‘Nosferatu’ director Robert Eggers is driving himself mad trying to drive us mad

Published Dec 27, 2024  •  8 minute read

Robert Eggers speaks during the BAFTA Special Screening of "NOSFERATU" at AMC Century City 15 on Dec. 10, 2024 in Los Angeles. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth /Getty Images for BAFTA

By Travis M. Andrews, The Washington Post

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BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – The movies Robert Eggers makes are deeply unpleasant.

Sure, so are most horror movies. But the director’s films don’t merely include the grisly and ghostly. They showcase the most disgusting aspects of both humanity and the human body.

In “The Witch,” his debut feature about witchcraft in 1630s New England, a raven pecks at a woman’s nipple as she breastfeeds it and people drink blood from goat udders. “The Lighthouse,” about two loathsome men stuck in a remote lighthouse, is slicked with snot and spit from Willem Dafoe’s gassy seafarer, along with semen from Robert Pattinson’s, who masturbates compulsively as he slowly loses his mind. And while “The Northman,” Eggers’s Viking revenge epic set in the early 900s, includes fewer bodily fluids (if we don’t count the gallons of spilled blood), it has a small set piece centered on what appears to be a burping and farting contest.

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“He’s shamelessly, shamelessly uncompromising,” says Bill Skarsgard, who appears in Eggers’s fourth movie: a bleak, psychosexual reimagining of the 1922 silent vampire film “Nosferatu,” a movie Eggers has cherished since he was 9 years old. It is now playing in theatres.

Eggers has released three dank, nasty, atmospheric films steeped in folklore and mythology and outfitted with ornate (and obsessively researched) costuming and set design.

None of them are particularly mainstream affairs, yet “The Witch” made $40 million on a $4 million budget, and “The Lighthouse” made $18 million on an $11 million budget.

“I like archetypal stories – fairy tales, myths, folktales, legends, fables – because they always work, and you can always reinterpret them,” Eggers says in early December at the Beverly Hills Four Seasons, where the fluids are far more inviting: a metal cask of hot apple cider, a carafe of coffee, a cortado with oat milk.

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“They mean different things in different stages of your life,” Eggers says, sipping on the cortado. “They’re always relevant to current events, and you don’t need to bend them, and you don’t need to break them.”

Eggers doesn’t focus on bodily functions merely to gross us out. He’s obsessed with historical detail, going so far as to have a costume designer make about 20 versions of iron-shod leather slippers – the kind a Romanian nobleman might wear – for Skarsgard’s Count Orlok (the vampire), even though the footwear appears in only a few frames of “Nosferatu’s” 132-minute running time.

Details are everything. When he would watch movies when he was younger, he says, he would be irked if all the characters wore similarly fitting clothes, and “it would seem like there was one tailor in the entire world.” So he strives to get things right.

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A guy living in a lighthouse and drinking mugs of grain liquor every night would probably produce an abnormal amount of flatulence, so he put it on screen. To record a certain type of footstep, his sound designer went to an abandoned monastery in Ireland. When he has a character bite the head off a living pigeon in “Nosferatu,” he made sure to get the angle and amount of the bird’s arterial spray correct. And an undead vampire who is 250 to 300 years older than his victims would wear clothing from a different era.

It’s an attempt to achieve the unachievable. And it drives him mad.

“Historical accuracy is impossible. Even if you could achieve it, it would still be an interpretation,” he says. “A lot of times you have to kill your darlings, because I won’t do it if it’s not, quote, historically accurate. So, sometimes it’s really f—ing frustrating and challenging.”

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His movies are inspired, in part, by where he came from. Eggers grew up in Lee, New Hampshire, and spent his Halloweens visiting Salem, Massachusetts, while his peers went to Bruins games. He was fascinated by mythology and folklore, partially, he says, because of New England’s landscape: the colonial graveyards, the dilapidated farmhouses.

“I’ve always been drawn to darkness,” he says.

But not too dark, at least not when he was young. Modern monsters like Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger were too frightening. But Eggers found a coziness in Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula and the other classic, pulpy movie monsters from decades earlier.

That sense of the archaic extended to the authors he read: not Stephen King but Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.

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His stepfather was a college professor teaching Shakespeare, and his mother ran a children’s theater company. Eggers dresses for the part of director, wearing a sleek black T-shirt with a sweater draped over his shoulders and four rings on his fingers, one shaped like a skull.

When he was 9 years old, he saw “Nosferatu,” a silent German film from 1922 that’s an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula.” He was primed to like it: A year earlier he was inspired by the 1931 Bela Lugosi movie to dress as Dracula for Halloween.

He saw an old VHS version made from bad 16-millimeter prints whose intertitles were translated from a French version of the movie.

“You’re kind of viewing it through a dirty window,” Eggers says. “It felt like something that was unearthed from the past.”

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He cherished that unearthed treasure as a burgeoning high school thespian, mostly in musicals. When he was a 17-year-old senior, he got a chance to stage his own play. He suggested “Nosferatu,” a silent movie on a high school stage.

The intertitles were projected as supertitles above the stage, along with clips from the original movie and a bit of footage he shot as one of his first forays into filmmaking. For a scene featuring Orlok in the bowels of a ship, they filmed in the attic of his grandpa’s 18th-century farmhouse. Eggers, as Nosferatu, appeared to rise from a coffin because a friend was underneath, pushing a board up with his legs.

The costumes and makeup were black and white, but the blood was scarlet. When one character appeared to be spewing blood, he was actually spewing a mixture of stage blood and Mountain Dew Code Red.

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A local artistic director saw the play and invited them to stage a more professional version at his theater, the Edwin Booth. It was a small hit in the area, and “it cemented the fact that I wanted to be a director,” Eggers says. “It also made ‘Nosferatu’ an important part of my identity.”

He continued to cherish “Nosferatu” as he graduated from the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York and began acting in off-Broadway gigs where “I felt like I couldn’t be worse at directing than the people directing me.” He cherished it as he started a small theater company but grew frustrated over how difficult it was to attract an audience.

And he cherished it as he found work as a set designer, as he began to make short films, as he tried to break into Hollywood. Even then, he wanted to remake the movie, but he also knew he would need a large budget to do it right.

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He was writing screenplays, but no one was buying them. So he figured he’d make his own damn movie.

“It should be a horror movie,” he says of his thought process. “It should be under a certain budget. I’m probably going to have to shoot it in my proverbial parents’ backyard, so I’ll set it in New England. Okay, what’s the archetypical New England spook? A witch. Hasn’t been a good witch movie in a while, so okay, cool.”

Eggers hoped “The Witch” would get positive enough reviews that he could at least make another movie. It got more, including the directing award at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival. “I had my agent calling me before I had gone backstage to get a glass of champagne about studios wanting to have meetings about franchise movies,” he says. “It was like, ‘This is just as ridiculous as you imagined it to be.’”

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He didn’t want to make franchise movies. “I don’t think that I am a good match to make a Marvel movie, nor would I want to make one,” he says. “There is no ‘my version.’” He wanted to make a “black-and-white dusty, crusty, rusty, musty movie with the pipes and the sweaters and, you know, beards,” which became “The Lighthouse.” “The Northman” was inspired by his honeymoon in Iceland.

And “Nosferatu” is a childhood dream.

The movie – which stars Nicholas Hoult, Lily-Rose Depp, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corrin, Dafoe and Skarsgard – is his longest-gestating project. And while it’s steeped in folklore (this time Romanian), it’s his first explicit remake.

By the time his team arrived in Prague for two weeks of rehearsals before shooting, the movie was completely storyboarded and blocked, meaning Eggers already knew what every single scene would look like. He would often do this by having production assistants stand around his office – we “treat them as toys,” he says – in various configurations.

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“It’s almost like the movie already exists,” Depp says.

Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter in ‘Nosferatu.’ Photo by Focus Features

It’s not just the storyboarding or the script. “We know where the camera is going before the actors get there,” Eggers says. Instead of Steadicam, they used mostly cranes and dollies, which allow the camera to move freely 360 degrees and give a film a sense of motion. But they also make filming much more complicated.

If a shot is inside a house, for example, carpenters might need to quickly remove a wall to bring the camera in and then replace it before the camera turns around. All the actors refer to shooting this way as a dance. “It feels almost theatrical in this way where it’s like every part of the set is living and breathing,” Depp says, “and you have to exist in that moment with everything and almost create a dance between the camera, theater actors, the walls that might be flying away.”

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Co-star Emma Corrin adds: “You’re also at no point the most important thing in the room. It’s the camera that is the main focus.”

The resulting film feels like a sweeping epic, a big-budget Gothic horror movie filled with breathtaking shots – and blood and guts and rats (so many rats). The dialect is period-specific, and the movie’s pace is languid. Some might say glacial.

It’s a gamble, as was “The Northman,” his first large-budget film, whose knotty dialogue and hyperrealism didn’t capture audiences the way the studio hoped. It was his first film to not turn a profit.

An ultraviolent remake of a silent German film isn’t exactly “The Avengers.” But, despite the seeming evidence to the contrary – all those bodily fluids pouring out of everyone – Eggers is not trying to actively repel audiences.

“I’m not an alchemist in my cell doing this for myself,” he said. “Making this kind of creative work is sharing what it is to be human with other human beings, even if the story is about an undead person.”

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