The catalogue of stories and films about bloodsucking vampires is extensive, from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Twilight, but Nosferatu (now in theatres) from from Robert Eggers looks and feels different. Starring Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Willem Dafoe, Bill Skarsgård, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin, the adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 film oozes passion as a horror hit.
The film is focused on Ellen Hutter (Depp) who is haunted by anxiety and visions of evil, diagnosed with “hysteria.” Her husband Thomas (Hoult) is a real estate agent sent to Transylvania to get Count Orlok (Skarsgård) to sign a contract for conclude the sale of a manor in the Hanseatic town of Wisborg. While Thomas is uncomfortable with Orlok, the mysterious client has a peculiar interest in Ellen.
As occultist professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Dafoe) studies Ellen, he forms a bond with her and believes that Orlok is the vampire Nosferatu, and linked to Ellen’s condition, including possessions.
Lily-Rose Depp: ‘Incredibly raw and brave and fierce’
At the core of this story, besides being an enthralling gothic vampire tale, is this interesting exploration of Ellen as not just a possessed figure, but a woman trapped in nineteenth century misogyny, leaving Depp with a particularly layered character to execute.
“Lily’s got a lot of strengths for this role,” Eggers highlighted to Yahoo Canada. “She understood it very clearly when I had the first meeting with her.”
“Lily is a bit of an old soul. … She’s very emotionally plugged in. I don’t think I’ve really worked with an actor who can get to such an extreme place so easily, and that was something that was crucial for this character who has a foothold in the other realm and a deep understanding of the other realm.”
The writer and director added that Depp is “a very hard working actor,” who got a dialect coach months in advance of travelling to Prague to shoot the movie.
“She’s also incredibly raw and brave and fierce, and her performance is super extreme when she goes into these ‘hysterical fits’ and the seizures and the possession stuff,” Eggers said. “That is all her hard work with Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, the choreographer and movement coach. … None of it’s assisted with CG or wire work. It’s all Lily doing that stuff.”
Another particularly compelling element of Nosferatu is the relationship between Ellen and Professor Von Franz, as he’s the only person who’s really willing to listen to Ellen and take her concerns seriously.
“They’re both outsiders. … Professor Von Franz is kicked out of his university and is living a sort of liminal lifestyle,” Eggers stressed. “It is lovely to see that he’s kind of the one person who can see her for who she is.”
“Ellen’s an interesting character because she has a lot of agency, but she doesn’t put on her husband’s trousers and jump on the horse, and ride off with a wooden or iron stake to kill the vampire. You see her having to really fight against nineteenth century society, and people are literally tying her to the bed. So I think to have this nutty professor see her, who she is, … to kind of reinforce what’s already inside her, is touching and satisfying.”
10 year journey to make ‘Nosferatu’
What makes Nosferatu stand out significantly is, while many of us have several cinematic tropes of vampires in our heads, built up over several years of exposure, Eggers was able to lean into his research to push against those tropes, bringing the audience on this historical journey.
“It was just really fun and fascinating to go back to the folklore,” he said. “I was really excited to say, … not the people who made up stories about vampires, but the people who actually thought that vampires were real, what did they think?”
The score of Nosferatu is also a strong element that grips the audience into the haunting experience of this film, with Eggers sharing that music is something he’s always thinking about, collaborating with sound designer Damian Volpe and composer Robin Carolan.
“We were shooting like 99 per cent on sound stages, so the music and the soundscapes that were going to end up in the film, I was playing on set for the actors to stay in the mood,” Eggers shared.
“Musically, obviously we need the kind of 20th century classical music, aleatoric stuff that has become kind of the mainstay of how you communicate a horror soundtrack. But we also wanted sort of soaring romantic music as well, and that was very pleasurable to see how they would play off one another and interact with each other well.”
Eggers has been striving to make Nosferatu for 10 years, but in the years it took him to get the movie off the ground, the filmmaker has given us The Witch, The Lighthouse and The Northman. Eggers recognized that he’s “grown a lot as a person and as a filmmaker” since the initial stages for crafting Nosferatu, but has also become a more “fluid collaborator” with his heads of the departments, with whom he continues to work with.
“It’s not just my vision, it’s a collective vision that we’ve been able to create together,” Eggers said. “But I would say that I’ve gotten better at getting what’s in my imagination onto the screen.”