It all started decades ago with a book.
Once upon a time, the accomplished filmmaker Robert Eggers was a serious 9-year-old in small-town Lee, N.H., methodically making his way through his school library’s series on various and sundry monsters.
“On the cover of the book on vampires was a picture of Max Schreck, standing in a Gothic arch, and I thought ‘That is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen,’ ” the now 41-year-old Eggers remembers, the memory exceptionally vivid despite its considerable age. “In small italic type under the photo, it said it came from a film called ‘Nosferatu’ ” — a film he’d never heard of.
Eggers had an agreement with his mother. “She was cool with me watching anything, but I had to have a conversation with her afterwards,” he says. “Sometimes,” Eggers adds, smiling, “it wasn’t worth it,” but with this 1922 German silent film starring Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok, it definitely was.
“My mom drove me to the closest video store, which, in rural New Hampshire, was not easy. We ordered the VHS and it arrived in about a month. If it had come with a cheesy organ or synthesizer soundtrack, it might have ruined it for me, but there was no sound at all. When the coffin lid is thrown open and you see Orlok inside, it had an effect. Not a jump scare — it was really disturbing. I didn’t see the artifice of silent filmmaking. It felt kind of real.”
Real enough to compel him as a high school senior, along with friend Ashley Kelly Tata (now a well-known New York theater director) to put on, “in our own humble way,” a play version of “Nosferatu,” a version that was transferred to the well-regarded Edwin Booth Theater in Dover, N.H. “I have such strong memories of the smell of that theater,” Eggers says. “It was such a magical opportunity, it totally changed my life. I thought maybe I could be a director.”
More than that, the memory of that terrifying silent film has stayed with Eggers for more than 30 years, during which he became one of the reigning American masters of disconcerting cinema, earning the praise of fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro as “a unique and incredibly vibrant voice in film” and directing elegant and unnerving pictures like 2015’s “The Witch” (winner of the U.S. dramatic directing award at Sundance) and “The Lighthouse” (which, in 2020, earned an Oscar nomination for cinematography). Though I am often an avoider of scary films, Eggers’ impressive command of the medium, his delicately shocking sensibility and his determination to get maximum effect with minimal explicitness has won me over.
During much of that time, Eggers was hoping and scheming to get his own version of “Nosferatu” on-screen and it has finally happened: Set to open, in a deft piece of counterprogramming, on Christmas Day, this formidably accomplished and deeply terrifying “Nosferatu” is remarkable for the way it is both respectful of tradition and unsettling in its own particular way.
Sitting in the spookily deserted terrace of a hotel restaurant, Eggers in person is the thoughtful calm in the middle of the storm his film has created, someone who prefers to think his answers through before speaking.
“It would have been foolhardy if I had been able to do it earlier — I wasn’t adept enough,” Eggers explains. “Also, this cast is phenomenal, and the way it fell into place is unexpected.”
Actor Bill Skarsgård, unrecognizable under layers of makeup (three-plus hours for the face and hands, six to do full-body) as the vampire of the title, was cast in a different role in one of the earlier incarnations. “But then I saw ‘It Chapter Two,’ where Bill played Pennywise as a middle-aged man, and that was scary,” Eggers remembers. “I said to myself, ‘I think Bill can do Orlok.’ ”
Playing Orlok’s opposite number, young bride Ellen Hutter in the mythical German city of Wisborg in 1838, is Lily-Rose Depp, who the director says “really understood the script. She’s seen every Dracula movie ever made, even the art-house ones. After her audition, everyone, including the videographer, who shouldn’t care, was in tears.”
“Nosferatu’s” other actors also fell into place, including the gifted Nicholas Hoult in the difficult role of Ellen’s husband Thomas, Eggers favorite Willem Dafoe as occult authority Professor Von Franz and top actors like Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Simon McBurney and Emma Corrin in smaller roles, a casting coup Eggers calls “really fortuitous — we needed actors with their depth to make it work.” But it is the nature of “Nosferatu,” as opposed to the Bela Lugosi-starring “Dracula,” that makes the count and Ellen the drama’s key players.
“In ‘Dracula,’ Lugosi is going to London for, I don’t know, world domination,” the director explains. “In ‘Nosferatu’ the count is coming to Wisborg explicitly for her,” as a script line where he insists “You have awakened me from an eternity of darkness” makes clear. What Eggers has done with his “Nosferatu” both echoes what is implicit in the 1922 version (of which he says “there is a dark sensuality to it”) and expands on it, taking the original’s theme of “sex and death and turning it up a little. The story of the demon lover is what connected to me.”
One of the hallmarks of Eggers’ films, visible in spades in “Nosferatu,” is his reliance on research to get to an almost (yes) fiendish level of on-screen detail. He and his team built five city blocks of Wisborg, constructing it in so many layers that an early shot of Thomas rushing through the streets is almost dizzying for how much is contained in the frame: hordes of hurrying pedestrians, bustling merchants, multiple beasts of burden, all competing for a place in the sun.
“I personally enjoy the act of research,” Eggers admits, “and while I get tired of beating the drum for historical accuracy, I do believe an accumulation of details grounds and transports an audience, makes it easier for them to believe the metaphysical stuff in the film.”
Eggers often says that the gathering of details through research “comes more easily to me than inventing,” including details that will not be visible to an audience, like children’s initials inside a character’s watch case or the way Thomas’ friend Friedrich (Taylor-Johnson) wears a period-appropriate corset under his clothes. “The audience never sees it,” the director says, “but he feels it.”
Some of the film’s details, like Orlok’s frighteningly long fingers and shooting exteriors in Hunedoara, an ancient castle in the real Transylvania in Romania, are nods to earlier vampire films, as is the use of 5,000 live rats, some of whom were “trained to run up a ship’s gangplank and enter on command.” But no matter where the elements come from, Eggers acknowledges that he is no mere accumulator. “I’m always shaping, creating, building off reality,” he says. “The lens we see things through is my interpretation of this time period.”
One of things Eggers especially likes about research is that it “brings to light stranger things than you can imagine.” The director emphasizes that Orlok is a folk vampire, “not a suave dinner-coat-wearing seducer,” but rather “a corpse, more similar to a zombie. And what would a dead 16th-century Transylvanian nobleman look like?” It turns out he’d wear, as Orlok does on-screen, “a cloak with impossibly long sleeves, longer than useful, to show he could afford the fabric, and that creates a very unique look.”
Though “Nosferatu” features a rich and enveloping visual backdrop, it was less expensive to produce than Eggers’ previous film, 2022’s “The Northman,” a massive Viking-style vengeance epic set in 10th-century Scandinavia. “That was the greatest learning experience I could ever have wished for,” the director remembers. “The scale was so massive compared to what I’d done before, it was trial by fire. I always want to bite off a little more than I can chew, and when that one was over, I said to myself, ‘OK, I know how to direct.’ ”
One of the places Eggers challenged himself on his latest film was in his decision to shoot as much of “Nosferatu” as possible in long, continuous takes. This mandated the designing and construction of 60 sets, including many with movable walls and ceilings to facilitate camera movement.
“Like period details,” the director explains, “long, uninterrupted takes draw you further into the film’s world. If there are no edits, you are more and more drawn into the hypnotic quality of the story. You feel a little less like you’re being fooled.”
Because a single small mistake by anyone can ruin a minutes-long take, this philosophy demanded a high degree of concentration from Eggers’ cast and crew.
“My set is not humorless, but it is fairly serious and very demanding,” the director says. “Everyone involved, from the cast to every single dolly pusher to the people who open and close walls for the camera, every person knows they are part of it. Our camera team in Prague was experienced — they’d worked on a lot of films, but they told us this was different.”
Making this degree of collaboration possible was the presence of one of the most cohesive crews in the independent film world, many of whom, including production designer Craig Lathrop and costume designer Linda Muir, have been there for all four of Eggers’ features to date. His Oscar nominated cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and editor Louise Ford go back even further, working on two of the director’s earlier shorts as well.
“It’s awesome — a loving, dysfunctional family,” Eggers says genially of his team. “We’re extensions of each other, we trust each other, we know what each other is fishing for. Also, the more we work together, each of us has more freedom to bring more of ourselves to the table.”
But, even though Eggers allows that “a Venn diagram of our interests would mostly overlap,” there are also “areas where we push each other in different directions. We want to feed each other, we want to grow, we’re pushing each other past where we initially imagined.”
The question of how to portray Count Orlok’s fate was a key problem that took cooperation to resolve. “The ending was a challenge,” Eggers says, in large part because “my approach, my taste, is that you don’t show the monster. And for a long time we don’t show him. But in the end there was no way around seeing the creature, and what that last scene would be was alarming and frightening to me.”
Complicating things further was Eggers’ distaste for one way to go. “I don’t like it when vampires burn up from the sun. In fact, it was the original ‘Nosferatu’ that’s credited as the movie that introduces the idea of dying from sunlight. What the folklore says is that the vampire must return to its grave before first light. Which means that is dawn, which signifies redemption, that kills, not the light.”
To solve this dilemma, Eggers decided to turn to a choreographer who’d been brought in to consult on different scenes, those between husband and wife Thomas and Ellen. What was worked out in terms of placement of the actors is so effective, so piercing, that it’s not surprising to hear the filmmaker say that though he knows Orlok is “such a monster, I personally, weirdly, feel sad for him.”
If there is a name on “Nosferatu’s” cast and crew list that is surprising, it is Chris Columbus as one of the film’s producers. Yes, that’s the same Chris Columbus who directed two “Home Alone” movies, two of “Harry Potter,” “Mrs. Doubtfire” and other family-friendly extravaganzas. It is a mark of Eggers’ determination to be making the best possible films that he wanted him on the team.
The two men bonded over a joint love of classic British Hammer horror, and Columbus served as an executive producer on Eggers’ first two films. But on “Nosferatu,” he functioned as very much a hands-on producer.
“Chris has been a great mentor,” Eggers says. “We met during post-production on ‘The Witch,’ but we never worked intimately together until ‘Nosferatu.’
“[Cinematographer] Jarin and I preplan every shot to the point of creative strangulation, and [Columbus] is a great antidote to our arty-farty-ness. He’s a master Hollywood storyteller, he’ll say things like ‘Where is this beat? It’s in the script but it’s not in the boards.’
“Because we make such different films, there’s no weirdness. He doesn’t want to water down what we do, he knows it’s not another Chris Columbus film. If there’s time on the set to do another shot, he’ll push me to do it. He becomes another collaborator.”
And in the motivated world of Robert Eggers, those who can make films better are always welcome, no questions asked.
And what would the 9-year-old who started it all feel about what has happened? “He would think it was pretty cool,” Eggers says after a moment.
“I thought I’d be making movies as a kid, but not like this.”
