Robert Egger’s ‘Nosferatu’ brings gore and horror to the movies this Christmas

Robert Eggers’ “Nosferatu,” an update of the silent vampire classic, is a Christmas movie. Even the prestige cult director thinks so.

While the film is about a monster’s thirst for blood and psychic dominance, the backdrop is the Christmas season, like other festive movie offerings at this time of year.

“Focus Features (the film’s distributor) looked up the Christmas release date for me,” Eggers told NBC News in an interview earlier this month. “And because of what was in the movie and because of my particular interests, I was really happy with it.”

(NBCUniversal is the parent company of Focus Features and NBC News.)

For years, the Christmas horror genre has helped movie fans get scared. Think: “Silent Night, Deadly Night” from 1984 and 1980’s “Christmas Evil.” Even “Gremlins,” a major studio release produced by Steven Spielberg in 1984, is bursting with matinee-show mayhem.

These movies have become part of holiday movie culture — and now “Nosferatu” could join them as another less-than-celebratory film.

“A Christmas Day release like ‘Nosferatu’ is a very welcome spooky gift for movie fans and horror buffs who want to counter-program — as the song says — ‘the most wonderful time of the year’ with a very unconventional holiday movie experience,” Paul Dergarabedian, Comscore’s senior media analyst, said. The appetite from the audience is there. “Terrifier 3,” which is out on Blu-ray and 4K disc in time to become a stocking stuffer, was highest grossing unrated film earlier this year. Its central character, the demonic Art the Clown, dresses as Santa Claus as he cuts through the snow.

The spirit of Christmas horror also lives on in the streaming service Shudder’s “The Last Drive-In”, hosted by trash cinema Joe Bob Briggs. For six years now, the series has released a Christmas special accompanied by a charity auction, giving fans a chance to bid on items ranging from props to Cracker Barrel meals with Joe Bob.

“We raised, I think, almost half a million for various charities, and that helps separate that episode from our normal ‘Last Drive-In’ episode,” said Matt Manjourides, a co-creator and producer of the show.

This year’s special features the gory double feature “Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale” and “It’s a Wonderful Knife.” The auction runs through Christmas.

The “Last Drive-In” approach to the holiday isn’t exactly flashy, but it’s about fun and community, in Manjourides’ view.

And when it comes to Christmas horror, there isn’t much daylight between the grit and grease of the world of Joe Bob Briggs and the ecstatic gothic glories of Eggers. Both Manjourides and the “Nosferatu” director cited the 1974 proto-slasher “Black Christmas” as a prime example of the category.

“Black Christmas”‘s own pedigree shows how flexible Christmas can be in the cinema, regardless of genre. The film’s director, the late Bob Clark, would eventually apply his holly-jolly terror talents to a harrowing Santa scene in another cult favorite — 1983’s “A Christmas Story.”

The vampire in winter

Eggers’ bloodsucker saga is the third “Nosferatu,” following FW Murnau’s unauthorized “Dracula” adaptation in 1922 and Werner Herzog’s remake in 1979. The 41-year-old American director had for years wanted to bring his own sensibilities to the story of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and his parasitic connection to Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp).

Bram Stoker’s original 1897 novel begins around Walpurgisnacht, a European spring festival often associated with spirits and witchcraft. But Eggers’ aesthetic is autumnal and wintry, and Christmas was an early part of his “Nosferatu” plans. “There’s something cozy about a ghost story around the fire when it’s cold out,” he said, evoking Charles Dickens’ classic ghost story “A Christmas Carol.”

The wintry setting also made sense for the plot of “Nosferatu”. “The vampire comes at Christmas time, and that kind of ups the emotional stakes,” Eggers said.

As the vampiric plague spreads, actual vacation photos get less screen time. Given Eggers’ passion for detail, even that required specialized craftsmanship for the 1830s film.

“I did a lot of research on what Christmas would look like back then, and Christmas trees that were on tables that seemed a little different to me, to my modern eyes,” production designer Craig Lathrop told NBC News.

Lathrop’s team found a company outside of Prague, where much of the film was shot, that still had 200-year-old molds for making small glass ornaments for the tabletop wood. They also learned that people of that era would fill the decorations with wax.

“So we did it and it looked amazing,” he said.

Whether the sinister gambit of the film’s Christmas release pays off remains to be seen. Eggers won a hearty following with “The Witch” in 2015. The period creepfest cleared $25.1 million in the U.S. and Canada, according to Comscore, more than six times its reported budget. His other features, 2019’s “The Lighthouse” and 2022’s “The Northman,” bolstered his fan base, though neither set the box office on fire.

It’s also usually a time for families to catch up on fare like Paramount’s “Sonic the Hedgehog 3” and for adults to flock to potential Oscar contenders like the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” and the Nicole Kidman-starrer “Babygirl.”

However, “Nosferatu” managed to lure moviegoers with a mix of critical buzz and a star-studded cast including Depp, Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin.

There is also precedent for a horror movie that scares big bucks during the holidays: “The Exorcist,” released on December 26, 1973, grossed nearly $200 million.