“In many ways, my adaptation of Nosferatu is my most personal film,” says visionary filmmaker Robert Eggers. “A story, not engendered by me, but one that I have lived with, within, and dreamed about since childhood.” He looked to the physical screenplay for Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror for insight and inspiration. “I studied Henrik Galeen’s screenplay with Murnau’s annotations very carefully,” he says, also extensively researching the occult and historical representations of vampires.

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OVERVIEW: Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu has a cryptic, beautiful, and unsettling atmosphere, transporting viewers into a world where witches, curses, and vampires are very real. It stands out for its visually stunning and atmospheric storytelling, creating a sense of timelessness and horror that resonates, exploring themes of obsession, love, and the supernatural, making it a compelling and eerie experience. Eggers’ reimagining is a labor of love and respect for the original film, while also bringing fresh, innovative elements to the table. The film features stunning cinematography, with a dark, moody aesthetic that pays homage to the original while incorporating modern techniques to heighten the eerie atmosphere. The settings are crafted with historical accuracy in mind. From the architecture to the costumes, everything is designed to immerse the audience in the period and enhance the Gothic horror ambience. The casting and performances are top-notch. The actors bring depth and complexity to their characters, making them both relatable and terrifying. The portrayal of Count Orlok is particularly noteworthy, capturing the sinister essence of the character while adding new layers of menace. Eggers’ version delves deeper into the psychological aspects of the story. The film explores themes of fear, obsession, and the unknown, making it not just a horror film, but a profound psychological experience. While it brings new elements to the table, Eggers’ “Nosferatu” remains respectful to its source material. It strikes a balance between honoring the classic and innovating within the genre, making it a standout reimagining that appeals to both fans of the original and new audiences. It’s truly a masterful blend of old and new, paying homage to a timeless classic while bringing it into the modern era with style and substance.

Nosferatu is a gothic tale of obsession between a haunted young woman and the terrifying vampire infatuated with her, causing untold horror in his wake.

In Eggers’ Nosferatu, estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to Transylvania for a fateful meeting with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), a vampiric prospective client. Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), Hutter’s new bride, is left under the care of their friends Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin) in his absence. Plagued by visions and an increasing sense of dread, Ellen encounters a force far beyond her control.

Director’s Statement

It is embedded with many of my own memories and personal experiences amplified and transposed to 1830s Baltic Germany. It took time to get there, to understand the fascination. Of course, it was the image and performance of Max Schreck that haunted me as a kid. There was something essential about the mysterious vampire and the simple fairytale of Nosferatu. And I am certain that when Hutter threw open the lid of Orlok’s sarcophagus audiences gasped at the terror and imagined the stench of the undead monster. How could I find my own way there?

As recently as twenty years ago, in Southern Romania, a man believed to be a vampire was exhumed, and his corpse ritually mutilated. He was a difficult man and a heavy drinker. After he died, his family said he returned as a strigoi, attacking them in the night. His daughter-in-law particularly suffered from these nocturnal assaults and became ill. When his body was destroyed, as per the folkloric procedure, the vampiric visitations stopped. His reign of terror ended. His daughter-in-law was cured. What is the dark trauma that even death cannot erase? A heartbreaking notion. This is at the essence of the palpable belief in the vampire. The folk vampire is not a suave dinner-coat-wearing seducer, nor a sparkling, brooding hero. The folk vampire embodies disease, death, and sex in a base, brutal, and unforgiving way. This is the vampire I wanted to exhume for a modern audience.

Robert Eggers

Robert Eggers during filming of Nosferatuu. Copyright: Universal Pictures, Focus Features

Writing Nosferatu

Eggers was inspired to write and perform a stage adaptation with classmate Ashley Kelly-Tata (now an
accomplished theater director) at his hometown high school. This production caught the attention of
Edouard Langlois, artistic director of the Edwin Booth Theatre in Dover, New Hampshire, who invited Eggers and Kelly-Tata to transfer their production to his space. The opportunity proved fortuitous for Eggers: “This made me know that I wanted to direct.”

After high school, Eggers enrolled in a drama program in New York, and later started a theater company. “I intended to return to Nosferatu again, but it never happened,” says Eggers.

Having directed the high school stage production, Eggers knew he wanted to bring the story back to the big screen in his own unique artistic way and has been working ever since to make that happen.

Eggers made his directorial debut with The Witch, a Puritan era supernatural horror film that screened to acclaim at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. After the success of The Witch, Eggers completed a draft of Nosferatu and gathered a preliminary cast.

He ultimately set the project aside to direct his reality-bending drama The Lighthouse, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2019. The Northman, Eggers’ lauded Viking epic, followed.

Eggers returned to Nosferatu, eager to tell the twisted beauty-and-the-beast tale through his own increasingly distinct lens. Eggers’ process included exploring his story in a different medium: “I ended up writing a novella with extensive backstories and scenes that I knew would never be in the film to understand why Nosferatu needed to be told again,” says Eggers. “I had to write that novella to make it my own.”

Ellen emerged as Eggers’ driving force. “As an evolution of the story, the thing that is most significant is that this is Ellen’s film. She is a victim not only of the vampire, but of nineteenth century society,” says Eggers.

In light of this shift in focus, Eggers chose to begin his screenplay with an occurrence that would then be diagnosed as “hysteria.” “This is Ellen’s story. There’s a prologue that begins with her childhood and an unexplained but terrifying haunting,” says Eggers.

Eggers looked to the physical screenplay for Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror for insight and inspiration. “I studied Henrik Galeen’s screenplay with Murnau’s annotations very carefully,” Eggers says. Eggers also extensively researched the occult and historical representations of vampires.

“His office was filled with hundreds of books,” producer Chris Columbus remembers. “It was almost like
walking into the office of a professor of vampirology. There were all these books on the occult, and
the history of vampirism.”

Eggers has a practical reason for grounding his scripts with historical authenticity. “The act of research is something that I truly enjoy,” says Eggers. “Part of it is about eliminating decisions; you don’t need to invent anything. you just look for it and find it.”

Dracula remained a secondary influence in Eggers’ writing process. “You can’t ignore Dracula when you’re going to approach this piece. There are a lot of things that have been in Dracula movies that I thought were in the novel but weren’t in the novel. And I had read it several times before! That was interesting, to forget everything that I had learned about Dracula and vampires – and then to relearn it from the bottom up.” Eggers wanted to create a film that was unique to him and pulled upon many references to create his own standalone version of Nosferatu.

Pauses in the careful development of Nosferatu gave Eggers the opportunity to build upon his skills as a writer, director, and producer, and to assemble a world-class team of collaborators, both in front of and behind the camera. “I wouldn’t have had as much control,” says Eggers of the fortuitousness of delaying Nosferatu. “I wasn’t as far along in my career, and I wasn’t as adept at filmmaking. It was helpful to step away from it.”

Casting Nosferatu

Nosferatu assembles a stellar cast that includes Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Ralph Ineson, Simon McBurney, and Willem Dafoe.

Lily-Rose Depp portrays Ellen, the conflicted, possessed central figure in Nosferatu. Depp explains her attraction to the script and role: “I always loved haunted gothic tales like this. I could see the whole thing playing out as I was reading it. I was holding my breath the entire time,” says Depp.

Despite elements of possession and fantasy, Depp found that Eggers’ screenplay mined much of its shocking suspense from realism. “There’s something about this script and this movie that feels very real, visceral, and human, which is interesting because we’re talking about demons, and ghosts, and this other realm. That’s what I think is the scariest part about the movie: just how real the nightmares are,” Depp says.

Nicholas Hoult, who plays Thomas, an earnest estate agent who journeys to Orlok’s castle in pursuit
of an opportunity to build a better life for his family, was a longtime fan of Eggers’ immersive, entrancing filmmaking. “There’s no one who, in my opinion, creates authentic worlds and builds atmosphere quite like he does in his movies,” Hoult says of Eggers. “The world he has created is incredible.”

Hoult also understood the responsibility of playing a part in realizing Eggers’ childhood dream. “This film has been thirty years in the making in many ways, and I wanted to do service to the story and this character in a way that would make Rob proud,” says Hoult.

A hopeful naïveté surrounds Thomas and Ellen’s relationship. Hoult explains: “It’s a pure love, but I wouldn’t describe it as a passionate love,” says Hoult. “Thomas is very caring for Ellen and loves her deeply, but there’s obviously a lack of truth in their relationship at the start.”

On his trek to meet Count Orlok, Thomas rests at a Romanian village and ignores warnings of danger. “Thomas starts to lose sense of what’s real and what’s not. From that moment on, he is never quite sure if he’s dreaming or if the things he’s witnessing are real,” says Hoult.

Bill Skarsgård, who undergoes an astounding transformation to portray Orlok, remembers watching Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror as a child. “My dad loves movies, and he gave me an early tour of cinema history, and Nosferatu was one of the films we watched,” comments Skarsgård.

Despite Skarsgård’s familiarity with Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, he found Eggers’ script to be breathtakingly original. “I read it and thought, ‘There’s nothing like this,’” Skarsgård remembers. “I thought it was one of the best scripts I had ever read.”

In Nosferatu, Willem Dafoe takes on the role of Albin Eberhart Von Franz, a professor engaged to cure Ellen. Dafoe also already had experience in this realm as he garnered an Oscar nomination in 2001 for his role as Max Schreck in the lauded behind-the-scenes drama Shadow of the Vampire, and also starred in Eggers’ The Lighthouse and The Northman. Dafoe was happy to re-team with Eggers for a third time. “The script is beautiful,” says Dafoe. “It really struck me as kind of a love story. I knew that my role was the role that Rob would play if he were an actor in this. That was a pleasure. He likes many of the things that Von Franz is versed in. Anytime I get to work with Rob I’m happy.”

Aaron Taylor-Johnson responded to his character’s precipitous lack of control. “Friedrich Harding was instantly a relatable character, someone who is a family man, someone who will go to the ends of the earth for his wife and children. It’s slowly slipping through his fingers, and he’s trying to hold it all together,” Taylor-Johnson says. In the face of alarming challenges, Friedrich continues to care for Ellen, even after he realizes that her illness may be beyond human control. “He has a guest under his roof, and a responsibility to his friend. He doesn’t want to go back on his word, but also, at some point, enough is enough,” Taylor-Johnson explains.

Emma Corrin is Anna Harding, Ellen’s friend and Friedrich’s spouse. Corrin echoes their co-stars’ appreciation for the specificity of Eggers’ screenplay. “I know how much he loved creating very curated worlds with all the detail and accuracy, almost like a painting, putting them together. I could see how this story, and its characters, and its architecture, and the whole world in which it’s set leans so much towards what he loves to do,” says Corrin.

Filming Nosferatu

Nosferatu reunites the renowned artists who contributed to the immersive power of Eggers’ previous films, including production designer Craig Lathrop, cinematographer Jarin Blaschke, costume designer Linda Muir, and editor Louise Ford, all of whom worked on The Northman, The Lighthouse, and The Witch. The Northman composer Robin Carolan also returns to the team.

After assembling his cast, Eggers established the production for Nosferatu in Prague’s Barrandov Studio, a longtime hub for European filmmaking. Eggers found opportunities to incorporate Prague’s architecture, and the production made a brief trip to Transylvania to shoot exteriors of Hunedoara Castle for Orlok’s Castle. In addition to the few practical locations, Lathrop designed an astounding sixty sets. “I wanted to build as much as possible,” says Eggers. “It gives me the most amount of control with how Jarin and I like to move the camera.”

Lathrop’s ingenuity led to sets that could accommodate Eggers’ ambitious camerawork. Eggers comments: “Often, it demands that we have movable walls and movable ceilings. There are several shots where a wall will open on a hinge to get the camera through, and then come back around and close back up. It’s a lot, but it’s very fun.”

The delicate dance between the actors, camera department, and crew made for an attentive set: “It’s an enjoyable way to work because every single person on set is dependent on everyone else. The tension and focus are incredibly high. If anyone – from the camera operator to the dolly pusher to the actors – does one little mishap, it all falls apart and we have to do another take. When we get it, it’s incredibly satisfying. It builds a lot of camaraderie.” says Eggers.

Blaschke shot on 35mm film and used special Dagor and Baltar lenses through the gracious assistance of Dan Sasaki at Panavision. Blaschke has a longtime interest in film photography, having developed his own sheet film negatives in trays and made contact prints from them. He brought his knowledge of nineteenth century view camera lens designs in creating the film’s look. Among Blaschke’s many goals for Nosferatu was to accurately portray the pale glow of moonlight. Blaschke explains: “If you made it look like actual moonlight does to your eye, you wouldn’t read people’s faces; you couldn’t tell the story at all. It was really riding that edge of where you can tell the story of the movie, but also believe it, and make it feel like moonlight does to your eye. That was the balancing act.”

“One of the things that we were developing since The Northman was a moonlit look that is very desaturated and closer to black and white,” adds Eggers. In finding the perfect romantic moonlight, Blaschke incorporated real candlelight with the assistance of a high-speed lens. “It’s all real flame,”
Blaschke says. “We just kept putting in candles until we got to the right exposure. It got messy, but
it’s very gratifying to shoot on film and have real candles.”

Lathrop shares Eggers’ commitment to historical accuracy and authenticity. “Once I got a script, I started digging into it in detail. This film is set in Wisborg, a fictitious town on the Baltic Coast, a Hanseatic town, and so I started researching the rich architectural history of Hanseatic towns.”

Lathrop made the home interiors a reflection of the characters’ disparate levels of wealth. “It’s important to see that Thomas and Ellen live in an extremely modest flat, but they have aspirations of something a bit grander,” says Lathrop. “Thomas is off to Transylvania to start this journey because he wants to make something of himself, or at least he wants to be a success in material way, like his friend.

Romanian screenwriter Florin Lăzărescu assisted the production by translating dialogue into Dacian, a dead language, and researching nineteenth century Transylvanian daily life. “Little by little, I started to talk to the team about different objects: icons, crosses, and toys for Roma kids. I found things I didn’t know about my country, about my culture, before researching for this movie,” says Lăzărescu.

Creating ORLOK

Special Effects makeup artist David White grew up with a love of classic vampires. “When I first became interested in make-up effects, I remember leafing through the pages of reference books in the library, which were so intriguing.” White, together with Eggers, took great pride in the designing of Count Orlok and thoroughly investigated the decay of flesh and bone using medical and historical research papers and books. He noted that “Robert shared illustrations and a mood board he had created. He even showed me his own early painting of the Count, which was very useful and gave me the vibe and tone.” From this reference, David got a greater understanding of the color tones and textures that Eggers liked. Robert also shared images of noblemen of the time, their hairstyles and facial hair, as well as imagery depicted throughout the centuries, including folk art.”

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ROBERT EGGERS (Writer-Director, Producer) is an award-winning writer and director. Originally from New Hampshire, Eggers got his professional start directing and designing experimental and classical theatre in New York City. Eggers eventually transitioned to film, directing several short films and working extensively as a designer for film, television, print, theater, and dance.

The Witch, his feature film debut as writer and director, won the Directing Award in the U.S. Dramatic category at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, where it premiered to critical acclaim. It also garnered two Independent Spirit Award wins for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. His second feature film, The Lighthouse, premiered at Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes and won the FIPRESCI prize. The film was nominated for a 2019 Academy Award® for Best Cinematography.
The Northman, a Viking revenge saga premiered on April 22, 2022 to great critical acclaim worldwide.

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