It’s a crisp December day in Soho, and Robert Eggers, dressed in trademark black with many adorned rings, is pondering a project that has been decades in the making. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a child who prized woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer and Martin Schongauer over comic books, Eggers became a fan of FW Murnau’s expressionist silent classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror early in life. That’s a high-falutin’ interest for a preteen.
“Yes, but in a weird way kids can have more patience with things that are different, because they’re more open to things,” says the film-maker. “My parents would rent Merchant Ivory movies, and I couldn’t really follow them. But I liked whatever these wild adults were doing. I watched Nosferatu for the first time when I was nine. I think part of the magic was that the VHS that I had was made from a bad 16mm print with no soundtrack. If it had a bad organ score it might not have had the same effect. That quality heightened Murnau’s atmosphere. It felt like a document unearthed from the 1830s, when the film is set, rather than the 1920s, when it was made.”
When, in 2015, the American auteur scored a huge hit with The Witch, a star-making feature for both Anya Taylor-Joy and demonic billy goat Black Philip, he announced that he would write and direct a remake of Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, that famously unauthorised 1922 adaptation of Dracula, Bram Stoker’s novel from 1897.
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Murnau changed names and details because of copyright issues, yet Stoker’s widow, Florence Balcombe, successfully sued, and a court ordered all copies of the film to be destroyed. Happily, several prints survived and had an enduring impact on cinema.
‘I honestly think the idea of Dracula and what Dracula has spawned and inspired is better than the novel. Stoker is not the greatest writer. Sorry’
Eggers previously staged Nosferatu at high school. He’s not alone in this passion: Werner Herzog remade the film in 1979 with Klaus Kinski; E Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire, a dramatisation of the Murnau film’s creation from 2000, featured the Eggers regular Willem Dafoe as Max Schreck, the mysterious actor who originated the film’s monstrous antagonist, Count Orlok.
Ten years and two features after the initial announcement, Eggers’s Nosferatu is finally playing in a cinema near you. The director’s earlier production, set in Prague and starring Taylor-Joy and Harry Styles, was scuppered when Styles pulled out at the eleventh hour, citing scheduling conflicts.
“I’m glad it didn’t happen back then,” Eggers says. “I think that in all of my public statements about it I’m wrestling with my own hubris and my own lack of confidence. It only proved the point that it needed time. I needed to learn more about film-making. It was all for the better. I have not said this before, but at the same time it was good that I did have the idea. Because the idea was there in the back of my head. And I had time to refine it.”
Eggers’s Nosferatu stars Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen, the tortured, stricken young bride, terrorised from a continent away by an evil presence she cannot name. Her husband Edward, played by Nicholas Hoult, is a striving young broker dispatched on business to the Carpathians, where maggoty peasants perform rituals to ward off Count Orlok, his client (played by Bill Skarsgård, wearing even more makeup than he did as the scary clown Pennywise in It.).
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Ellen’s melancholia and generalised terror lean into contemporaneous ideas about hysteria. And while we do get a gaggle of male experts – Dafoe’s Van Helsing cypher, Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s wit and Hoult’s doting groom – the dark heart of the film is Ellen’s private Gothic hell.
“Once I understood that it would be Ellen’s story, and that we’d see everything through her eyes, that was more interesting for me,” Eggers says. “It had the potential to be a lot more emotionally and psychologically complex than in an adventure story about a real-estate agent.”
Despite many lovingly crafted expressionist shadows and forests of stygian gloom, Eggers’s Nosferatu is hardly a straight remake of Murnau’s silent horror standard. Tod Browning’s Dracula, from 1931, which originated the iconic and elegant interpretation of Count Dracula by Bela Lugosi, was a touchstone. Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, from 1979, which reimagined the monster (played by Klaus Kinski) as existentially lonely, casts another dark pallor across Eggers’s project. Like that film, the current Nosferatu features hundreds of rats; unlike that film, which allegedly led to the deaths of dozens of animals, the rats were well-treated and kept safe behind Perspex. (“Definitely no rats were harmed during the making of this film,” the director affirms.)
‘We cast Romani actors and nonprofessionals from the Czech Republic and Slovakia for our Transylvanian village. It only makes sense if the visitor can’t translate their warnings’
“I watched the Herzog movie a ton as a teenager, and it’s impossible to not notice that it influenced my film. However, in the 10-ish years that I’ve spent trying to make this movie I’ve avoided the Herzog film. I also watched Coppola’s Dracula movie a lot as a kid. But never in the past 10 years. We did deliberately reference the Tod Browning Dracula a couple times. And I did go back to Bram Stoker’s book.
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“That was interesting, because, even though I knew that he had a moustache in the book and I knew that he was not killed by a wooden stake, I was so immersed in the world of cinematic Dracula adaptations that I was implanting cinematic tropes and scenes that weren’t actually there. I read Dracula very closely three times. But I honestly think the idea of Dracula and what Dracula has spawned and inspired is better than the novel. Stoker is not the greatest writer. Sorry.”
He was, paradoxically, guided by a much lower-brow text, Mel Brooks’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, starring Leslie Nielson as the bumbling count. Sample dialogue (on encountering a gush of blood): “This is ghastly! We should have put newspapers down first.”
“Dracula: Dead and Loving It was actually tremendously helpful,” Eggers says. “Because really it just highlights everything that doesn’t work about Dracula. It’s totally ludicrous that Van Helsing just happens to have the book with all the answers in it. And Mel Brooks makes clear and understands that in lot of other filmic versions everyone’s saying, ‘Don’t go to the castle.’ And he answers, ‘I’m off to the castle now, thank you.’ We cast Romani actors and nonprofessionals from the Czech Republic and Slovakia for our Transylvanian village. It only makes sense if the visitor can’t translate their warnings.”
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Eggers’s mother, Kelly, is an actor and a ballet dancer who worked with Laurence Fishburne on the soap opera One Life to Live. Last September his twin brothers, Max and Sam Eggers, won acclaim for their horror-comedy The Front Room, in which the singer Brandy plays a pregnant, overwhelmed woman attending to Kathryn Hunter’s mother-in-law from hell. Max previously cowrote Robert’s Oscar-nominated The Lighthouse with the director.
“My dad was a Shakespeare professor, and my mom had a kids’ theatre company,” Eggers says. “Growing up, we were constantly acting in plays. Even though we lived in southern New Hampshire in the woods, we occasionally had the opportunity to go to a museum or see a ballet. And I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Eggers has a reputation as a historical perfectionist. He collaborated closely with archaeologists, historians and the Icelandic poet Sjón Sigurdsson to recreate Viking life for his Ulster-based shoot of The Northman. The densely worded, Herman Melville-inspired The Lighthouse entailed deep delves into mermaid mythology, the symbolist artists Jean Delville and Arnold Böcklin, and the occult. He spent four years immersed in colonial American politics and providential writings to approximate 17th-century New England dialogue in The Witch. Nosferatu was another brainstorm.
“The cinematic vampire has evolved from Max Schreck to Edward Cullen,” says Eggers, referencing Robert Pattinson’s character in Twilight. “We needed to find a way to make the vampire scary again. We went back to folklore and reports by people who actually believed in vampires. To the things that happened to people who believed in vampires and thought they were real. Those early folkloric vampires are corpses. They are more akin to zombies than what 20th- and 21st-century cinema would lead us to imagine.
“So then the question was, well, what does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? What kind of Hungarian finery would he wear if he died in the 16th century? What kind of shoes and hat? We spent time with the Romanian playwright Florin Lazarescu, reconstructing ancient Dacian, the ancestral language of Romania. We had a Russian professor to advise on the Russian sailors on the ship. We had another adviser for the Romany languages.”
The writer of four very loquacious scripts laughs. “There was a lot of language.”
Nosferatu is in cinemas from Wednesday, January 1st
