“I don’t know how you’re supposed to behave if you’re being chased by a vampire, or experiencing demonic possession,” said Robert Eggers, smiling a little but deadly serious.
Not that he hasn’t thought about it for a very long time. The writer and director’s first brush with “Nosferatu,” F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film with a story ripped straight from Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” was in a book. As a child in New Hampshire, he saw an image of Max Schreck as the vampire and it obsessed him; as a teenager, he directed a stage version in, improbably, black and white. (The actors were painted in monochrome.)
This anecdote is not very surprising if you know Eggers’s work. At 41, he’s made three acclaimed feature films — “The Witch,” “The Lighthouse” and “The Northman” — that are united in sensibility: They’re historical, deeply researched and, let’s be honest, pretty strange. Obsessed with detail, Eggers excels at not just evoking some setting from the past but drawing the audience, with a kind of uncanniness, into the head space of his characters. The lazy tendency of many historical films is to put people with modern frameworks and preoccupations into period garb, telling stories that make sense to contemporary audiences. But Eggers refuses to pander.
“Nosferatu” continued to preoccupy him, even as he directed other films. Now, he’s finally pulled it off, and the result, which opened on Christmas Day, is peak Eggers. His vampire, Count Orlok, is not the sleek and seductive type; he’s a folk vampire, the animated but rotting corpse of a centuries-old Transylvanian nobleman, played in a counterintuitive twist by 34-year-old Bill Skarsgard. Across many miles, Orlok has forged a psychic and blatantly erotic connection with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp). Luckily for him, her solicitor husband (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Orlok’s castle to deliver papers that will make him the owner and inhabitant of a home near Ellen.
In town from London, where he lives, Eggers met with me over lunch at the coincidentally named Whitby Hotel in Midtown Manhattan. (The English town of Whitby is where Stoker was inspired to write “Dracula.”) He was thoughtful, a little reluctant to funnel his creative intuitions into words. This movie obviously took root deep inside his subconscious.
These are edited excepts from our conversation.
All of your films are about female desire upending the world. The usual modern spin on any movie that’s about woman and desire is rah, rah, feminism, burn the patriarchy down. But you come at it differently.
Ellen doesn’t put on her husband’s trousers and jump on the horse and kill the vampire with the stake. Yet to say that she is a female character with a ton of agency is a fact. To say that she’s a victim is also a fact. But she’s as much a victim of 19th-century society as she is a victim of the vampire.
People talk a lot about Lily-Rose Depp’s character’s sexual desire, which is a massive part of the character, of what she experiences — being shut down, and corseted up, and tied to the bed, and quieted with ether. Misunderstood, misdiagnosed. But it’s more than that. She has an innate understanding about the shadow side of the world that we live in that she doesn’t have language for. This gift and power that she has isn’t in an environment where it’s being cultivated, to put it mildly. It’s pretty tragic. Then she makes the ultimate sacrifice, and she’s able to reclaim this power through death.
There’s a lot of literary criticism about Victorian male authors who have strong female characters with chthonic energy and understanding, who are then punished unconsciously by the male authors by making them die. While there’s certainly validity in that [critique], I’ve also read feminist literary criticism that says how it’s interesting that in this very repressed Victorian society, over and over again, this archetype that was needing to consummate itself in the patriarchal imagination is a woman who understands the darkness and the sexuality and the earth juju, and should be the savior of the culture.
In your movie, Orlok is a folk vampire, a corpse, perhaps not the kind of vampire people are expecting. You and I grew up in the age of sexy pop culture vampires, melding death and desire and also allure. But you’ve separated those — there’s death and there’s sex, but none of the sexiness. I can’t imagine anyone falling for Orlok.
I think it depends how much of Depp’s character you have in your own personality. But yeah. There’s not going to be a poster of Orlok pinned next to, you know, Edward Cullen and Justin Bieber.
Is it challenging to create that character for an audience who expects a certain seductiveness from vampires?
It’s fun. One of the reasons I love researching these period worlds is to get to the root of these things. These early folk vampires, when they were disinterred, sometimes had erections. This was part of the decomposition process, but it was interpreted by the community participating in this excavation ritual as, OK, this guy’s out to [expletive]. And there are more examples of eroticism in early Balkan folk vampire lore.
I also cast a young, handsome, charming actor, rather than digging up Christopher Lee’s corpse and trying using it as a meat puppet. Because you know that on some level, everybody knows what’s going on under [the Orlok costume]. In theory, that’s something I would be against, because what’s onscreen is the only thing that should matter, but I think it is probably helpful psychologically to the audience.
I didn’t even register that Bill [Skarsgard] was playing Orlok until after I had seen the movie. I expected something a little suave, beautiful, even if he’s decayed. But it’s like there’s maggots under his skin.
Bill had maggots on him. Real maggots.
Did you think about doing this in black and white?
I never wanted to. It’s romanticism, not expressionism — and it’s been done very well in black and white before! Obviously it’s a very desaturated movie, and I think some scenes have a kind of strength in expressing a colorless world, in color. But also, even if I wanted to, that’s too expensive. Budget’s too high. Studio can’t do all its TV deals.
A lot of people talk about my films as stylized. But aside from the fairy tale composition, it’s not intended to be stylized. I over-rehearse with the intention of it being in the actors’ muscle memory, so that it doesn’t feel like hitting a mark. If you’re doing expressionist cinema, you are aware of the artifice so much, because it’s stylizing the world in a way that is completely unrealistic. Here, obviously — you know, I’m sick of talking about my research, too, but obviously the verisimilitude of the material world is very important to me.
This is kind of a Christmas movie. Not just because of when it’s coming out.
It takes place in the Christmas season, and there’s a Christmas tree. And there’s a music box that plays “O Tannenbaum,” and there’s snow.
It feels like my favorite Christmas songs, which are about darkness, and the woods, and frightening occurrences.
“God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” has the devil in it, thank God.
Your films make me think about how myths and archetypes are reinvented across cultures and eras. The Christmas story is about a virgin offering the sacrifice of her own body to bring the Savior into the world. “Nosferatu” is almost exactly the flipped version of that.
Ho ho ho.
The characters talk about the “cock crowing,” and about a trial lasting three nights — all of these little things that tap into biblical symbolism. How much do you think about that when you’re writing?
I probably think about it a little too much.
Is that possible?
I guess it’s a question how self-aware you want to be. Your work’s always going to be interpreted by other people who have different lenses. When you’re searching with a hammer, everything’s a nail, you know.
When you work, do you think about beauty? The last shot is beautiful but also grotesque.
I think about the concept of beauty. There’s death in that shot, and there’s lilacs and sun beams, and it’s beautiful.
When we had Bill in the coffin for the big reveal in the crypt, the body, the decay, the blood under the skin and the veins and the whole thing — I went to David [White], the prosthetics designer, and I said, that is beautiful. It’s also a rotten, festering corpse with maggots on it. But it’s a beautiful interpretation of death and power. And even though this vampire is a bastard, Bill brings beauty to the performance — elegance, pathos.
Right. Not in a soft or decorative way.
Somebody described Murnau’s work as being like Gothic architecture. I’m sure you’re not surprised to hear this, but I much prefer the aesthetic of the Northern Renaissance to the Italian Renaissance. I honestly think Raphael’s paintings are disgusting. They are so porny. Raphael shade thrown!
You do have that beautiful dawn sky there at the end.
I need to have a beautiful sunrise at the end. Murnau’s film is often credited with creating the myth that a vampire can be killed by the sun. But it’s actually in folklore that the vampire must be in their grave by the first cock crow. So it’s not sunlight killing him. It’s the purity of dawn.
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