Robert Eggers and his role in raising ‘Nosferatu’ from the dead

(This story contains spoilers from Nosferatu.)

“It was a damn relief to wrap the movie,” says Bill Skarsgard. Yes – the face of an entire horror franchise with his twisted portrayal of The the clown Pennywise – was more than ready to free Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu. “Everything he represents is so intense that I was happy to let go of the shackles he had on me.”

Skarsgård first read the script for Eggers’ macabre folk tale 10 years ago. The filmmaker had just released The witch (2015) and Skarsgard thought he was sitting with someone who represented the future of cinema. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, this is so exciting,'” recalls the Swedish actor The Hollywood Reporter about Eggers’ interest in him for the role of the century-old villain. “The script shook me. … It was flattering, but also very scary.”

Skarsgard’s Count Orlok, though derived from FW Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist classic starring Max Schreck as the titular monster, is infinitely more sinister than its original form. (Okay, Murnau’s film was an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula; the author’s estate sued for copyright infringement—and won.) At once Eggers celebrates Schreck’s beast and completely misrepresents him; credit to the folklore written by and about the people who truly believed these creatures existed and were afraid of them. At the same time, he drives an effort through the heart of the “hot vampire” trope that today’s audiences have grown accustomed to.

“The evolution of the cinematic vampire, from Max Schreck to Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson’s character in Twilight series) … vampires are no longer scary,” says Eggers THR. “These early folk vampires were not delicate, pale-skinned aristocrats in dinner jackets. They were bloated, ugly, rotting corpses.” Thus his monster was born.

Nosferatu is summoned from the occult niche in the Eggers universe that viewers are now familiar with: remnants of The lighthouse (2019) and The Norwegian (2022) oozes through the gothic gloom and nauseating eroticism. Skarsgard plays the lead, but it’s Lily-Rose Depp’s Ellen Hutter who turns the Stokers story upside down.

In the early 1800s, Ellen is newly married to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a younger real estate agent in the fictional German town of Wisborg. He yearns for an official position in the company and accepts an assignment from his jovial boss Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to travel east of Bohemia to an isolated castle in Transylvania’s brutal and rugged Carpathians.

His task is to get contracts signed for the purchase of a Wisborg mansion from a mysterious Count Orlok. Thomas leaves his desperate wife with the couple’s friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), who are forced to witness the return of Ellen’s nightmarish episodes. Only viewers, Ellen and Orlok understand the sensual connection between the vampire and what he believes to be his rightful bride – Depp’s character beckoned to him years earlier, forming a bond steeped in both repulsion and desire.

“It was physically and emotionally demanding,” Depp says of the astonishing physical performance she puts on, bending her body out of shape, convulsing as her eyes roll back in her head and tears stream down her cheeks. Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, a choreographer specializing in Japanese but oh (“dance of total darkness”), was brought in to help. “The torment she goes through is the meat of the film,” Depp continues. “The darkness she’s carried since she was younger is now coming to a head. She found a man who has been able to anchor her to the world, the light, and then he walks away, leaving her behind vulnerable to the forces that will claim her.”

“But it’s not as simple as her (being) tormented by this horrible thing,” Depp continues, “There’s a longing there. A connection between Orlok and Ellen. She was the one who called out to him and who he says in the film, she must surrender herself.”

Depp says sexuality is a topic people have asked a lot about. That’s deliberate on Eggers’ part, she adds, because this is the story of a love triangle at its core. “This demonic, dark fairy tale could be a young woman torn between two men, each representing different parts of what she wants. The desire and disgust serve as a mirror for the shame we feel, certainly the shame I’m sure on that many women felt at the time.”

Hoult also believes that his character was a victim of the period, a man devoted to his wife but inherently unable to understand her. “He sweeps things under the rug,” says the British star. “(He’s thinking), ‘Let’s not talk about it or think about it. As long as I get this promotion, things will be okay and we’ll deal with it down the road.’

Willem Dafoe jumps in: “(Hoults) is the hardest role in the whole movie in a funny way.” Thomas is our introduction to Orlok in his horrifying entirety, he explains, and viewers have no choice but to absorb the panic he exudes. “The audience is with him and he has to keep that fear alive. It cannot solidify into anything; it keeps changing. And it’s damn hard to do because he’s also being traded.” Depp calls Hoult’s performance “so beautiful”: “You really feel the birth of darkness.”

Dafoe enters the picture as something of an incarnation of Stoker’s vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing. The fictitious Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz is ostracized from the academic spheres in which he once socialized to indulge his passion for necromantic knowledge.

Von Franz is the only character in Nosferatu who truly understands Ellen’s suffering. Is it true that Dafoe thinks his role is who Eggers himself wants to play? “He’s curious,” Dafoe says with a smile. “I just thought, ‘Wow, this is juicy. I have an interest in these things, but I’m not very knowledgeable about them, so I ate up the research. What are the Hollywood tropes that have been developed over the years, and what actually came from folklore and history?”

The dismissal of the troops in Nosferatu feels purposeful, an exploration of the vampire as myth. Today, the audience thinks of the Cullens TwilightSalvatore’s of The Vampire Diariesor even a blonde, Tom Cruise caught on Interview with the vampire. Why do we love to romanticize them? And is this movie a rejection of their portrayed hotness in pop culture?

“It all goes back to John Polidori’s (1819 horror card) The vampire“, says Eggers. “Which was the first popular, Anglo-literary vampire story. He based the vampire on Lord Byron, not a folkloric vampire. So the sexy aristocrat has been the mold. And while Stoker does some different things with Draculahe is still based on that character. And I think as the cinematic vampires evolved, because of their ability to transcend death, there’s something attractive and appealing about that.”

“But I think Bill’s vampire is sexy,” Eggers adds, followed by a chorus of agreement from his cast. Dafoe says, “He’s pure appetite.”

Appetite is a good word to capture the magnetism of Skarsgård’s portrayal. He has the bald head, pointed ears and spindly fingers according to both Murnau’s film and Werner Herzog’s film The vampire Nosferatu from 1979. But it’s a deep, gritty, Transylvanian rasp that does a good deal of the legwork for Eggers’ being. “I knew he would live in the shadows for so long,” says Skarsgård. “The voice was my (only) form of expression.” He worked with an opera singer to lower his voice by a whole octave. “We showed the film in Stockholm last week with my friends and family and some of them didn’t think it was my voice or they thought it was a voice actor.” (Laughing.) “Rob and I built it together and that meant we had the freedom to create our version of it, to make it different than, you know, (in a heavy, imitative Transylvanian accent), ‘Dracula!”

At this moment, Depp himself performs his Dracula impression for the group. They burst out laughing. “It’s very Italian,” she says. “I think it’s the last (role) in the world I could play.”

Skarsgard begins to unpack the significance of a short story about Orlok’s backstory that Eggers wrote just for him. The count had a family and was once married, the actor says, before his director intervenes: “I don’t want the world to know his backstory. But he had a very detailed one.”

Eggers is the expert. He tells THR he first saw Murnaus Nosferatu when he was nine. “It had a big impact on me,” he begins. “One of the cool things about how I saw it was … It was on VHS. It was made from a bad 16mm print. Today you can see the restored version and you can understand Murnau’s intentions. It’s wonderful to see the film like that, but what I saw was super degraded, and Max Schreck seemed like a real vampire, like something dug up from the past. It had an eerie authenticity.”

The filmmaker didn’t hold back with his updated take. The film should come with a warning to those less inclined to the sight of rats. Corrin says the extensive practical effects – which required them to lie topless under a series of rodents – were a double-edged sword. “It serves an incredible purpose, those moments,” they say. “The same with the practical sets. It builds this immersive world, completely alive both for the actors in it and for the audience watching. You can just so easily walk into this period of history and be completely convinced and blown away by it. But then you are also working with 20 incontinent rats on your bare chest.”

The Nosferatu cast battles rats, corpses and rabid dogs. They evoke a sense of dread rarely conjured on screen – Depp’s unraveling is perfectly complemented by Skarsgard’s satanic hunger. This leaves one final question: who is the loudest screamer?

“Willem,” Eggers says, asking Dafoe for permission to tell a story.

“When we shot The lighthouseI was with my wife and we are in Halifax (in Nova Scotia). We’re going to have dinner and there’s a homeless man screaming down the street. He’s screaming, screaming, screaming, and I said to my wife, ‘Let’s just pick up the pace.’ We are almost at the restaurant. Plus it’s Halifax, how bad can this guy be? This homeless person just keeps screaming louder and louder and getting closer and closer and closer. We rush to the restaurant and suddenly this guy jumps on my back and screams in my ear. And that’s Willem Dafoe, wearing leather pants.”

Dafoe replies, “Sometimes when I see a friend on the street, especially if it’s a woman, I go behind and (imitates jumping out on someone).” His cast again roars with laughter. “Because then you can calm them down!”

Focus Functions’ Nosferatu hits theaters on December 25.