‘Nosferatu’ Director on His Bloody Dracula Film Being the Surprise Hit of Christmas

Nosferatu is the best film of 2024—and also, now, a bona fide box-office hit, as proven by its $40 million opening-weekend tally and its current $100+ million global haul (and counting). Proving that audiences crave a bit of murder, malevolence, and mad eroticism with their holiday cheer, Robert Eggers’ fourth feature is a bloody Christmas treat and another feather in the cap of a director whose oeuvre—which also includes The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northmen—continues to grow more formidable with each successive entry.

An adaptation of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent nightmare (which itself was based on Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula and remade once before, in 1979, by Werner Herzog), Nosferatu recounts the tale of a most devious Count: Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), who strives to reach Europe’s shores by purchasing an aged manor house by way of a deal solidified with real estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult). Yet Orlok isn’t interested in seeing Germany’s tourist sights—his true goal is reuniting with Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), Thomas’ bride, who called out to him as a girl and, in doing so, created a wicked bond that strengthens by the day.

As imagined by Eggers and Skarsgård, the vampiric fiend is a towering figure of corruption and carnality who both resembles his predecessors and is a unique monster in his own right, and his reign of terror plays out via a series of lush, hypnotic set pieces that resound with unnerving malice and profane perversity.

At 41, Eggers has established himself as one of America’s most daring distinctive cinematic voices, and Nosferatu reconfirms his gift for crafting unholy moods through a combination of haunting visuals, startling staging, and dread-inducing production and sound design.

Not simply a genuine 21st-century horror triumph but a work of breathtaking invention and overpowering sensation, the film stands as the director’s finest achievement to date and the crown jewel of the past movie year. No surprise, then, that shortly after its Yuletide debut, we were thrilled to speak with Eggers about his latest’s impressive theatrical showing, the challenges of revisiting a classic, and the projects that may be on his immediate horizon.

Are you surprised at just how well Nosferatu has performed at the box office, especially given that it’s not exactly a conventional sell at the holidays?

Yeah, I’m absolutely surprised. And obviously, it’s a pleasant surprise. The thing that I’m most excited about with the film’s success at the box office at the moment is just that I had creative freedom and support the whole time. That’s exciting, and I hope that it’s helpful for other filmmakers. Let’s see.

When we spoke about The Northman, you said you needed to restrategize in terms of how you pitched studios. Did you do something differently with Nosferatu in that regard?

Yes and no, I think at the end of the day, even though it’s 100 years old, it is still an IP. That was something Focus Features was able to understand and lean into with their marketing strategy. [Producer] Chris Columbus has been saying that it’s unfair to call this an IP movie; he thinks it’s an original movie. I think everyone will have their own opinion about that, but it probably helped, I must admit.

Does the film’s success now make any future plans easier to realize?

It only helps. But it’s still a funny time in the industry right now anyway. I can’t make a $100 million esoteric non-IP movie just because Nosferatu did alright.

Has your experience on Nosferatu made you want to work with a well-known IP again?

It has its creative benefits for sure. But I’d like my next film to be an original one.

Is there a plan in place for an upcoming original film?

I mean, I can’t talk about it [laughs]. But I always have a lot of scripts in the works, because you need to. And by the way, just because I want my next thing to be an original thing doesn’t mean that anyone’s going to finance it [laughs]. But that’s what I would like.

Remaking a classic is always a risky gambit, since the bar is set so high. Thus, why did you want to tackle Nosferatu in particular? And was the daunting challenge of reimagining a beloved property in a new way part of the fundamental appeal of doing it?

Yes, it’s very daunting because it is a classic film in any genre, and also the movie that—while there were other horror movies before it—kind of invented the horror genre in many ways. So one is struggling with their own hubris and their own lack of confidence with taking on something like this.

There are how many versions of Dracula where you’re getting to the castle and meeting the Count for the first time—having that scene—and it’s pretty spectacular? That’s scary to know that you’re going to have to do that. The same way that if you’re directing Hamlet on stage, the weight of “To Be or Not to Be”—how do you make it your own? Do you ignore it, or do you dig into it deeper? But the advantage of doing something that’s been done so many times is that you see what works, and also what doesn’t work, and what’s oftentimes missing, so you can lean into unexplained territory.

That makes sense.

I’d also say that Mel Brooks’ Dracula: Dead and Loving It was like an instruction manual for things not to do. It’s really great because it just pokes fun at every ludicrous story problem and plot hole and silly trope in Dracula, so you can be very careful when approaching these things [laughs].

Whether it was a specific plot point or an atmospheric or aesthetic element, were there things you wanted to actively avoid doing—or replicating—with Nosferatu?

Obviously, there are very many visual similarities with this and the Murnau film. But [cinematographer] Jarin Blaschke and I did not want to replicate any of Murnau’s shots, which we did not do, and that was satisfying. Then, I also wanted to not do Max Schreck again, even though it is very much Max Schreck’s performance and Max Schreck’s makeup design that perhaps first got me passionate about Nosferatu as a kid. I felt that Schreck does such a marvelous job and [Klaus] Kinski did his interpretation based on that [in the 1979 Herzog version], and I wanted to do something different there.

What was the guiding creative idea behind Count Orlok, then, if you wanted to veer away from Schreck’s iconic portrayal?

Because vampires are no longer scary and my friend Patton [Oswalt] put the final nail in that coffin, I went back to the folklore, which was written by and about people who actually believed that vampires existed and they were terrified of them. The early Slavic and Balkan folk vampires are undead corpses and look like undead corpses instead of suave, pale, handsome men in dinner jackets. So the question I quickly asked was, what would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like?

That informed the design of Bill’s Orlock, in his costume and—I knew it would be controversial, but it seems like it’s become really extremely controversial—his mustache. But we also make nods to Schreck, like the shape of his skull, his fingers and fingernails, and a few other things.

I remember you saying you researched old regional dialects for The Lighthouse, and Nosferatu is similarly rife with period-specific language and turns of phrase. Did you research 19th-century German/European speech?

We went the course of Hammer Horror in the Frankenstein movies and other Hammer Horror movies that take place in Germanic countries. Everyone still just has British received pronunciation, and the lower-class characters are Londoners. We kind of did the same thing here.

I was reading British literature of the period to inspire how the characters would talk. But then, of course, we have characters who speak Romanian, and characters who speak Romany, and Orlok speaks ancient Dacian, which is a dead language that is spoken by the ancestors of the ethnic Romanians. I also worked with some specialists on all that stuff.

Lastly, Herr Knock’s pigeon-biting is one of the film’s gruesome highlights—and pulled off with a deft bit of sleight-of-hand. Was that moment inspired by Ozzy Osbourne?

I didn’t think of Ozzy when conceiving the scene, although I was listening to a lot of Black Sabbath when we were shooting the movie, weirdly. I did, however, send Simon [McBurney] Ozzy biting the head off a bat in a text when it was his birthday.