How Robert Eggers remade a classic vampire film

Robert Eggers likes to go out in the cold. “Theoretically, I don’t care,” the 41-year-old filmmaker says in a soft voice, glancing into the hotel room where he is sitting. If a fan or someone tells me about an obscure film that I might like, then one When a clip comes up, I say, “Turn it off.” I don’t want to know anything about it. I just want to see the movie. Is this crap what we’re doing here? I wouldn’t want to read it.” He laughs loudly. “No offense!”

“But,He continues, placing particular emphasis on the conjunction: “I thought it would be extremely helpful if – when you make a film with a vampire who is a rotting, festering, maggot-ridden middle-aged man – the audience left “Inside it and knew that there was actually a beautiful young man behind all of this.” Eggers laughs again, shakes his head and then shrugs his shoulders. “The May be a draw to bring people to the theaters.”

It is indeed an accurate description of the main character Nosferatu, the writer-director’s remake of the 1922 silent film that more or less set the standard for every bloodsucking magnum opus of the last 100 years. (It opened on Christmas Day because the world loves a sick joke.) Played by German actor Max Schreck, the original Count Orlock – a character so indebted to Bram Stroker’s Count Dracula that the author’s heirs sued the producers for copyright infringement won – is bald, beetle-like and is characterized by its pointed ears and claw-like hands. Eggers has been obsessed with the film since he first saw FW Murnau’s Symphony of Horror as a nine-year-old and once staged a theater production of it as a teenager. Once his debut in 2014 The witch As the New Hampshire native immediately established himself as one of the next generation of horror filmmakers to watch, he began thinking about what his own film adaptation of Orlock would look like.

“The early vampires in folklore that you read about – they’re corpses,” Eggers points out. “Undead corpses, but corpses nonetheless. They would be more like cinematic zombies than Bela Lugosi. The first question when we set out to do this was: What does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? That influenced the hairstyle, the costume, the fact that our Nosferatu has a mustache… I don’t know if people who haven’t read it Dracula I know this, but the Count has a mustache in the novel. That’s why we wanted to be realistic about the time and at the same time pay homage to the original look with the long nails and the shape of the skull. And also make him look like he literally just rose from a grave.” A pause. “I still do Do In my opinion, our Nosferatu is a bit prettier!”

This is where the “handsome young guy” comes into play. Immediately afterwards, Eggers met his future Count Orlock, Bill Skarsgard The witch had been released; The two immediately started talking about finding something to work on. The director had already started working on the first drafts of a film Nosferatu adaptation, with the idea that his new take on the classic would be his second feature film, and he thought Skarsgard would be perfect for Thomas Hutter, the real estate agent who travels to Transylvania and becomes one of the vampire’s victims. Then Eggers hit some roadblocks.

“I mean, creative differences, not enough influence in the industry yet, blah, blah, blah,” Eggers says, rolling his eyes as he explains the delay. “But I mean, in the end, thank God! Thank heavens! I thank Black Phillip for making me wait because I wouldn’t have had the experience or the bond that I have with my crew, who are the same people I worked with from the beginning, to pull it off. More importantly, I wouldn’t have had the right cast. Especially when it comes to Bill.”

Eggers eventually turned to nautical psychological thrillers The lighthouse (2019). When it came time for him to make his third film, the bloody Nordic saga The Northman (2022), the director cast the younger Skarsgard as Thorír the Proud. (Bill’s brother, Alexander Skarsgard, previously played the title role.) “We have footage of Bill in full Viking costume, with hair extensions and a beard, the whole thing,” says Eggers. “Then Covid came and he couldn’t do it. I have no regrets because (actor) Gustav Lindh is great in the role. But we were still looking for something in common.”

Around the time Eggers’ Nosferatu remake was looking like it was finally going to happen, he happened to catch it It: Chapter Two. “There’s a scene where Bill plays Pennywise as a middle-aged man,” he says, “and it just had a lot of depth and weight and darkness and believability.” I emailed him or texted him – I can’t remember , what – and said, ‘Do you want to talk about playing Orlock?'”

By this time, Eggers was already in the process of assembling the rest of his cast: Nicholas Hoult as Hutter; Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, an occult expert and eccentric who is the film’s equivalent of Van Helsing; and Lily-Rose Depp as Hutter’s wife Ellen, who suffers from mysterious seizures and seems to have a mysterious connection to the Count. “I had never seen Lily wear a film before,” notes the director. “But when we met, without my prompting or word, she brought up the 1981 film possession” — an Eggers favorite that features a truly unhinged performance from Isabelle Adjani — “and I thought, ‘Okay, she got it.’ Then she auditioned, and it was as raw and intense as anything you could get from her on screen. She came into it the film like that. It was tiring for her. And there’s the scene with a tongue where…”

Eggers pauses and remembers his love of films, such as Revenge, which are best served cold. “I just want to say that I usually like to do 10 to 12 takes, and with this sequence I thought I could maybe get four out of Lily without her expiring. She just throws herself into everything.”

“The thing is: Robert also throws himself into everything,” says Willem Dafoe on the phone a few days later. After seeing the witch, The Oscar-nominated actor sought out the young filmmaker because he felt that “he seemed like he liked to work the way I like to work: all-in.” (Case in point: This.) When Eggers and Dafoe were filming The lighthouse, The former mentioned that he was working on a possible Nosferatu remake.

“We joked that he couldn’t imagine me playing the lead because I had kind of done it years ago,” the actor says, referring to the 2000 film shadow of the vampire, where he portrayed Max Schreck in a behind-the-scenes drama. “When he came back to me years later, after getting the green light, and said, ‘I think you should play von Franz,’ I immediately said yes – because when you read it you know it was going to be good. It would happen be Film.” Von Franz actually gets many of the film’s best lines, including the already immortal “I have seen things in this world that would make Sir Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!” (Eggers admits, that the script itself hasn’t changed much in the almost ten years he’s been working on it, “and most of the work was taking a lot of Franz’s lines because I loved writing for Willem so much that I just keep doing something added.” I remember my producer saying, “This character talks so damn much, you’ve got to cut some of it out!”

“What I particularly liked,” Dafoe adds, “is that if he had been in the movie, he would have played that role!” I mean, Robert was originally an actor, so he could have played him. The character just appeals to so many of his interests and engages in many of the same esoteric knowledge and research. So it was like, in a way, I was this sweet extension of Robert on screen. I felt like I was his agent in the film.”

For Eggers himself, the fact that he was finally able to put his Gothic-meets-Grand Guignol stamp on the material feels like he’s come full circle in his own way. Nosferatu “22” wasn’t the first vampire film he’d ever seen, he’s quick to point out. When he was nine years old, “I had already seen the Lugosi Dracula once or twice.” However, it was one of the first films that awakened him to the narrative and imaginative power of horror.

“When I was a child, I got Fangoria magazine whenever I could,” he says. “That was my only real connection to Freddy and Jason and all those slasher movies because they scared me so much I couldn’t watch them. I remember my mother and a friend watching at one point Friday the 13th And I kind of crept downstairs, looked at it for a few minutes and then said, ‘Just shoot me!’ Please put me out of my misery, I can’t do this!’

“But,“, he says, emphasizing the word again: “The Universal monster films, the Hammer films, all those Roger Corman films – I was able to enjoy them.” I was able to enjoy the horror world and the characters and creatures that interested me , interact and didn’t have to be too afraid. That brought me to the original Nosferatu, And there was something to it… it just felt real because of the way it was available at the time. They were those low-quality 16 millimeter prints that were used for the VHS tapes, so you usually saw a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. And that’s why the artifice wasn’t there so much.

“There are obviously beautifully restored versions now, and I love looking at them,” Eggers adds. “You can see Murnau’s intentions so clearly. But you would look at these old, faded, messed up prints and Max Schreck seemed like a real vampire. The whole thing somehow felt like this artifact that had been unearthed from the past. To use a word I don’t even want to talk about anymore: it felt authentic. And that was really, really inspiring.”