There’s a moment early in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, when Lily-Rose Depp, last seen as the twisty pop star in The Idol, telegraphs to the audience: This will be unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.
In Eggers’ reimagining of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German Expressionist horror fantasy Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, Depp is magnetic vampire muse Ellen Hutter, paired with Nicholas Hoult as her husband Thomas. As we witness Ellen’s loneliness and desire being sated by a monster, followed by an opening monologue in which she confesses her fears to her husband, it’s clear that Eggers’ casting choice has paid off.
At audition, Depp performed that same monologue, and Eggers gave her the role that same day. “Myself, the casting director, and even the videographer were in tears, because it was so powerful,” Eggers says. “She was, as she is in the film, incredibly brave, and raw, and powerful. Her ability to tune into this dark and haunted place so quickly is pretty phenomenal.”
In the original Nosferatu, a young German realtor is sent to Transylvania to secure a property in his local area for the mysterious Count Orlok, who arrives by boat and proceeds to stalk the man’s fiancée. If you think that sounds a lot like the plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula — published in 1897 — so did the deceased author’s estate, who sued the film’s producers and ordered every print to be destroyed. However, some grainy bootleg copies survived, and in 1981 serious repair work began in a bid to restore Murnau’s vision.
Eggers has loved the story of Nosferatu almost all his life. He was just 9 years old when he happened upon one of those grainy bootlegs of Murnau’s film, and he became especially captivated by actor Max Schreck’s portrayal of the vampire. In Stoker’s novel, Count Dracula is subtly described as a “tall old man, clean shaven, save for a long white mustache and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere.” In Murnau’s Nosferatu, however, Schreck appears as a walking nightmare —a terrifying, skeletal creature with two sharp, pointed teeth, bat-like ears and claws for hands.“ Max Schreck’s performance, the makeup that he designed, his uncanny movements,” Eggers recalls of seeing it that first time. “The VHS was made from a degraded 16mm print, so you don’t see the bald cap and the grease paint, and sometimes his irises look like cat eyes. It doesn’t look like that in the restored version. But in what I saw, it had kind of more realism, because of the degraded quality that I was watching.” The year before, aged 8, Eggers had dressed as Count Dracula for Halloween, his fascination with vampire lore then just beginning. Later, in high school, inspired by Henrik Galeen’s Nosferatu screenplay and Stoker’s novel Dracula, Eggers would team up with classmate Ashley Kelly-Tata (now an accomplished theater director) to put on a stage production of Nosferatu, in which Eggers starred as the vampire Count Orlok. Edouard Langlois, artistic director of the Edwin Booth Theatre in Dover, NH, saw the production and invited Eggers and Kelly-Tata to bring it to his space. Thus, that play would show Eggers what he wanted to do, and it became the reason he is a director today. And ever since, he has dreamed of bringing Nosferatu to the screen. The project almost came together a few times, only to have it fall apart for various reasons. “It’s complicated,” Eggers says, citing one factor was originally that the timing crossed over with when he was still in post with his previous film, The Northman. “I probably would’ve had a nervous breakdown had it all gone [at that time],” he says. “But basically, I think after it fell apart the second time, I was like, ‘This is not happening. It’s never going to happen, it’s done. Forget about it. Murnau’s ghost is telling me to f*ck off, leave it alone.’ And I had a script that I was really passionate about, but no one wanted to make it. But then I went to Kujo [Peter Kujawski] at Focus [Features] and said, ‘Nosferatu?’ and he was like, ‘Yeah, sounds great.’ And then, all of a sudden, everything snowballed.” Eggers approached Hoult for the role of Thomas — a pure and heartfelt man gripped by the need to provide for his wife — because they had met years before. As soon as he saw Eggers’ first feature, The Witch (2015), the actor had called him. “Nicholas is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met,” Eggers says. “I remember when I met him the first time, it was in Brooklyn, in this little bar that no longer exists, sadly, because it was pretty cool.
