cater to modern sensibilities by foregrounding her in the tale – they are now rimmed with rage.
“[Dracula] has this extreme love story with Mina – their relationship is quite lovely,” says Eggers of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 take on Dracula, which memorably starred Winona Ryder as Mina and Gary Oldman as the Count who crossed oceans of time to be with her.
Coppola’s visually lush version is just one of 200-plus screen versions of Dracula, but it is, like Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, a movie that Eggers feasted on in his youth. “The stuff I was looking to for this film was all demon-lover stories,” he continues. “Stuff like Wuthering Heights. The Olivier version has contaminated everyone’s thinking about Wuthering Heights, but in the novel, Heathcliff is an asshole psychopath. And as much as he loves Cathy, he’s obsessed with her and he wants to destroy her. Ellen’s relationship with Orlok is incredibly toxic.”
It is a smart move, lending a keen modernity to a film that is based on a 1922 movie and inspired, visually, by the Romantic paintings of Casper David Friedrich and Johan Christian Dahl. Skarsgård’s Count Orlok might be striding through 19th-century settings, but he also has one foot in this post-#MeToo age.
Eggers shrugs. “I’m not trying to make something with a message, but I don’t live in a vacuum,” he says. “The things that are around are going to come out in the film.” One thing he is sure of is that the core themes of Nosferatu will never die. “Sex and death, y’know?” he laughs. “What else do you want?”
Nosferatu opens in cinemas on January 1
