Robert Eggers likes to go in cold. “In theory, I don’t care for this,” the soft-spoken 41-year-old filmmaker says, glancing around the hotel room he’s sitting in. “If I see a trailer for a movie made by a director I’m a fan of, or someone tells me about an obscure movie I might like then goes to pull up a clip, I’m like, ‘Turn it off.’ I don’t want to know anything about it. I just want to watch the movie. This shit we’re doing here, right now? Wouldn’t want to read it.” He lets out a loud laugh. “No offense!”
“But,” he continues, putting a particularly hard emphasis on the conjunction, “I did think it would be extremely helpful if — when you’re making a movie featuring a vampire who is a rotting, festering, maggot-ridden middle-aged man — the audience went in knowing there’s actually a beautiful young guy underneath it all.” Eggers lets out another laugh, shaking his head then shrugging. “That may be a pull for, like, getting folks into the theaters.”
It’s indeed an accurate description of the main character in Nosferatu, the writer-director’s remake of the 1922 silent movie that more or less set the standards for every bloodsucker magnum opus of the past 100 years. (It opened on Christmas Day, because the world loves a sick joke.) As played by the German actor Max Schreck, the original Count Orlock — a character so indebted to Bram Stroker’s Count Dracula that the writer’s heirs sued the producers for copyright infringement and won — is bald, bug-like and distinguished by his pointy ears and claw-like hands. Eggers has been obsessed with the film since he first saw F.W. Murnau’s “symphony of horror” as a nine-year-old, and once mounted a theatrical production of it as a teen. Once his 2014 debut The Witch immediately established the New Hampshire native as one of the next-gen horror moviemakers to watch out for, he started thinking about what his own screen version 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’d look closer to cinematic zombies than, you know, Bela Lugosi. So the first question when we set out to do this was: What does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? That informed the hair, the costume, the fact that our Nosferatu has a mustache… I don’t know if people who haven’t read Dracula know this, but the Count has a mustache in the novel. So we wanted to be realistic to the time period, while paying homage to the original look with the long nails, the shape of the skull. And also make him look like he’s literally just risen from a grave.” A pause. “I still do think our Nosferatu is bit more handsome, though!”
This is where the “beautiful young guy” enters the picture. Eggers had met his future Count Orlock, Bill Skarsgard, right after The Witch had been released; the two immediately began talking about finding something to work on. The director had already begun working on the early drafts of a Nosferatu adaptation, with the idea that his redo of the classic would be his sophomore feature, 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 ran into a few roadblocks.
“I mean, creative differences, not enough industry clout yet, blah, blah, blah,” Eggers says, rolling his eyes while explaining the delay. “But I mean, in the end, thank goodness! Thank the heavens! Thank Black Phillip that I was forced to wait, because I wouldn’t have had the experience or the bond I have with my crew, who are the same people I’ve worked with since the beginning, to pull it off. More importantly, I wouldn’t have had the right cast. Especially in terms of Bill.”
Eggers ended up pivoting to the nautical-themed psychological thriller The Lighthouse (2019). When it was 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, was already playing the title role.) “We have footage of Bill in a complete Viking costume, with hair extensions and a beard, the whole thing,” Eggers says. “Then Covid hit, 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 to together.”
It was around the time that Eggers’ remake of Nosferatu began to look like it was finally going to come together that he happened to catch It: Chapter Two. “There’s a scene where Bill plays Pennywise as a middle-aged man,” he says, “and it had just a lot of depth and heft and darkness and believability to it. I emailed him or texted him — I don’t remember which — and said, ‘Do you want to talk about playing Orlock?’”
Eggers had already been in the middle of assembling the rest of his cast at that point: Nicholas Hoult as Hutter; Willem Dafoe as Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, an occult expert and eccentric who’s the film’s equivalent to Van Helsing; and Lily-Rose Depp as Hutter’s wife, Ellen, who suffers from mysterious fits and seems to have a mysterious connection to the Count. “I’d never seen Lily carry a film before,” the director notes. “But when we met up, without me prompting or saying anything, she brought up the 1981 movie Possession” — a favorite of Eggers, which features a truly unhinged performance by Isabelle Adjani — “and I thought, ‘Ok, she gets it.’ Then she auditioned, and it was just as raw and intense as everything you see her doing onscreen. She came into the film like that. It was exhausting for her. And there’s that the scene with a tongue where…”
Eggers stops himself, remembering the whole thing about his preference for movies, like revenge, being best when served cold. “I’ll just say that I like to do 10 to 12 takes usually, and with that sequence, I figured I could get maybe four out of Lily without her expiring. She just throws herself into everything.”
“The thing is, Robert throws himself into everything fully as well,” Willem Dafoe says, speaking over the phone a few days later. After seeing The Witch, the Oscar-nominated actor sought out the young filmmaker, having sense that “he seemed like he liked to work the way that 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 about him not imagining me playing the lead, because I’d already sorta done it once years before,” 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 he got the green light and said, ‘I think you should play von Franz,’ I immediately said yes — because when you read it, you know this was going to be good. It was going to be his movie.” Von Franz, in fact, gets a lot of the film’s best lines, including the already immortal “I’ve seen things in this world that would make Sir Isaac Newton crawl back into his mother’s womb!” (Eggers admits that the script itself didn’t change much over the near decade he worked on it, “and most of the work was having to strike a lot of von Franz’s lines because I loved writing for Willem so much that I just kept adding things. I remember my producer going, ‘This character talks so fucking much, you gotta cut some of this!’”)
“What I loved,” Dafoe adds, “is that this would have been the role he would have played if he’d been acting in the movie! I mean, Robert started out an actor, so he could have played him. The character just addresses so many of his interests, and is preoccupied with a lot of the same esoteric knowledge and research. So it was like I was this sweet extension of Robert onscreen, in a way. I felt like I was his agent inside the movie.”
For Eggers himself, the fact that he’s finally got to put his Gothic-meets-Grand-Guignol stamp on the material feels like he has, in his own way, come full circle. Nosferatu ’22 wasn’t the first vampire movie he ever saw, he’s quick to mention; by the time he was nine, “I’d already seen the Lugosi Dracula once or twice.” It was, however, one of the first films to awaken him to the narrative and imaginative power of horror.
“When I was a kid, I would get Fangoria magazine whenever I could,” he says. “That was my only real connection to, you know, Freddy and Jason and all of those slasher movies, because they were so scary to me that I could not watch them. I remember once, my mom and a friend were watching Friday the 13th, and I kind of snuck downstairs, saw a few minutes and was then like, ‘Just fucking shoot me. Please put me out of my misery, I can’t do this!’
“But,” he says, once again adding emphasis to the word, “the Universal monster movies, the Hammer films, all those Roger Corman movies — I could enjoy those. I could interact with the horror world and these characters and creatures I was interested in, and not like be too terrified. That brought me to the original Nosferatu, and there was something about it… it just felt real, because of the way that it was available at that time. They were these degraded 16 millimeter prints that got used for the VHS tapes, so usually you were seeing a copy of a copy of a copy of copy. And therefore, the artifice was not so much there.
“There are obviously beautifully restored versions now, and I love watching those,” Eggers adds. “You can see Murnau’s intentions so clearly. But you’d watch those old, faded, messed-up prints and Max Schreck seemed like a real vampire. The whole thing felt just kind of like this artifact that had been unearthed from the past. To use a word that I’m like sick of talking about — it felt authentic. And that was just really, really inspiring.”
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
