Robert Eggers takes on Nosferatu’s towering cinematic legacy

Six months after Robert Eggers debuted his horror movie The Witch at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, the then-fledgling filmmaker announced his next project.

He was going to remake F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu, an Expressionist classic that looms large in cinema history and the cultural consciousness.

The Witch was Eggers’ first feature (it was also Anya Taylor-Joy’s debut film role) and while the folk horror heralded the arrival of an artist with a command of atmospheric chills and a deep appreciation of the genre, it was still an ambitious declaration.

Even Eggers acknowledged, back then, that it was “blasphemous” for someone of his relative inexperience to sprint into Murnau’s world.

Nosferatu didn’t end up being Eggers’ next movie, it wasn’t even the one after. In 2019, he stranded Willem Dafoe and Robert Pattinson in The Lighthouse, a claustrophobic, distressing and woozy film about two men going mad from isolation. Eggers backed that up with The Northman, an unshackled and intensely violent Viking epic.

It’s taken almost a decade, but Nosferatu finally happened, the realisation of an idea from not 2015 but much further back. He was just a kid when he came upon an image of German actor Max Schreck in character as Count Orlok, the vampire character based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

The picture of this monster, his menacing eyes bulging, his long fingers curled, entranced him. He was nine years old. He never lost sight of his dream project - in high school, he staged a version of the story as a play.

His Nosferatu will open in cinemas on New Year’s Day, a dark, bloody, gothic fairytale of obsession and horror, inherited from both Murnau and Stoker, but also distinctly Eggers.

He’s glad he didn’t make Nosferatu until now. “I didn’t have the same experience as a filmmaker, and I was less of an adept filmmaker,” Eggers told The Nightly. “Particularly with the experience of The Northman, that was sort of my PhD in filmmaking, and now I know how to make a movie.

“It was good to go into Nosferatu with more confidence and more tools in my belt.”

Set in 1838 in Germany, the film stars Bill Skarsgard as Count Orlok (although you will never see his face under the gruesome prosthetics) who is infatuated with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), the young wife of Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), an estate agent who travels to Transylvania to complete a transaction for Orlok.

In Orlok’s castle, which the locals warn him against visiting, Thomas is besieged by waking nightmares, terrorised by the creature and his supernatural forces. When Orlok travels to Ellen’s town of Wisborg, a plague arrives with him and an outcast scientist, Von Franz (Dafoe), is recruited to help defeat the evil.

Nosferatu is Dafoe’s third collaboration with Eggers, and he has witnessed the evolution of the young filmmaker up close. “The basic spirit, the basic person, the basic intellect, the basic impulse remains the same, but I think he’s also grown stronger.

“He was always confident and always pragmatic, but also very passionate about what he did.”

Dafoe said the real difference is when he first worked with Eggers on The Lighthouse, a movie he really loves, is that The Northman and Nosferatu are bigger worlds, the practicalities of the production were more demanding.

“The guy is basically the same, just a little older and a little smarter,” he added. “It’s just refinement, and practice that has probably made him a more adept filmmaker, but I’ll take any of it.”

Nosferatu, as opposed to Dracula, is a stripped back version with a more mythic feel, a supercharged Grimm Brothers story. The thread that runs through all of Eggers’ films so far is they’re all rooted in the past, in an almost otherworldly folklore universe.

Eggers studied the occult, tales about vampires, hysteria and 19th century medicine, and used that to add to the towering legacies of Murnau and Stoker’s works. When the stories are so well-known, a new version has to do more than merely justify its existence.

“I was trying to follow the movements of (1922 Nosferatu scriptwriter Henrik) Galeen’s screenplay and not really be Dracula, but rereading Dracula a few times in the process of writing the screenplay, there were some things I took from it that were helpful, to fill things out.

“But I took things from a lot of 19th century novels and from folklore, and from gothic cinema, to make this its own thing. It was finding ways to enrich the world and make the story more connective.”

He and his cinematographer Jarin Blaschke were also conscious about not replicating any shots from Murnau’s film.

“There are some things that reminiscent, absolutely, but given the precision of the cinematic language that we were after, to not repeat any of them was one of the things, aside from the script changes, that gives it its own identity.”

Of course, its Eggers’ own obsessiveness with infusing folk horror into his films that makes this version of Nosferatu fresh.

Fresh, but not contemporary. With four films under him, Eggers still isn’t interested in making something set in the present day.

“I mean, never say never,” he said, “I went to the gym this morning, and I’ve never done that before. So, people change, but I get enough of the kitchen sink in my own kitchen.”

Nosferatu is in cinemas on January 1