The real story behind the upcoming Robert Eggers movie ‘Nosferatu’
Everything about Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is fascinating, dating right back to the inspirations behind the inspirations of the filmmaker’s upcoming horror movie.
F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 masterpiece is perhaps the single most influential and important film in the history of horror, which only technically happened when the filmmakers were denied the rights to mount a straightforward adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Producer Albin Grau drew on his wartime experiences and lifelong obsession with the occult to develop a vampiric story, using Dracula as the framework to explore Orlok’s demonic origins in greater detail, with the turmoil of 1920s Germany in the aftermath of World War I casting a shadow over the film’s tone and atmosphere, albeit with plenty of supernatural artistic licence applied.
Making several superficial changes to differentiate Nosferatu from its clear and obvious – but not so much as to infringe on copyright – source material, Count Orlok ended up becoming every bit as iconic as Dracula. Both were heavily indebted to European folklore and various urban legends surrounding the undead, yet Murnau dodged a bullet in the long run.
Whereas new spins on Stoker’s story arrive at incredibly frequent intervals, Nosferatu has endured in a class of its own for a century, something that wouldn’t have been possible were it not for the necessary deviations required to avoid the wrath of lawyers and litigators for treading on Dracula’s toes.
As soon as Dracula entered the public domain, though, Werner Herzog decided that he fancied remaking Nosferatu. His ability to cherry-pick elements from both led to 1979’s Nosferatu the Vampyre, with regular collaborator and ultimate frenemy Klaus Kinski in the title role.
Despite quite literally calling itself Nosferatu, Kinski actually played Count Dracula as Herzog liberally lifted whatever he wanted from the pair of them to craft his ideal version of the story. It proved to be the right move, with Nosferatu the Vampyre winning widespread acclaim.
Then there was the movie about the movie with a metatextual twist, which saw future Dracula Nicolas Cage producing E. Elias Merhige’s fictionalised account of Nosferatu‘s production in Shadow of the Vampire, wherein Willem Dafoe’s Max Schreck isn’t an actor at all, but rather a real vampire that tried his hand at becoming a thespian under the watch of John Malkovich’s Murnau.
Even Eggers’ version hasn’t been without incident, having first been announced in July 2015. From there, it repeatedly ran into difficulties behind the scenes that left the filmmaker sceptical as to whether he’d ever end up making it at all, before the pieces finally began falling into place.
With Bill Skarsgård as Count Orlok and a supporting ensemble that numbers Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Ralph Ineson, and Emma Corrin, Nosferatu will spread its wings once again as the ultimate example of counterprogramming when it releases on December 25th, 2024.
Beginning as a Dracula knock-off before being combined with its inspiration for a remake, Nosferatu then dabbled in self-awareness before eventually becoming a subject of a reinvention in the truest sense of the word at Eggers’ hand, but only after nearly a decade of failure. In short, it’s quite the story.
