Robert Eggers needs you to see his Nosferatu as each a lover and a biter

Though the Dark Universe may be lifeless, Robert Eggers has crafted one thing like its non secular successor with a collection of disturbing horror options. The Witch left you questioning how actual its demons have been, The Lighthouse’s tentacled sea creatures have been at all times slithering someplace simply off-screen, and The Northman was a mythologically charged research of individuals’s capacity to turn out to be monsters and the way that transformation can rob somebody of their humanity. Those movies introduced their otherworldly components as reflections of characters’ superstitions and their must make sense of the worlds round them. But Eggers needs the undead ghoul on the heart of his new Nosferatu remake to go away you feeling one thing way more primary (although not essentially easy) and carnal.

Eggers’ Nosferatu is brimming with visible and tonal nods to F.W. Murnau’s groundbreaking 1922 silent movie. But by way of his new takes on the vampiric Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) and bedeviled housewife Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), you may really feel Eggers tapping into the darkly sexual vitality that made Bram Stoker’s Dracula such a uniquely transgressive horror novel for the Victorian period. The new Nosferatu is arriving at a time when the thought of getting down and soiled with monsters has come a lot, a lot extra into vogue — a lot in order that we’ve seen complete cinematic franchises constructed on the idea. 

Viewed by way of that lens, it’s straightforward to take a look at Nosferatu as a narrative that’s making an attempt to talk to this second in on-screen monster-fucking. But once I just lately sat down with Eggers to debate the film, he instructed me that, as a lot as vampire tales may really feel like manifestations of societal anxieties, channeling the zeitgeist wasn’t in any respect his aim.

As a lifelong Dracula fan fascinated by the way in which loss of life and sexual need outline vampire mythos, Eggers knew that he needed his Nosferatu to be as erotic because it was haunting. But Eggers additionally needed his Nosferatu to really feel like a decidedly feminist, macabre romance, which is why he took some inspiration from Emily Brontë.

“It was at all times clear to me that Nosferatu is a demon lover story, and one of many nice demon lover tales of all time is Wuthering Heights, which I returned to lots whereas penning this script,” Eggers defined. “As a personality, Heathcliff is an absolute bastard in the direction of Cathy within the novel, and also you’re at all times questioning whether or not he actually loves her, or if he simply needs to own and destroy her.”

Nosferatu leaves you to ponder those self same questions because it introduces Ellen, a perceptive girl whose brilliance is being stifled by the social mores of Nineteenth-century Germany. Though Ellen desperately loves her husband Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), he struggles to know how years of being tormented by unusual visions have left her satisfied that the embodiment of loss of life is stalking her. It’s simpler for Thomas and Nosferatu’s different male characters like Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) to dismiss Ellen’s nightmares as delusions. But every time Ellen goes to sleep, it’s by no means lengthy earlier than a monstrous presence reaches out to her thoughts, urging her to let it inside.

In Depp’s tremulous Ellen, you may see traces of Mina Harker, the only heroine in Stoker’s novel, whose cleverness winds up being instrumental in Dracula’s final demise. But Eggers needed this model of Ellen to really feel like a lady who, regardless of “understanding issues on a really deep stage, doesn’t have the language to articulate her experiences.” It was additionally essential to him that this story emphasize how males’s misogynistic preconceptions of ladies are a sort of monster in and of themselves.

“Ellen’s husband loves her, however he can’t perceive these ‘hysteric’ and ‘melancholic’ emotions she’s experiencing, and he’s dismissive of her,” Eggers mentioned. “The solely particular person she actually finds a reference to is that this monster, and that love triangle is so compelling to me, partially due to how tragic it’s.”

In the identical method that Ellen is aware of that one thing is on the market watching her because it stalks by way of the shadows, Count Orlok — a long-dead Transylvanian nobleman — can really feel that there’s one thing very particular about Ellen. Much of the brand new Nosferatu’s unsettling strangeness is crystallized within the pair’s uncommon psychic connection. It’s alarming to see Ellen seize up and convulse in matches as her thoughts seemingly leaves her physique. But there’s additionally an more and more orgasmic high quality to the sound of Ellen’s matches that instantly clues you into how, as scary as Orlok is, he additionally elicits one thing deeply pleasurable in a few of his victims.

More so than many different latest vampire tales, Eggers’ Nosferatu leans into the truth that creatures like Orlok feast on the blood of the dwelling as a result of they themselves are very lifeless. Whatever magic it’s that’s introduced Orlok again is spectacular, however you’ll by no means mistake him for a mannequin with a beating pulse. He’s alleged to learn as a reanimated corpse; a once-suave and debonaire one, however a corpse all the identical.

Because Nosferatu is a really sexy love story, although, Eggers felt Orlok wanted to be at the very least considerably attractive with a purpose to promote his uncooked magnetism and “assist the viewers to know on some stage that there’s a lovely man beneath all that make-up.”

“In my thoughts, Orlok was positively good-looking when he was alive,” Eggers mentioned. “I needed him to have robust options, and for there to be a sort of magnificence in his brows, cheekbones, and nostril as a result of these are the elements of himself that he can present a bit of little bit of within the mild to a home visitor earlier than they understand that he’s really rotting and falling aside.”

Nosferatu begins piling the horrors on as Orlok and Ellen’s hyperlink strengthens. The air is already thick with loss of life and concern because the movie introduces Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz and Simon McBurney’s Herr Knock. It isn’t lengthy earlier than the lads begin to perceive simply how endangered all of their lives are due to their proximity to Ellen. But Eggers additionally needed Nosferatu’s male characters to carry a bit of caprice to the movie, if solely to assist audiences cope with all the stress and recognize how monsters can have senses of humor.

“Some of these scenes with Thomas and Orlok are positively scary and intense, however they’re additionally moments the place Orlok is enjoying together with his meals,” Eggers defined. “When Louise Ford and I have been modifying these scenes, we might be in stitches at instances due to how pithy Orlok is while you actually concentrate.”