Are Hot Vampires Out? Robert Eggers and His ‘Nosferatu’ Cast on Raising a Bone-Chilling Beast From the Dead

[This story contains spoilers from Nosferatu.]

“Wrapping the movie was a fucking relief,” Bill Skarsgard says. Yes — the face of an entire horror franchise with his twisted portrayal of It clown Pennywise — was more than ready to set free Robert Eggers‘ Nosferatu. “Everything that he represents is so intense, I was happy to let go of the chains he had on me.”

Skarsgard first read the script for Eggers’ macabre folktale 10 years ago. The filmmaker had just released The Witch (2015) and Skarsgard believed he was sitting with someone who represented the future of cinema. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God, this is so exciting,’” the Swedish actor recalls to The Hollywood Reporter about Eggers’ interest in him for the role of the century-old villain. “The script floored me. … It was flattering but also very daunting.”

Skarsgard’s Count Orlok, while derived from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent German Expressionist classic starring Max Schreck as the titular monster, is infinitely more haunting than its original form. (Granted, Murnau’s film was an unauthorized version of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula; the author’s estate sued for copyright infringement — and won.) All at once, Eggers pays homage to Schreck’s beast and contorts him entirely; honoring the folklore written by and about the people who truly believed these creatures existed and were terrified of them. At the same time, he drives a stake through the heart of the “hot vampire” trope contemporary audiences have become accustomed to.

“The evolution of the cinematic vampire, from Max Schreck to Edward Cullen [Robert Pattinson’s character in the Twilight series] … vampires are no longer scary,” Eggers tells THR. “These early folk vampires were not suave, pale-skinned aristocrats in dinner jackets. They were bloated, nasty, rotten corpses.” Thus, his monster was born.

Nosferatu is summoned from the occult niche of the Eggers universe viewers are now familiar with: remnants of The Lighthouse (2019) and The Northman (2022) ooze through the Gothic gloom and nauseating eroticism. Skarsgard stars in the titular role, but it is Lily-Rose Depp‘s Ellen Hutter who flips Stoker’s narrative on its head.

In the early 19th century, Ellen is newly married to Thomas (Nicholas Hoult), a junior estate agent in the fictitious German town of Wisborg. Angling for an official position with the firm, he accepts an assignment from his jovial boss Herr Knock (Simon McBurney) to travel east of Bohemia to an isolated castle in Transylvania’s brutal and bone-chilling Carpathian Mountains.

His task is to get contracts signed for the purchase of a Wisborg mansion by a mysterious Count Orlok. Thomas leaves his desperate wife with the couple’s friends, Friedrich and Anna Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Emma Corrin), who are forced to witness the return of Ellen’s visceral, nightmarish episodes. Only the viewers, Ellen and Orlok understand the sensual connection between the vampire and who he believes is his rightful bride — Depp’s character beckoned him years prior, forming a bond steeped in both repulsion and lust.

“It was physically and emotionally demanding,” Depp says about the astonishing physical performance she displays, bending her body out of shape, convulsing while her eyes roll back into her head and tears flood her cheeks. Marie-Gabrielle Rotie, a choreographer specializing in Japanese butoh (“dance of utter darkness”), was brought in to help. “The torment that she’s going through is the meat of the movie,” Depp continues. “The darkness she’s carried within her since she was younger is now coming to a head. She found a husband that has been able to anchor her to the world, the light, and then he goes away and leaves her vulnerable to the forces who want to claim her.”

“But it’s not so simple as her [being] plagued by this horrible thing,” Depp continues, “There is a yearning there. A connection between Orlok and Ellen. She is the one that called out to him and, as he says in the movie, she must surrender herself.”

Depp says that the sexuality is a theme people have asked about a lot. It’s deliberate from Eggers, she adds, because this is the story of a love triangle at its core. “This demonic, dark fairy tale could be a young woman torn between two men, both representing different parts of what she wants. The desire and disgust serves as a mirror for the shame that we feel, certainly the shame that I’m sure a lot of women felt at the time.”

Hoult also believes his character was a victim of the time period, a man devoted to his wife but inherently incapable of understanding her. “He sweeps things under the rug,” the British star says. “[He thinks], ‘Let’s not talk about it or think about it. As long as I get this promotion, things are going to be okay, and we’ll deal with that down the road.’”

Willem Dafoe jumps in: “[Hoult’s] is the most difficult role in the whole movie in a funny way.” Thomas is our introduction to Orlok in his gruesome entirety, he explains, and viewers have no choice but to absorb the panic he radiates. “The audience is with him, and he has to keep that fear alive. It can’t harden into anything; it keeps morphing. And that’s fucking hard to do because he’s also being acted on.” Depp calls Hoult’s performance “so beautiful”: “You really feel the birth of darkness.”

Dafoe enters the picture as somewhat of an incarnation of Stoker’s vampire hunter, Professor Abraham Van Helsing. The fictional Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz is ostracized from the academic spheres he once socialized in for indulging his passion for necromantic lore.

Von Franz is the only character in Nosferatu who truly understands Ellen’s suffering. Is it true that Dafoe thinks his part is who Eggers himself would want to play? “He’s curious,” Dafoe says with a smirk. “I just thought, ‘Wow, this is juicy.’ I have an interest in these things but I’m not very knowledgeable about them, so I ate up the research. What are the Hollywood tropes that have been developed through the years, and what really came from folklore and history?”

The dismissal of those tropes in Nosferatu feels purposeful, an exploration of the vampire as a myth. Today, audiences think the Cullens of Twilight, the Salvatores of Vampire Diaries, or even a blonde, fanged Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire. Why do we love to romanticize them? And is this movie a rejection of their depicted hotness in pop culture?

“It all goes back to John Polidori’s [1819 horror short] The Vampyre,” Eggers says. “Which was the first popular, anglo-literary vampire story. He based the vampire off of Lord Byron, not a folkloric vampire. So that sexy aristocrat has been the mold. And while Stoker does some different things with Dracula, he’s still based on that character. And I think as the cinematic vampires evolved, because of their ability to transcend death, there’s something attractive and appealing about that.”

“But I think Bill’s vampire is sexy,” Eggers adds, followed by a chorus of agreement from his cast. Says Dafoe: “He’s pure appetite.”

Appetite is a good word to capture the magnetism of Skarsgard’s portrayal. He has the bald head, the pointed ears and spindly fingers per both Murnau’s film and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre from 1979. But it’s a deep, gritty, Transylvanian rasp that does a good chunk of the leg work for Eggers’ creature. “I knew that he was going to live in the shadows for so long,” Skarsgard says. “The voice was my [only] form of expression.” He worked with an opera singer to lower his voice by an entire octave. “We showed the film in Stockholm last week, with my friends and family, and some of them didn’t believe it was my voice, or they thought that it was a voice actor.” (Laughs.) “Rob and I built it together and it meant we had the freedom to create our version of it, to make it different than, you know, [in a heavy, imitative Transylvanian accent], ‘Dracula!’”

At this moment, Depp herself performs her Dracula impression for the group. They erupt laughing. “It’s very Italian,” she says. “I think it’s the last [role] in the world that I could play.”

Skarsgard begins to unpack the significance of a novella on Orlok’s back story that Eggers wrote just for him. The Count had a family and was once married, the actor says, before his director intervenes: “I don’t want the world to know his backstory. But he had a very detailed one.”

Eggers is the expert. He tells THR he first watched Murnau’s Nosferatu when he was nine. “It had a major impact on me,” he begins. “One of the cool things about how I saw it was … It was on VHS. It was made from a bad 16mm print. Today you can see the restored version and you can understand Murnau’s intentions. It’s wonderful to see the film like that, but what I saw was super degraded and Max Schreck seemed like a real vampire, like something that had been unearthed from the past. It had a haunting authenticity.”

The filmmaker didn’t hold back on his updated take. The film should come with a warning for those less inclined to the sight of rats. Corrin says the extensive practical effects — requiring them to lie topless underneath a swathe of rodents — were a double-edged sword. “It serves an incredible purpose, those moments,” they say. “Same with the practical sets. It builds this immersive world, completely alive both for the actors in it and for the audience watching. You can just enter so easily into this period of history and be completely convinced in and torn by it. But then you also work with 20 incontinent rats on your bare chest.”

The Nosferatu cast battles rats, corpses and rabid dogs. They evoke a sense of fear seldom conjured on screen — Depp’s unraveling is wholly complemented by Skarsgard’s satanic hunger. This leaves one final question: who’s the biggest screamer?

“Willem,” Eggers says, asking Dafoe’s permission to tell a story.

“When we were shooting The Lighthouse, I was with my wife and we’re in Halifax [in Nova Scotia]. We’re gonna have dinner, and there’s an unhoused man screaming down the street. He’s screaming, screaming, screaming, and I was like, to my wife, ‘Let’s just pick up the pace.’ We’re almost at the restaurant. Plus it’s Halifax, how bad could this guy be? This unhoused person just keeps screaming louder and louder and getting closer and closer and closer. We’re rushing to the restaurant and then suddenly this guy jumps on my back and screams my ear. And it’s Willem Dafoe, wearing leather pants.”

Dafoe replies: “Sometimes when I see a friend on the street, particularly if it’s a woman, I go behind and [mimics jumping out at someone].” His cast members roar with laughter again. “Because then you get to reassure them!”

Focus Features’ Nosferatu hits theaters on Dec. 25.