Yahoo Lifestyle Yes, 'Nosferatu' Director Robert Eggers Knows About That 'SpongeBob SquarePants' Gag
Robert Eggers, the director of a new remake of the classic 1922 film “Nosferatu,” said he knows about Transylvanian vampire Count Orlok’s connection to Bikini Bottom.
In a Thursday interview with The Hollywood Reporter at his movie’s Los Angeles premiere, Eggers was asked about the show “SpongeBob SquarePants” introducing younger generations to the fictional creature from the original film, who was notably seen flickering the lights in the Season 2 episode “Graveyard Shift.”
That kind of cultural reference resembles ones that Eggers saw as a child while watching Jim Henson’s “Muppet Babies,” he said.
“[The Henson show] would play little clips of Lon Chaney’s ‘Phantom of the Opera’ and early versions of ‘Cyrano de Bergerac,’” Eggers said.
“That weird cartoon gave me exposure to a lot of movies that I watched when I was a little older with memories from ‘Muppet Babies.’ So, thanks, ‘SpongeBob.’”
Director Robert Eggers thanks SpongeBob for introducing younger people to #Nosferatupic.twitter.com/HQgmQ4WEMR
— The Hollywood Reporter (@THR) December 13, 2024
Count Orlok has become a recurring character on Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants,” in which he is simply called Nosferatu. A younger version of the creature, named Kidferatu, has appeared on the spinoff show “Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years.”
The vampire wasn’t originally intended to make his debut in the fictional Bikini Bottom city with “Graveyard Shift,” according to Jay Lender, who worked for years on “SpongeBob SquarePants.”
Lender, in a feature attached to the “Nautical Nonsense and Sponge Buddies” DVD, said there was initially a different gag in the episode, with the character SpongeBob ripping up a section of floorboard in the Krusty Krab restaurant and saying that he’s “delivering the mail to Floorboard Harry” at night.
“And there’s a little guy under the floorboards who reaches up and grabs the mail and pulls it in,” said Lender.
“We used Nosferatu in the end, but once upon a time, Floorboard Harry was going to be the guy who was flicking the light switch. But we found out that Nosferatu was funnier.”
Lender told Polygon in 2022 that he was a big fan of the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland as a kid and recalled seeing a still of Count Orlok “standing in the doorway.”
“So my first experience with Orlok and with that image is as this disjointed non sequitur. When the moment came that I needed to come up with a replacement horror non sequitur, that image was already in that slot in my brain,” he said.
“What’s interesting is that because of SpongeBob, for 20 years, everyone else’s first experience with Orlok came as a weird disjointed non sequitur horror image too.”
Eggers’ “Nosferatu” is set to hit U.S. theaters Christmas Day.
