Robert Eggers is quickly making a name for himself as a filmmaker with, shall we say, esoteric tastes. The director of The Witch and The Lighthouse makes horrifying folk tales set in isolated locales in unusual pockets of history, with dialogue ripped from the pages of actual documents. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a mainstream bone in his body. One of the movies he’s developing right now is an old-fashioned horror remake. Very, very old-fashioned.
In a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting, Robert Eggers talked about his upcoming remake of the influential classic Nosferatu. The original silent film, directed by F.W. Murnau, was an unofficial adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula about a rat-like vampire named Count Orlock, and it frequently ranks amongst the best motion pictures ever made in any genre.
And despite that classical pedigree, Eggers says his version of Nosferatu will have a broader appeal to moviegoers than The Witch and The Lighthouse.
“Yeah, Nosferatu would need to be more accessible than these two films,” Robert Eggers laughs. “Particularly more accessible than The Lighthouse!”
That doesn’t mean that Robert Eggers is planning to go completely mainstream in the future; when asked if he ever wanted to make a romantic comedy or a superhero film, his response was “Absolutely not.” But as a filmmaker his tastes aren’t entirely idiosyncratic.
“I definitely hope to create, to tell some stories on larger canvases, which does mean making something that is narratively more broad,” Eggers explains. “But that’s not a bad thing. Charles Dickens is a lot of fun to read but it’s not obscure, and that’s just fine.”
Of course, the most mainstream version of Nosferatu would actually be Bram Stoker’s Dracula, itself a horror classic which – like Murnau’s version – is long overdue for a new major motion picture readaptation. But Eggers is quick to explain why Nosferatu is more befitting his sensibilities than Stoker’s original.
“I mean, that movie [Nosferatu] is really important to me for many reasons, but I think Nosferatu is closer to the folk vampire,” Eggers says.
“The vampire played by Max Schreck is a combination of the folk vampire, of the literary vampire that actually has its roots in England before Germany, and also [has roots in] Albin Grau, the producer/production designer’s occultist theories on vampires.”
“So he’s not a traditional folk vampire but it’s much closer to that than Stoker, even though obviously Stoker is using a lot of folklore that he’s researched to create his vampire,” Eggers continues. “But Dracula is finally much more an extension of the literary vampire that was started by John Polidori, based on Byron.”
It’s far too early to cast Nosferatu, but one possible cast member is right in front of him. Could Robert Eggers cast his The Lighthouse star Willem Dafoe as the title creature, Count Orlok? Especially since Dafoe already earned an Oscar nomination for playing the vampire 19 years ago, in E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of a Vampire?
“You can ask Willem Dafoe,” Eggers says. “If you look, my next movie has been leaked [the Viking drama The Northman] and we’re trying to cast Dafoe in that, so I clearly enjoyed working with him.”
