The Allure of the Macabre: Robert Eggers Talks ‘Nosferatu’

Filmmaker Robert Eggers’ resume is not lengthy, but it’s impressive. The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman (which he co-wrote with Sjón), are quite different tales, but all are canopied by the macabre. Witchcraft. Abject loneliness. Brutal violence. Each conveyed through a sort of Jungian lens by Eggers. His latest achievement, Nosferatu, could cement him with the great horror masters. The film is a take on F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror which starred Max Schreck and was loosely based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Nosferatu was not the suave vampire that Bela Lugosi would portray in Dracula (1931), but a frightening, feral-looking undead creature that lurked in the shadows.

Eggers’ Nosferatu is both depraved romance and heroic alchemy. Starring an unrecognizable Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, William Dafoe, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, and Simon McBurney, this tale of the strigoi is dark, disturbing, and highly entertaining. Eggers has been enamored of the original film since he was a child. Though he’s had to put this aside to make other projects, it’s been his dream project for a while. He’s teamed with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke again to create a world of Stygian-hued menace in Nosferatu. Eggers recently spoke with Script magazine about his journey as a filmmaker.

On Getting Greenlit

Sonya Alexander: I know this is something you've been working on for a while. How did you finally get the greenlight for it?

Robert Eggers: You never know how these things are going to come together but I'd been trying to make this movie for about ten years, and it fell apart a couple of times. The last time it fell apart I felt it was not going to ever happen, and I was OK with that. I thought that maybe I should be making original things only. It's distasteful to do a remake of such a famous thing. It's over. Then I had another script that I took to market, and nobody wanted to make it. I went to Peter Kujawski at Focus Features and said, ‘How about Nosferatu?’ and he said yes. It just happened to be at the right time. So here we go. [laughs]

On Influences and Style

Sonya Alexander: In one of your interviews, you mentioned artist Hyman Bloom as an influence. He said during an interview that a visit to a morgue inspired some of his work. Have you ever visited a morgue?

Robert Eggers: I have never visited a morgue. I must admit I'm terribly ashamed that I haven't. I wanted to go to the Body Farm where Sally Mann did a series of photographs of corpses. People donate their bodies, and they leave them out in different situations to decay so that forensics can understand what happened to murder victims.

Sonya Alexander: How do you feel The Witch, The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu are connected?

Robert Eggers: I have a primal narrative that comes out. It's not something that's designed, it just sort of happens. Everyone likes to die naked and insane…! I'm interested in folklore, mythology, fairytales, and archetypal stories. I don't have anything particularly unique or sophisticated to say about it. I'm sure a critic could sum it up better than myself.

Sonya Alexander: How do you think your silent short Hansel and Gretel informed your style for this, if at all?

Robert Eggers: I don't think it informed my style for this. You can see maybe something is similar with the prosthetic makeup design of the witch and Orlok here and there, but that was probably inspired by Nosferatu anyway. I think it just kind of highlights my love for silent cinema that I've had since I was a child. Part of the choice of doing my first film that way was knowing that my facility for filmmaking would be limited, and my budget would be limited, and my lighting would be limited. If I could do it in black and white, I could keep it contained. It is a terrible movie.

Sonya Alexander: I disagree!

Robert Eggers: I don't know who posted it on YouTube....if you are a young filmmaker who happens to like what I'm doing, that should give you hope if you're ever feeling doubtful about your own talents…!

Sonya Alexander: I also read that twenty years ago there was a family in South Romania who thought they had a strigoi. Did you visit them, or did you just read about them while you were doing research?

Robert Eggers: I just read about them. I didn't really spend any time in that region, but I spent a decent amount of time in Transylvania researching.

On Research

Sonya Alexander: What were the steps of your research for Nosferatu?

Robert Eggers: Too many things to say...! When I decided I wanted to embark on this journey, I watched the Murnau film again and I read the biography of Murnau. In the appendix is this screenplay by Henrik Galeen which has Murnau’s notes, obviously translated into English. 

Then I started trying to understand the filmmakers’ intentions and their love for German Romanticism. Albin Grau, the producer, was a practicing occultist and I wanted to understand his views. In some interviews, I think he tried to be a little sensationalist because he talks about some Serbian vampire lore. I think there's no way that he didn't believe in the existence of astral vampires as a reality. His views were different than the Van Helsing character, von Franz, played by Willem Dafoe who's an occultist of the 1830s. 

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I just wanted to do my best to understand the original filmmakers’ intentions and how that might influence where else I might go in my research. I had to do a lot of research about everyday life and the material world and interior world of Northern Germany. I had to learn about vampire folklore from Transylvania.

On Filming

Sonya Alexander: Did you have any nightmares during the filming of Nosferatu?

Robert Eggers: Mainly about the schedule...! I often have nightmares that have to do with the film during the writing phase or sometimes nightmares can even inspire dreams. But it usually happens during the writing phase because you're only focused on the story and nothing else. None of the moving parts, the bigger picture, or the personalities. I'm also usually watching a ton of movies when I'm writing so you're going to bed with the residue of the day.

Sonya Alexander: Was it difficult to make the leap to a big budget film like this?

Robert Eggers: The first big budget leap was The Northman. That was challenging. This was actually a more modest budget than The Northman, though the scale is debatably larger. The Northman was a great learning experience to prepare me and my collaborators to do this film.

Sonya Alexander: How so?

Robert Eggers: My other films took place in single locations with very small casts. There's just a lot of moving parts and certain responsibilities of making something of a certain scale. I tried to intuit, tried to foresee, tried to research, tried to understand...but there were certain things that I just could not grasp before I started making The Northman. 

There are just certain things I had to learn by doing and those things were then applied to Nosferatu, not that Nosferatu is a walk in the park. I want to continue to challenge myself, but if you're a carpenter and you want to make a f*cking really crazy cabinet...if you've made a lot of other cabinets in different styles and you've got a lot of tools in your toolbox, it's easier to make that crazy cabinet in your imagination. That was a clunky metaphor, but you get it.

On Writing

Sonya Alexander: What are the benefits of developing characters that are parts of small worlds like The Witch and The Lighthouse?

Robert Eggers: Those are kind of fun stories because they're both stories about isolation, so you have that tempest in a teapot with both of them and that is a satisfying story to write because their personalities clash and explode and that's always fun to play with...evolving power dynamics. That's fun to do here. That's the reason Dostoevsky is so much fun to read…because of the extreme flip flopping of power dynamics through the scenes. It's so gripping and that's something that I enjoy exploring.

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Sonya Alexander: When you tackle a script, do you start them with the same process, or does it vary by project?

Robert Eggers: It varies by project. Certain projects demand certain things. Generally, I write with a writing partner. Nosferatu is something I began a zillion years ago and came back to. With my schedule and all the stuff that I'm working on, I need to have a writing partner because I need to have multiple scripts going at the same time because you never know what's going to work and not work. 

Working with a writing partner is a different process than working alone. Since The Northman, every script that I've started writing I've started writing with Sjón. We'll get together and hash out a lot of ideas and create what the story is. He'll break the first draft and then I'll come in and start doing stuff. We did another script where he broke the beginning, I broke the ending, then we came together again to work on it. Recently we did one where I was really specific about the cinema language I wanted to include in the script, so I wrote the first draft alone. Every project demands something different.

Focus Features’ Nosferatu will be released in Theaters on December 25, 2024.