Nosferatu: rats, anxiety and Transylvanian folk

Hours away from the UK premiere of Nosferatu – Robert Eggers’ fourth feature, and this year’s most hotly anticipated film-with-a-festive-release-date (alongside erotic thriller Babygirl) – celebrity stylist Harry Lambert is hovering by a lift. Shortly after, eyes glued to his phone and flanked by PRs, Nicholas Hoult strolls past: seemingly, the entire second floor of this central London hotel is in press junket mode. Down the corridor, Eggers and Bill Skarsgård (aka Count Orlok, aka the film’s titular Nosferatu) are discussing a new cut of the film.

​“It’s seven and a half minutes long!” says the actor, alluding to edits dictated by censors for a Middle Eastern audience (he’s only joking; the picture’s run-time exceeds two hours).

Originally tipped as Eggers’ second feature, Nosferatu should have followed 2015’s terrifying folk horror The Witch. A mix of scheduling issues and personal concerns – would it be egomaniacal to take on a mammoth project like Nosferatu so soon into his career? – delayed things a little. But this was a long time coming: aged nine, Eggers was introduced to the original F.W. Murnau-directed silent film from 1922 (itself an unofficial, and subsequently controversial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula) on a bootlegged VHS.

The director would go on to direct a high school production of Nosferatu at 17, before falling hard for Werner Herzog’s 1979 iteration, starring a pre-Possession Isabelle Adjani, in his twenties. As one of the genre’s most erudite participants working today, Eggers’s preoccupation with the horror lexicon – underscored by an affinity for the gothic and the grotesque, further shaped by early watches of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) – make him well-positioned to launch Nosferatu into the 21^st century.

Skarsgård, meanwhile, whose ​“dead Transylvanian nobleman” Orlok is mostly concealed throughout the film, has a creep factor that’s tangible via a startlingly low voice and set of distressing talons. He was always attached to the project, having previously been cast as estate agent Thomas Hutter – a part which ultimately went to our hallway wanderer Nicholas Hoult.

Lily-Rose Depp plays Ellen Hutter, Thomas’ wife and the object of Orlok’s questionable affections: all porcelain façade with echoes of an Anna Weyant painting. She’s joined by Emma Corrin and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Anna and Friedrich Harding, the couple’s wealthy, vampire-skeptic friends. Then, of course, there’s Willem Dafoe, always excellently deployed and here embarking on his third collaboration with Eggers as Professor Von Franz.

Casually describing his research in the lead up to production as reading ​“some more obscure things, some less obscure things” – when in fact, he is renowned for an exhaustive approach – Eggers recalls that his version of Nosferatu is largely informed by Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. ​“There’s not really a better description of gothic atmosphere than in that short story,” he says.

And who are we to argue? Nosferatu​’s got all the makings of a bonafide frightfest, a rat scene that’ll have you feeling nostalgic for ​’90s-era Fort Boyard, plus some of the best frocks on the big screen this year. Which is to say nothing of its final, stunning vignette… But we won’t spoil that for you.

Hi Robert, hi Bill! Each of you were introduced to the original Nosferatu before your teens. What other films did you watch when you were probably too young to see them?

Robert Eggers: I was definitely too young to see the Coppola film [Dracula]: the werewolf fornicating with Sadie Frost in the courtyard was not something a nine year-old should be seeing.

Bill Skarsgård: I have older brothers, so I was exposed to a lot of movies. I watched Jurassic Park when I was four or five, then had a dream a T‑Rex was outside my window.

On that note, Robert, you’ve mentioned previously that you were afraid of a lot of things growing up. What scares you today?

RE: My cinematographer, Jarin Blaschke, texted me a couple years ago: ​“What are you afraid of?” I said, ​“going too deep into the occult and becoming mad; being stabbed to death in an alley; being alone.” He texted back saying, ​“my daughter was just asking for a Halloween project.”

BS: [laughing] That’s amazing. Losing my mind is up there. And loneliness – they go hand in hand. I had major death anxiety when I was young, and I’m still trying to figure out what death means to me. That’s the journey of life, isn’t it? Getting comfortable with the grave.

And did working on Nosferatu help you come to terms with death?

BS: Kind of, it’s about that in a way – can you escape death? That’s the bargain Orlok took, and he’s not very happy about it, but it’s a Faustian bargain. Can you trick it?

Were there any specific performances you were inspired by when it came to getting into character or setting the tone of the film?

RE: Bill had to watch some weird Soviet films with super masculine, scary Balkan villains – moustached sorcerers and whatnot.

BS: Yeah, like [Bulgarian director Ludmil Staikov’s 1988 film] Time of Violence.

Sound, famously, is a key element of the horror genre. What music were you listening to between takes? Were any playlists involved?

RE: Robin Carolan, the composer and I made a lot of playlists: general Nosferatu playlists, romantic playlists, Transylvanian folk music playlists, aleatoric scary horror playlists… Playing that stuff on set kept the mood up, and kept people tense and frightened. Bill sometimes would listen during the many hours of putting his prosthetics on – and sometimes he’d watch stand up.

Anyone in particular?

RE: Nobody cancelled.

BS: Exactly. The funny ones, the ones that are not, you know…

Got it. In terms of your wider research Robert, did it lead you anywhere surprising?

RE: I storyboarded this ​“reveal” of the castle, and Chris Columbus, the main creative producer on the film [also of Home Alone fame], was like, ​“you’re using [gothic-Renaissance] Hunedoara castle in Romania. It’s like, the coolest castle ever, why are you shooting it in such a stupid way?”. So I thought, let’s see. I watched the first Harry Potter movie, which showed a much better way to introduce a castle. So even though it’s different, that [bit] is slightly inspired by Harry Potter.

Bill, your co-star Emma Corrin, when talking to THE FACE about their Deadpool costume, said: ​“There is absolutely nothing less free[ing] than being in prosthetic fingers”. What was your experience with that?

BS: [They] were the only things that were removable, so I could pull off the fingers to eat, wipe my ass, scroll through the old phone… They were great to wear, but soft, which was problematic because they’d bend in a weird way.

More generally, can either of you speak about Orlok’s look and how you arrived at this iteration of the character?

RE: I went back to the folkloric vampire, so the question was, what would a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like? That informed the whole shebang.

Finally, the reported 5000 live rats you had on set…

RE: Thousands of rats! 100 were trained, which was pretty spectacular. Also spectacular was the smell: they’re incontinent. There’s a scene with half a dozen on Emma Corrin, and there would be pools of urine in Emma’s clavicle. And unlike in Herzog’s day, you can’t just release thousands of rats into the streets, you have to take care of every rat.

BS: They need their own green room.