Robert Eggers, the director behind The Northman and The Lighthouse, has finally made the Nosferatu film he’s dreamed of since he was a kid.
We’ve seen a little of the film so far via trailers, but except for some silhouettes and clawed hands, we haven’t seen much of Nosferatu, played by Bill Skarsgård.
In a recent interview with Deadline, however, Eggers shares what inspired him to create the look of Orlock (a.k.a. Nosferatu).
“Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I’ve been thinking about and looking at for a long time,” he said. “I had read Montague Summers [the clergyman scholar who wrote about the occult] as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes. And so, you’re infusing things you’re reading with cinematic tropes that aren’t there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you’re like, ‘They’re not even drinking blood, they’re just strangling people, or suffocating people, or f*cking them to death.’ And that was really interesting.”
Eggers added that he started by thinking what a dead Transylvanian nobleman would look like, and that he wanted to give a nod to Max Schreck’s makeup design in the classic Nosferatu film.
Skarsgård, according to Eggers, was taken aback when he first saw what his costume would be. “Bill sees the sculpt of the bust and he freaks out, and he’s like, ‘That doesn’t look anything like me, this guy didn’t look like me when he was even alive. What the f*ck?’ He wasn’t mean, but he was alarmed,” Eggers said. “And I was like, ‘Well, that’s the point, that you’re totally transforming into somebody else.’ And then, he’s putting the makeup on and he’s like, ‘Ugh, I look like a goblin. This is terrible.’ And then, once they put the hair on, even though the makeup wasn’t totally finished, I saw the first moment when he was like, ‘Okay, this is cool. This is a person.’ I started to see him in the mirror, playing around, trying to do something.”
We’ll get to see Skarsgård’s dark performance, which also apparently included some intense vocal training, when Nosferatu premieres in theaters on December 25, 2024.
