Robert Eggers on taking his time making ‘Nosferatu’ and changing Bill Skarsgard's role

Nosferatu writer and director Robert Eggers was obsessed with vampires and Bram Stoker’s Dracula from an early age, even dressing up as the eponymous count at Halloween. “One can only guess it was some kind of unconscious interest in sex and death as a kid because it’s taboo,” reflects Eggers, who saw a photograph of Max Schreck’s monstrous Count Orlok from FW Murnau’s 1922 silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony Of Horror in a book about vampires in the school library and wanted to “find out what this was all about”.

He was nine when he watched the film for the first time. “On a VHS, which had no soundtrack,” recalls the director, who is now aged 41. “Had it had a cheesy organ or synth score, it might not have had the same effect on me. And because of the degraded quality of the VHS, made from a bad 16mm print, it felt unearthed from the past.”

In high school, Eggers wrote, directed and starred in his own “humble” adaptation of Murnau’s film, with his friend Ashley Kelly Tata, now a theatre and opera director in New York. “Embarrassingly, I played Orlok, but we can let that go,” he says. “It was very expressionist. Black-and-white make-up, black-and-white wigs, costumes, sets. It was a silent film on stage, and we were pantomiming everything. There were intertitles and music.” The artistic director of a local theatre company was impressed and invited Eggers to mount a more professional version. “It changed my life,” he reveals, “cemented the fact I wanted to be a director, and marked me forever with Nosferatu.”

After his debut feature The Witch was a hit at Sundance in 2015, Eggers tried to adapt Nosferatu for the big screen. “It was foolish of me and I’m glad it didn’t happen, because I’ve grown a lot as a filmmaker and as a person and have fostered these close relationships with my creative heads of department, and our collaborations are more fluid and we’re further extensions of each other,” says Eggers, who instead followed The Witch with The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). But Nosferatu was never far from his mind. “It fell apart several times, and a few years ago I had come to terms with the fact the film was just not going to happen… but then it did, because filmmaking is weird and Hollywood is strange, and you don’t know whatever is going to happen next. I’m glad it took some time.”

Eggers’ Nosferatu, which Focus Features/Universal released in North America on December 25 and in the UK on January 1, takes inspiration from both Murnau’s film and Stoker’s 1897 novel, of which the former was an unauthorised adaptation. Nicholas Hoult stars as trainee estate agent Thomas, who travels from Germany’s Baltic coast to Transylvania to meet the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard) about a property, while his wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) stays with their well-heeled best friends (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin). But as Orlok’s connection to Ellen is revealed, Willem Dafoe’s Van Helsing-like professor is drafted in to fight the evil that has spread to their hometown.

Casting switch

When Eggers initially tried to make Nosferatu, he had cast Skarsgard in what would become Hoult’s role, rather than as the dreaded count. “Things change, things develop. In It Chapter Two, there’s a scene where Skarsgard plays Pennywise as a middle-aged man and he had so much weight and so much darkness, and I thought, ‘Maybe Bill’s Orlok?’ We had a conversation, and I said, ‘I think you can do it. I want you to do it. Let’s work on this and build a character and do a screen test.’ Once you saw the screen test, it was undeniable.”

Skarsgard’s Orlok is the anti­thesis of Schreck’s skeletal monster, presenting instead as a hulking brute with a booming voice — less vampire, more undead Transylvanian nobleman, replete with a thick moustache that recalls Rasputin, a character Eggers has toyed with making a film about. “Cinematic vampires have lost their power and what makes them frightening,” says Eggers, who “went back to the folklore to understand the time when people believed vampires existed and were truly terrified of them”.

He discovered early folkloric vampires were described as walking corpses and visually more akin to zombies. “Then the question becomes, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? I sent Bill some Soviet movies with scary Balkan villains with incredibly low voices, so there’s something of that [in there]. But we still have some nods to Schreck — the fingernails, something about the profile and the hunch and the shape of his skull. Because you need to respect the past.”

Ellen is the object of Orlok’s terrifying obsession, and Depp impresses with her English accent and acrobatic body contortions that did not require CG or wires to achieve. “She is also passionate about Dracula and has seen all the major versions and some less popular, more obscure versions, so she knew what I was up to and had my number, so to speak,” notes Eggers. “Her performance is so raw and powerful. The harrowing physical feats she performs are the thing people comment the most about, and well they should because they’re incredibly difficult, not just physically but emotionally. But the mono­logue she gives in bed, where she’s half recalling and half being present, is just as impressive for me.”

While Skarsgard’s Orlok respects the past, Eggers’ Nosferatu looks very different to Murnau’s, its sumptuous cinematography inspired by German romantic paintings of the period and the work of the late Freddie Francis. One of Britain’s greatest cinematographers, Francis shot Jack Clayton’s The Innocents — a key cinematic reference here — and directed more than a dozen horror films for Hammer, Amicus and the like. “I’m such a fan, he always had brilliant, elegant staging,” says the filmmaker.

Likewise, Nosferatu — which shot at Prague’s Barrandov Studio and on location in the Czech Republic between February and May 2023 — features long takes and complex staging, his actors moving around in the frame in cahoots with the camera. Just don’t call it modern. “I’m always struck when people say the filmmaking feels modern, because the staging is not,” insists Eggers. “It’s kind of the things that were happening in the ’60s, ’50s and ’40s. We don’t use a Steadicam, ever. We just use dolly and crane. It’s pretty traditional.

“Obviously, the technology in the make-up, and the technology in the camera support, and the CG to finish things and polish things and perfect things is [modern],” he continues, “but what we’re doing, shooting on film, with long, unbroken takes is not new. I mean, you can watch it in a Universal Sherlock Holmes B-movie.”

Having finally exorcised Nosferatu from his system, Eggers, who lives in London — “it’s a little bit more chill [than New York] and, given my proclivities, having more history is appealing” — is keeping his options open for what comes next. “I have many things,” he says. “You’ve got to keep many things on the stove, because you don’t know what the studio is going to order, and you don’t know what they’re going to send back to the kitchen.

• Into the shadows: creating the deep, dark look of ‘Nosferatu’