Long before his feature debut The Witch (2015), acclaimed director Robert Eggers had been inspired by F. W. Murnau's iconic vampire flick Nosferatu (1922) – so much so, that he intended to release his own rebooted version. After various setbacks, however, it wasn't until 2024 that the project finally saw the light of day, following his successes with The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022). Nosferatu follows estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) as he travels from his small German town across the Carpathian mountains to facilitate a property deal for the mysterious Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård). There, he discovers the nobleman's vampiric nature as Orlok's obsession with Thomas' wife Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) intensifies.
Nosferatu has not only taken the box office by storm, but the 2025 Oscars too with four nominations for the horror film. Speaking on the day of the nominations, FILMHOUNDS caught up with Eggers about the film's rocky start, his inspirations, and bringing a new version of Orlok to life.
Firstly, congratulations on your Oscar nominations. How are you feeling?
Very, very happy. Very proud.
You started working on Nosferatu ten years ago. How did the project evolve over that time?
It was the right time because finally, Peter Kujowski at Focus Features greenlit the movie. No one had greenlit the movie before. I'm really glad that it took a long time and had many false starts because I've evolved as a person and a filmmaker, and my collaborations with heads of departments have become much more fluid. We're now a further extension of each other, and it's easier for us to get the collective vision onto the screen. The concept of the film hasn't changed too much since I got the first draft finished about nine years ago or so.
It channels elements of German Expressionism in its look, but the scenes from the original film weren't replicated, when so many remakes and adaptations do. How did you strike that balance?
It comes down to trusting your sensibility and respecting the original. One very simple choice that [cinematographer] Jarin Blaschke and I made was to not replicate any shots from the Murnau film. We do have the same scenes, but they're not shot-for-shot and you know his filmmaking voice. So that was helpful. Everything that I love about the Murnau film and how it differentiated it from Dracula, are things that I explored further to make it more my own. In the Murnau film, Ellen, the female protagonist, becomes the central protagonist and the heroine by the last act. And so I thought, “Maybe it should be her story from the very beginning”, and she could have more emotional and psychological depth and complexity.
There's been a lot said about the relationship between Count Orlok and Ellen Hutter and the blurred lines of romance and abuse. What was your intention with their relationship and how did you develop it?
It's very much a demon-lover relationship, which is not a positive relationship. One of the first things that I reread early on in the research process was Wuthering Heights. Heathcliff and Cathy's relationship as it evolves is not healthy in the novel, Heathcliff is a total psycho and he wants to possess and destroy. It was this demon-lover archetype that allowed me to explore a lot of complex and clashing ideas about love and sexuality – many of them dark and unsavoury. As a ‘Victorian movie' we're in this period that is famous for repressed sexuality, and the more you repress something, the more it wants to explode.
Nosferatu strays quite far from what we're used to with the vampire mythos. How did you develop the creature in the film?
There was a significant amount of research that had to do with Albin Grau, the producer and production designer of the original film. He was a practising occultist and a member of the Brotherhood of Saturn. I'm fairly certain he believed in astral vampires, you know, even if he didn't believe in folk vampires, and so I needed to look at what he was thinking about. I needed to look at what occultists in the period of the film were thinking about. The most important thing was going back to the folklore and the early Balkan and Slavic folklore. The folk vampire is not a pale, seductive, handsome Robert Pattinson-like nobleman, but a dirty, nasty, smelly, rotting corpse. I followed the folklore, but I also asked myself, “What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?” And then that is my best endeavour – moustache and all.
The secretive design of Count Orlok and finally seeing him onscreen was a big thing for audiences. What was it like for yourself seeing your design come to life when Bill was in the prosthetic for the first time?
It was an interesting process because the first time he saw them, or just the sculpt of them, he was intimidated. He said, “It doesn't look anything like me, this guy didn't look like me when he was alive.” The first time he tried the prosthetics on when it was still a work in progress, I saw the moment when he became a little bit inspired and thought, “Okay, there are things I can do with this. This is working, maybe. And then the third or something camera test, when he was in the full makeup that was fully articulated and painted beautifully, and we knew what it was, and the costume and everything I saw the moment when he turned and, you know, became Orlok, and that was very powerful and scary.
What was the collaborative process like between yourself and Bill to bring the character to life?
The voice was something that I had thought a lot about and was working on with Bill. He also worked with an opera singer to lower his voice and to get it to be what I had imagined. The makeup collaboration was with David White, the prosthetics designer. I knew what I wanted, but he brought more to the table. And while Bill was also doing what I was asking for, he brought more to the table too, particularly with binding moments where Orlok was vulnerable. I was so sick of the tropes of the sad vampire that I didn't want to go there. But Bill knew that it was important to still have the vulnerability in some places. And I think it makes the performance.
There have been lots of reports of you using thousands of rats on set and lighting scenes with candles. What was the filming like for a production of this size and complexity?
It's exciting because it's the same approach, just on a larger scale. I think the only time that is very frustrating when you're working on a larger scale is that it's hard to be as nimble. I was insistent about shooting all the day exteriors on gloomy days, and you can't just take a small crew to weather cover if you have hundreds of extras on a backlot set and it's sunny and you're so you have to just wait for clouds. Producers and student executives are looking at you in a certain way. That aspect can be challenging,
Nosferatu is available to buy or rent on digital platforms from 3rd February 2025.