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There’s a moment early in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, when Lily-Rose Depp, last seen as the twisty pop star in The Idol, telegraphs to the audience: This will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
In Eggers’ reimagining of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist horror fantasy Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, Depp is magnetic vampire muse Ellen Hutter, paired with Nicholas Hoult as her husband Thomas. As we witness Ellen’s loneliness and desire being sated by a monster, followed by an opening monologue in which she confesses her fears to her husband, it’s clear that Eggers’ casting choice has paid off.
At audition, Depp performed that same monologue, and Eggers gave her the role that same day. “Myself, the casting director, and even the videographer were in tears, because it was so powerful,” Eggers says. “She was, as she is in the film, incredibly brave, and raw, and powerful. Her ability to tune into this dark and haunted place so quickly is pretty phenomenal.”
In the original Nosferatu, a young German realtor is sent to Transylvania to secure a property in his local area for the mysterious Count Orlok, who arrives by boat and proceeds to stalk the man’s fiancée. If you think that sounds a lot like the plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — published in 1897 — so did the deceased author’s estate, who sued the film’s producers and ordered every print to be destroyed. However, some grainy bootleg copies survived, and in 1981 serious repair work began in a bid to restore Murnau’s vision.
Eggers has loved the story of Nosferatu almost all his life. He was just 9 years old when he happened upon one of those grainy bootlegs of Murnau’s film, and he became especially captivated by actor Max Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula is subtly described as a “tall old man, clean shaven, save for a long white mustache and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere.” In Murnau’s Nosferatu, however, Schreck appears as a walking nightmare —a terrifying, skeletal creature with two sharp, pointed teeth, bat-like ears and claws for hands.
“Max Schreck’s performance, the makeup that he designed, his uncanny movements,” Eggers recalls of seeing it that first time. “The VHS was made from a degraded 16mm print, so you don’t see the bald cap and the grease paint, and sometimes his irises look like cat eyes. It doesn’t look like that in the restored version. But in what I saw, it had kind of more realism, because of the degraded quality that I was watching.”
The year before, aged 8, Eggers had dressed as Count Dracula for Halloween, his fascination with vampire lore then just beginning. Later, in high school, inspired by Henrik Galeen’s Nosferatu screenplay and Stoker’s novel Dracula, Eggers would team up with classmate Ashley Kelly-Tata (now an accomplished theater director) to put on a stage production of Nosferatu, in which Eggers starred as the vampire Count Orlok. Edouard Langlois, artistic director of the Edwin Booth Theatre in Dover, NH, saw the production and invited Eggers and Kelly-Tata to bring it to his space. Thus, that play would show Eggers what he wanted to do, and it became the reason he is a director today. And ever since, he has dreamed of bringing Nosferatu to the screen.
The project almost came together a few times, only to have it fall apart for various reasons. “It’s complicated,” Eggers says, citing one factor was originally that the timing crossed over with when he was still in post with his previous film, The Northman. “I probably would’ve had a nervous breakdown had it all gone [at that time],” he says. “But basically, I think after it fell apart the second time, I was like, ‘This is not happening. It’s never going to happen, it’s done. Forget about it. Murnau’s ghost is telling me to f*ck off, leave it alone.’ And I had a script that I was really passionate about, but no one wanted to make it. But then I went to Kujo [Peter Kujawski] at Focus [Features] and said, ‘Nosferatu?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, sounds great.’ And then, all of a sudden, everything snowballed.”
Eggers approached Hoult for the role of Thomas — a pure and heartfelt man gripped by the need to provide for his wife — because they had met years before. As soon as he saw Eggers’ first feature, The Witch (2015), the actor had called him. “Nicholas is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met,” Eggers says. “I remember when I met him the first time, it was in Brooklyn, in this little bar that no longer exists, sadly, because it was pretty cool. He was just so gentle.”
Eggers thought of Hoult for this, particularly in view of his work in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2018 film The Favourite. “I think after working with Yorgos, and I think, particularly his attention to detail of every single beat and micro beat in the dialogue and the scene work, I felt like this is kind of a perfect match,” Eggers says. “He has both this incredible, naturalistic, emotional thing, and then he can handle the period language, and really communicate it effortlessly. And he has a great look for it and a great feel for it.”
For anyone who has seen Eggers’ three films — The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman — it is understood that he has a singular and transportive vision. As Aaron Taylor-Johnson — who plays Friedrich Harding, the vampire-sceptic husband of Ellen’s best friend Anna — puts it: “A Robert Eggers movie is so distinctively Robert Eggers.” And as such, in Nosferatu, Eggers plunges us into his vision, to another dimension — an elegant yet terrifying world in which a monster stalks the dark of the unconscious, as both the evil within and the outward manifestation of some ancient lore.
Like Hoult, Willem Dafoe had also met Eggers right after The Witch. And like Hoult, he had called the director and asked to meet, which led to his role in two-hander The Lighthouse with Robert Pattinson, and then a role in The Northman too. Of the latter, Dafoe says, “I’m not seven feet tall and 350 pounds, so I think I was very fortunate that he found something for me to do in that. And that was fun. I’m a huge fan.”
In Nosferatu, Dafoe plays Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a kindred spirit to Count Dracula’s vampire-slaying nemesis Abraham Van Helsing. “I know he had been talking about Nosferatu for a long time,” says Dafoe, “and I certainly wasn’t going to play Orlok because in fact, I did that before in Shadow of the Vampire [the E. Elias Merhige-directed 2000 film about the making of the original Nosferatu, for which Dafoe was Oscar-nominated]. But I was very happy when he proposed this role of Von Franz, because clearly it was a role that was a guilty pleasure for him. And once upon a time he was an actor, and I felt very strongly that this is the role he would play if he weren’t directing.”
As an expert on the occult and mysticism, Von Franz is the only character who truly understands the strange psychic connection between Count Orlok and Depp’s Ellen, which, though absent from the original Nosferatu, is a major plot point in Eggers’ film. Says Dafoe, “I’ve heard Robert describe it as a triangle between Ellen’s husband, who’s a loving guy, he loves her dearly, and he’s conscientious. He wants to be a good husband, but he doesn’t quite see her, and he doesn’t understand what she’s going through. And then on the other hand, you have this demon lover that attracts her, and she doesn’t know why, but somewhere there is a deep understanding there and a deep attraction.”
That strange magnetism between Ellen and Count Orlok is at the heart of the film. Unlike her friend Anna (Emma Corrin), Ellen cannot, or will not, conceal her sexual desires. The vampire seems to hear some internal cry in her, and targets her as a result, and in this, Eggers explores themes of punishment and the shaming of female sexuality. “Particularly in the 1980s, there was a lot of literary criticism talking about all these Victorian male authors who created these female heroines who have sexual desire and sexual energy, and then need to be killed and punished for that,” Eggers says. “It’s this misogynist thing. But I think a lot of female literary critics who I was also reading were saying, ‘But isn’t it also interesting that, from this repressed cultural period, there’s the idea of this dark, chthonic female heroine who would be the person who could understand the depths?’ And in telling that same kind of story in a modern context, even trying to stay through the lens of the 19th century, we could have potentially some more nuance there, potentially, hopefully.”
Depp sees Ellen as a woman experiencing “a real loneliness as well as a nascent sexuality.” While, as she says, this is “something that I think is everybody experiences kind of around that time, be it a girl, or a boy, or whoever, I think there’s not as much room for girls, especially at the time. We’re talking about a time period where there was a lot less room for women and girls to be much of anything except for exactly what people wanted them to be. So, I think you feel that in Ellen, and you feel like the birth of all these new feelings, and she doesn’t really have anybody to talk to about it, or anybody to understand her … I think it’s a real source of shame for her, and one that she’s trying to come to terms with, and that’s what I think is so beautiful about her relationship with Von Franz, Willem’s character, because he sees her in this way and understands her, I think, in a way that she longs to be understood.”
Hoult adds: “Talking about the sexuality, there’s also that interesting moment where Ellen says, whilst under some sort of possession, ‘You could never satisfy me like he could.’ There’s this element, I think, with Thomas where, because he is so good-natured and pure in many ways, I think he hasn’t ever let any darkness in to his life or in his own passions.”
As Ellen becomes increasingly disturbed by Orlok’s imminent arrival, Depp was required to embody the vampire’s possession of her, arching and contorting her body, her eyes rolling back in their sockets. In training for that body work, Eggers brought in Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, a choreographer who specializes in Japanese butoh (originally named ankoku butoh, which translates as “dance of utter darkness.” “Butoh was something that I was familiar with,” Eggers says. “I had worked with Marie-Gabrielle and [choreographer] Denise Fujiwara on The Witch, and so I had a basic understanding of it, and knew that it would have many of the tools to do this stuff. So, some things became more demonic possession, but the starting place was with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie.”
Eggers also explored the work of 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his findings on so-called hysteria. “Charcot got an artist in to do engravings of his idea of every hysterical pose that his patients made for different reasons, and so we were able to use that as a roadmap to how we would orchestrate the dynamics of her character through all those different scenes.”
But of course, the vampire itself would be the crux of Eggers’ vision, evoking all his deep research into vampire lore. He went back to the tropes of other representations and peeled them back to build his own monster. His vampire would not drink from his victims’ necks, nor would he appear like any other that came before on screen.
“Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I’ve been thinking about and looking at for a long time,” Eggers says. “I had read Montague Summers [the clergyman scholar who wrote about the occult] as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes. And so, you’re infusing things you’re reading with cinematic tropes that aren’t there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you’re like, ‘They’re not even drinking blood, they’re just strangling people, or suffocating people, or f*cking them to death.’ And that was really interesting.”
In terms of the actual look of Orlok, Eggers says he asked himself, “What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like? That was basically where I started from, and I wanted to still acknowledge Max Schreck’s makeup design.”
In one of the earlier attempts to get his film made, right after The Witch, Eggers had a then-25-year-old Bill Skarsgård in mind for the Thomas Hutter character, but now he asked him to consider the role of Orlok. “I’ve been dying to work with Robert for a very long time, but it was very daunting,” Skarsgård says. For part of his prep work, he spent “countless hours” consuming Romanian folklore podcasts and YouTube videos. “There’s a whole giant subgenre of a rabbit hole where you can just dive into with people reading ancient texts, and the whole kind of mythology around it. And of course, Robert’s intention with this one was to bring it back to this Transylvanian folklore version.”
Eggers says, “First was finding the voice. And also, I didn’t want this spider-hand thing [resting] on the chest. We were trying to flush that stuff away, but we found that in the audition process.”
Then Eggers presented Skarsgård with the look of the monster, but Skarsgård was taken aback. “Bill sees the sculpt of the bust and he freaks out, and he’s like, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me, this guy didn’t look like me when he was even alive. What the f*ck?’ He wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed. And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the point, that you’re totally transforming into somebody else.’ And then, he’s putting the makeup on and he’s like, ‘Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.’ And then, once they put the hair on, even though the makeup wasn’t totally finished, I saw the first moment when he was like, ‘OK, this is cool. This is a person.’ I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something.
“That was the next step of enjoying who the character was and could be,” he continues. “I think it was the second full makeup and costume test, Bill entered, took his mark, and it was like, ‘Orlok’s there. He’s there.’
The voice of the vampire was Hoult and Depp’s first impression of Skarsgård in character. “Rob had a recording of Bill’s voice,” Hoult says, “and that was fascinating, because even through just a phone speaker in the rehearsal room, it was like it got through to your bones, and it was unexpected, but then made perfect sense. You’re like, ‘Oh, of course that’s how he would sound if he was this nobleman who had been dead for 200 years.’ It was otherworldly, but rounded in history, and truth, and so that was exciting.”
But that voice and Orlok’s appearance were not easy to achieve. Sometimes the full make-up would take six hours. Skarsgård says: “To create that voice it was just a heavy labor of a performance. The prosthetics took forever. Everything was very uncomfortable. You were very hot and you were very itchy and sticky. And then for me to just being able to use that voice that we worked so hard on, there was a whole regimen every morning. Not only every morning, but between every take. Between every scene, there was a whole routine that I built up in order to access the voice.”
Says Eggers, “What’s very interesting is not just the physical transformation, not just all the vocal work that he did, but the darkness that he needed to actually inhabit. It sounds silly, but it was real. He told me the kind of things he was thinking about, and it was frightening. And I’m glad he was able to go there. It wouldn’t have worked otherwise.”
In fact, Skarsgård felt deeply haunted by the experience, so much so, that even the film itself began to seem very dark to him. “I became very obsessed… I was so in that mind state that I felt this is pure evil. I felt that the movie was evil. I think that felt like we were doing some sort of evil, dark, magic sorcery at times. I certainly don’t feel that way about the movie now that it’s complete. I think it’s actually beautiful. It’s scary and it’s horrific, but there’s also a lot of beauty in it. And it’s sensual and sexual and it hits on so many different layers. But in terms of reaching out as far as humanly possible away from yourself, and gathering whatever it is that you can gather, and just transforming yourself, this is, I think, probably as far as I’ll go in my entire career.”
At a camera test Depp met Skarsgård in costume for the first time. “I remember thinking, ‘This is genuinely scary as hell, to be just next to him in a room, so I can’t imagine how it’s going to read on screen.’ He was genuinely petrifying-looking, and then, once we started actually shooting the movie, it was otherworldly, because, like everything in a Robert Eggers movie, the detail—the way they made his skin look and feel, the costume, the whole thing—feels so real, and it feels like a total nightmare. That’s what I think is so unsettling about it: it’s not just like looking at a monster; it’s like there’s something very human about him, which I think makes it all the more terrifying.”
Before they were set to shoot, Eggers and his longtime DP Jarin Blashke moved to Prague. “In the early films, I would shot-list the whole thing,” Eggers says, “and he would shot-list the whole thing, and then we would come together and do a kind of greatest hits. Lighthouse was a little more similar to this, where we were often coming up with shots together in the same room.” He catches himself. “When I say ‘early films’, I’m also including some shorts. But this time, I was so busy and consumed with a lot of sh*t that Jarin was coming up with stuff and being like, ‘Do you like this, yes or no?’ But really, in a very lovely fashion. So, we moved to Prague early, so that our kids could start school on time, and, for a month and a half before pre-prep started—not even hard prep—Jarin and I were in my kitchen, coming up with the shots.”
As always, their attention to detail and exacting planning came into play. “It’s a matter of both looking at what’s in the script, and sometimes rewriting things a little bit, to make sure that we can carry things in one fluid shot, and move throughout the scene, and the beats work in a fluid way. It’s tons of planning and working with a storyboard artist. And then we are on a stage with the set taped out, seeing if the shot can work in this space, and if not, do we move windows? Do we move walls? Do we need to move windows and walls in the middle of the shot? Does [production designer] Craig [Lathrop] have to hide hinges in his beautiful finishes that we can’t see, so that we can swing a wall, or have the wall collapse to get the shot?”
Dafoe finds this detailed and tightly planned way of working results in a kind of acting athleticism. “I love this way of working,” he says, “because you can dance with the camera… They meticulously designed the shots, and the shots are very ambitious, and the shots are normally very long, and have to be choreographed and rehearsed. Because they’re complicated and there’s nothing to cut to, because they really shy away from conventional coverage. There really is no coverage. They design these shots, and you have to live in those shots, and you have brief rehearsals before you start. Basically, they tell you what the shot is, and then that becomes the structure, and then you have to fold into it.”
For Taylor-Johnson, the experience of working within that exacting framework also served his performance. “Rob and Jarin, the cinematographer, have this special language,” he says. “And the way they shot this, it was so unique to any other film I’ve ever been on. There’s a lot of blocking. And there’s one setup, one take for each scene. And that would take the majority of the day. And it put tremendous pressure on the actors in the scene. But it also made us really bond super close, because it was like a theatre company in the process of how we would block it, rehearse it all morning, and then get to filming it, and then tweak it and change it.
“The performances are so stripped down. If your eyebrows were dancing up and down on your forehead, you were not allowed any of that. He’d strip you of all your little safety nets and your little tics. That was amazing, because it just pushed you. It pushed you as an actor and it pushed you to just constantly sit within the period. You’re in the costume, you’re in the environment. Everything around you is real. The furniture is 17th-century antique furniture. This was crazy; you’d open up a drawer and there’d be handwritten letters from my character to Emma’s character.”
“We built everything, basically,” Eggers says. “All the interiors and the Wisborg back lot set. We built all that stuff. The courtyard of Orlok’s castle and the gate house was Pernštejn Castle [in the Czech Republic], but we also modified it, we built a larger gate. But for the vast majority of things, we built them. Even the cemetery—we built the mausoleum, and we brought in 30 of our own headstones, to make it what it needed to be for this film.”
Onscreen, Hoult’s Thomas is the first to meet Orlok. He has been sent to get some papers signed by the mysterious Orlok. As he approaches the Transylvanian castle, he stays at an inn, where the locals warn him off. “We built a Transylvanian village in the Czech Republic,” Eggers says. “There were Czech actors, there were Slovakian actors, and then we brought in a whole lot of people from Romania as well to make it work. And it worked.”
On the final stretch of his journey to the castle, Thomas stands, exhausted, in the middle of a forest as snow falls, and a ghostly carriage approaches. The scene is so arrestingly beautiful it feels like the manifestation of a Grimms’ fairytale. “First of all, there’s the snow,” Hoult says. “Rob would spend a lot of time looking at snow in movies, and then he would find movies where he was like, ‘This is the snow.’ But it wouldn’t be snow that’s made nowadays, so then they’d manage to locate 10 bags of this snow from the ’90s that was the snow in another movie. That’s the level that Rob’s working at with everything.”
As the empty carriage draws up, Thomas seems to magically find himself seated. “He’s pulled, into the propulsion of his story,” Hoult says. “So, for that shot to work, I stepped onto a dolly, and then the dolly lifts me up as it’s tracking along, and the shots are so steady, like the step onto the dolly, if that’s not smooth enough, if the dolly dips a little bit because of my weight, all those little things become so very technical, and minute, and that’s how you get the effect of me kind of being pulled into the darkness.”
Hoult had not seen Skarsgård in the full Orlok regalia until shooting the scene when he first enters the castle. “I think that’s part of the genius of how it unravels in the story as well,” Hoult notes, “because for that first interaction, we’re so far apart, he’s just a silhouette. And through that first scene that we do, when we walk into the castle, you don’t really see him. It’s kind of that thing where you’re like, ‘Oh, I know I feel uneasy,’ but Tom is too polite. He’s not the person that’s going to be like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, back up.’ It’s all kind of a weird fever dream, what’s happening, but it’s like, ‘Oh, I’ve got to continue this. This is what I need to do.’”
“There’s a wonderful moment where, through some camera trickery, Bill’s standing at the end of the table,” he recalls, “and then it pans over to me, and then he’s moved around, and he’s actually peering right over my shoulder. There are these beautiful moments where there’s all these things that add up to being like, ‘Oh, this is horrible, and weird, and I should get out of there,’ but, in the moment, because you can’t quite tell what’s happening, it’s kind of spooky, and the tension builds better through that.”
Then there are the rats. 5,000 of them, to be exact. They seem to both follow and represent the vampire, signifying his presence. “A great deal of the rats were trained to enter on cue,” Eggers says, straight-faced. “I think in the scenes where we had thousands of rats, that is not that challenging. The big thing that makes it difficult is that we had to contain them for their safety with plexiglass that you don’t see on camera. And then, rats in the background become CG. But what was more challenging was for Emma Corrin, who had to have live rats placed on their body. “Rats are incontinent,” says Eggers, “so they were defecating and urinating on her, take after take. That’s difficult.”
In that scene, Corrin had to lie, half-naked, covered in rats. “Thirty of them were on my bare chest,” Corrin says. “Honestly, I was being very brave about it. I was very much stoic, being very British about it, really. And then we were in the scene, and I had no top on, and it was just horrible. The smell is something that you can’t imagine. And the incontinence was a thing that I really didn’t expect, but was terrible… It was grim. And yeah, they loved my hair, so they would go and sit in the wig and get all up in my face. Do you watch I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here!? You know when they had to put their hand in the box with the tarantulas? It was a bit like that, I won’t lie.”
Hoult laughs as he recalls his own interaction with the rodents. “I remember when I was opening the casket, and Bill’s laying in there, and there were rats in there, so he was locked in there with rats and I was like, ‘I’m going to keep getting this wrong, so he has to do it more and more.’ When we first burst into that room, there were the 5,000 rats, and then they were almost like a carpet.” He laughs. “Rat rugs. That’s what I’ll be selling on my Etsy store.”
Mainly due to the rodent quotient, Taylor-Johnson advised his wife Sam Taylor-Johnson against watching. “I said to Sam, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t see this movie.’ She’s like, ‘Well, I really desperately want to see it, but is it really that terrifying?’ I was like, ‘Well, listen, you’ve got a phobia of rats. That’s one thing. And then secondly, it’s terrifying.’ And I know it’s definitely going to cause some sleepless nights for most people. But people like that.”
And then there are also the maggots. In a scene where she touches the vampire’s skin, Ellen’s finger seems to dig into something rotten. “Rob was asking me to feel these crevices in his back that were filled with maggots, like there were literally maggots on him,” Depp says. Were they real maggots? “I think there was a question of real maggots, at some point.”
The incredible detail and dedication and the sheer scale of Eggers’ execution could only really have been fulfilled at this time in his career, at a time when he has garnered the kind of backing and support required for a project like this. As he says, “I’m really glad that it took a long time to get the film made, because to make a film like this and to not hate it is a major achievement. And the support from the studio to let me and my collaborators execute our creative collective vision to the best of our abilities was pretty astonishing.”
And that timing allowed for the right cast too, for Depp’s rising star, for Hoult who has several critically acclaimed films out this year alone, plus Superman coming up next; for Sarsgård who became the ideal choice to lean into the mind of the undead, for Eggers’ longtime favorite Dafoe and for Corrin and Taylor-Johnson who had long wanted to work with Eggers. The stars literally seemed to align to finally bring this film to fruition at the right time, so many years after Eggers first imagined it.
Depp says: “I know Rob has been dreaming of making this movie for so long, so, on a human level, not even actor to director, just person to person, it’s so nice to see his dream come true.”
Nosferatu is in theaters December 25th.
Deadline Shoot: Photographer: Lenne Chai; video director and editor: David Ferino; creative director: Fah Sahkaret; videographer: Chris Smith; set designer: Leah Waters-Katz; photo assistants: Chir Yan and Ben Chant; digitech: Dante Velasquez Jr. Lily Rose’s Team – styling: Spencer Singer; make-up: Nina Park; hairstylist: Bryce Scarlett. Nicholas’ Team – styling: Nicole Ferreira Dejulio and Wendi Ferreira; grooming: Jamie Taylor.
