The Dark Lord of Fine Details

It takes guts and ambition to dream up these places and stories, then make them real. But when Eggers and I met over Zoom to discuss his fourth feature, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 classic, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, he seemed hell-bent on puncturing his own pretensions. It was a pale, drizzly day in London, where Eggers lives, and he was sitting in a café at the British Film Institute. “I’m embarrassed about the hubris that it takes to do this, because in many ways [Nosferatu] is the movie that invented horror movies and it also invented a lot of aspects of cinema, period,” he said, one hand stretched over his eyes. “But I think because of my history with the story, this is just as personal a film as The Witch, to me, even though it is a remake.”

Itself an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Murnau’s German expressionist Nosferatu is a major moment in the lineage of on-screen vampires, with its creeping shadows and reedy, long-fingered monster. The film has left a mark on everything from Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and the 1979 Salem’s Lot miniseries to the TV comedy What We Do in the Shadows and Bad Bunny’s “Baticano” music video. For Eggers, the vampire tale is part of his origin story as a filmmaker.

As Eggers explained to Hereditary director Ari Aster on The A24 Podcast, he stumbled upon a picture of Murnau’s lead actor, Max Schreck, in a book about vampires when he was in elementary school in New Hampshire. The image drove him to the video store, 45 minutes away, which ordered a copy of Nosferatu just for him. “I wore that VHS out,” Eggers said on the podcast. As a high school senior, and already showing signs of being a creative overachiever, he codirected and starred in a theater adaptation of the silent film; a local director was so impressed by the production that he invited Eggers and his collaborators to stage it at his theater.

The version of Nosferatu that will land in theaters on Christmas day—unholy!—has been in the works for nearly a decade. Eggers originally intended it as a follow-up to The Witch, his 2015 debut, but delayed production due to “creative differences.” (He declined to elaborate further.) In retrospect, he’s glad Nosferatu took so long. It gave him time to mature as a filmmaker and a better shot at achieving his vision. Eggers has often said that he wasn’t a director until he made The Northman, a mammoth saga with long, heavily choreographed fight sequences. “I was always pretending I was, and now I know how to do the job,” he told me.

Eggers’s Nosferatu is a gothic feast, starring Bill Skarsgård as the vampire Count Orlok and Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a young woman with whom Orlok shares a powerful connection. (Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and Dafoe help round out the stellar cast.) It’s Eggers’s most overtly commercial movie to date, with its familiar characters and story. He also considers it his biggest undertaking yet.

To create the sprawling world of Nosferatu, Eggers and production designer Craig Lathrop oversaw the construction of 60 sets in the Czech Republic, from Orlok’s Transylvanian castle to a Romanian village to the fictional German port city of Wisborg. It’s not unusual for a film to have that many sets, Lathrop explained. But most of the time, movies lean heavily on locations found in the real world. For Nosferatu, Lathrop’s team built every last set, with painstaking attention to lifelike detail and historical accuracy. (They considered using a number of real castles for Orlok’s decrepit home, but, being tourist destinations, they were too clean for the movie’s aesthetic.) “Craig has a really special knack for ensuring very realistic finishes. A lot of times, when you light the set, it looks great, but if it’s not lit, you can tell that it’s a set,” said Eggers. “Craig’s sets aren’t like that.”

As with all of Eggers’s movies, the underlying structure of Nosferatu is the equivalent of several dissertations’ worth of research and writing. Skarsgård and Linda Muir, Eggers’s longtime costume designer, used the same word to describe the director: thorough. “Everything, every detail, is so well-researched. He is a walking encyclopedia of his own film,” Skarsgård wrote in an email. Eggers told me that he has an ever-growing shelf of untouched books that he’d like to read for fun, but he tends to dedicate all of his reading time to the project he’s currently working on. “Which is a little lame,” he admitted.

Early in the process of writing Nosferatu, in an effort to figure out what made his version of the story worth telling, Eggers drafted a novella that fleshed out the characters, their backstories, and their relationships. “It provides a lot of scenes that I knew would never be in the film but might create the connective tissue to give me an understanding of all of this,” he said. Similarly, he wrote a biography of Orlok, which he gave to Skarsgård ahead of his audition. (Neither the novella nor the biography are for public consumption, Eggers was quick to note.) Eggers also studied Stoker’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu to develop a vampire mythology that stood up to his own rigorous standards, combining Paracelsian metaphysics, Romanian folklore, and the occult beliefs of Albin Grau, Murnau’s production designer and producer.

In distinguishing his version of Nosferatu from previous iterations, Eggers dialed into the idea that it would be Ellen Hutter’s story. To embody the haunted young woman, he thought of the otherworldly Depp, whom he had seen in the 2021 film Wolf. When they met to discuss the role, he said, “She was referencing films that I was going to send to her to watch. She was already on top of it.” Depp threw herself into rehearsals, training with movement coach Marie-Gabrielle Rotie to nail several episodes of “hysterical” possession. “People are going to be shocked by how incredible she is and how powerful her performance is,” said Eggers.

If Eggers is a nerd, so are his collaborators. When Muir found an instructional book about women’s clothing that was published in 1838—the year in which Nosferatu is set—she remembers nearly screaming with delight. “It was like striking gold,” she told me. For Orlok’s costume, Muir launched into researching Hungarian counts between 1560 and 1580. She landed on a Kalpak hat, red leather mules with metal heels, and a cloak so heavy, with sleeves so long, that she had to outfit it with a quick-release harness system for Skarsgård, who was prone to overheating in his prosthetics.

One gets the sense that Eggers and his team are goading each other on, pushing for greater and greater historical finesse. Muir described herself and the director as “kids in a candy store” when looking at their finished work together. “He will challenge you,” said Lathrop. “You have to really know your stuff... You want to bring in stuff and say, ‘This is what they used. Isn’t that crazy?’ And you can almost guarantee that he’ll go, ‘Oh my god, that’s great. How do I use this?’”

First-time viewers won’t catch every detail of the world of Nosferatu. They will probably miss, for instance, the 1830s-style animatronic birdcage that Lathrop found and placed in a home inhabited by a family with two young girls. “It’s not really important to the story,” he said of the chirping contraption. But those seemingly small elements—the silk flowers in Depp and Corrin’s hair, the hand-carved bricks lining the streets of Wisborg, the German calligraphy littered across an estate agent’s desk—serve the nightmare that Eggers has created. “If an audience is looking at something that they can believe actually existed, then I think it’s easier for them to believe that the horror or the very fantastical characters that are in the script could also potentially exist,” Muir said.

And then there’s the nightmare himself. Skarsgård was supposed to appear in The Northman, which stars his brother Alexander, but had to drop out after they’d done test photography. When Eggers was casting Nosferatu, he thought about the younger Skarsgård, whom he’d recently seen as Pennywise the clown in It Chapter Two. “He has this scene where he’s [the clown] as a man, a middle-aged man, not a creepy clown, and there was this serious weight and darkness there,” said Eggers. “I thought: That’s interesting. I think he can actually do this.”

Inspired by “Eastern European films that had some übermasculine men with a certain kind of vocal quality,” Eggers hooked Skarsgård up with an opera singer, Ásgerður Júníusdottir, who trained the actor to drop his voice by a full octave. Skarsgård learned to find the right placement in his chest and put together a routine for warming up his voice and relaxing his muscles. “We tend to tighten up around the neck, shoulders and throat. It makes the voice tighter and higher. That’s why your voice is always deepest in the mornings,” Skarsgård wrote over email. “I worked on it so much that I never really felt satisfied while shooting. I knew I’d gotten better on recordings prepping. But it got consistent. Which is the most important thing.”

What Orlok looks like will remain a secret until the film comes out. Put simply, Skarsgård has almost completely transformed. “If you know Bill’s eyes really well, you can find him in there,” said Eggers.

When Eggers was a kid, he was obsessed with costumes: Batman, Captain Hook, Abraham Lincoln, a cowboy, and so on. He liked to buy bagged Halloween getups and modify them into something more worthy of his vision. “I used to wear costumes to school, until I got beat up for it, in fact,” he said. On the day of our call, Eggers was wearing a black Arc’teryx jacket and ball cap, along with a fistful of signet rings. “As of late, because I’m over 40 and can’t do whatever I want and have been trying to be fit, or something adjacent to that, I’ve been embracing a gorpcore vibe, which is basically how I dress on set,” he said, with a dollop of self-deprecation. Technical fabrics are well-suited to the environments where he shoots his movies, which are often dirty and either broiling or freezing. But, being “a goth-adjacent aging hipster,” Eggers only wears black.

I asked what eras of fashion history interest him, thinking he might reference the early work of Yohji Yamamoto or Ann Demeulemeester, designers known for their use of his preferred shade. With no hesitation, he told me that, left to his own devices, he would wear an Edwardian sack suit and a starched collar. “It has a formality and rigor to it, but it’s a sack suit, so you’re also meant to be working in it,” he said of the loose, early twentieth-century menswear style. Eggers sticks with contemporary clothing because he wouldn’t want to look like he’s putting on a show. But, several weeks later, something Dafoe said about the director’s love of history sent the sack suit racing to mind.

“When you say he does lots of research, it’s not that he’s a good boy,” said Dafoe, his voice crackling with warmth. “It’s because he feels connected to it. He lives in that world. He feels like in these stories, in the past, in history, they tell us how to live, even today.”

Eliza Brooke is a freelance journalist who writes about entertainment, fashion, and culture. She lives in Washington, DC.