The vampire culture is alive and well in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake. The 2024 movie release stars a young woman (Lily-Rose Depp) being stalked by a Transylvanian vampire (Bill Skarsgård) that unleashes all kinds of horror. If you’re curious where the inspiration came from for The Witch director to take on the upcoming horror flick, I just found out he was long obsessed with the silent film that was destroyed long ago and survived only through bootlegs.
The 1922 German film Nosferatu is an example of a movie to impress pretentious movie fans for its introduction to vampires on the big screen and influencing the horror genre as a whole. Historical horror film director Robert Eggers certainly was sold, as I just found out through his interview with Deadline that he’s a huge fan of the early 20th century film, saying:
Max Schreck’s performance, the makeup that he designed, his uncanny movements. The VHS was made from a degraded 16mm print, so you don’t see the bald cap and the grease paint, and sometimes his irises look like cat eyes. It doesn’t look like that in the restored version. But in what I saw, it had kind of more realism, because of the degraded quality that I was watching.
It turns out that vampire aficionado Robert Eggers was nine years old when he came across the silent classic Nosferatu in the form of a grainy bootleg. He was completely in awe of Max Shreck’s interpretation of Count Orlok. This copy, as well as restored versions, would be all that remains of the F.W. Murnau movie because Bram Stoker’s estate sued the producers of the best vampire movie for being too similar to Dracula and ordered every copy to be destroyed. However, grainy bootlegs were able to survive the journey, with restorations carried out in 1981.
Watching Nosferatu’s old bootleg was only the start of Egger’s obsession with the German Expressionist film. Loving the horror classic’s screenplay and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the then-high-school student collaborated with a classmate to create a stage production of Nosferatu where Eggers himself portrayed Count Orlok. Artistic director Edouard Langlois was so in awe of high school production he saw that he asked Eggers to bring his play to his Edwin Booth Theatre space. From then on, Eggers had two dreams: to be a director and bring Nosferatu back to the big screen.
His dream became a reality when it was announced in 2015 that he would be giving Nosferatu the remake treatment. But like many great films, the upcoming remake fell apart a few times because it was coinciding with the post-production of Eggers’ The Northman. Just when The Lighthouse director was ready to give up, feeling it was “Murnau’s ghost is telling me to fuck off,” he approached Peter Kujawski at Focus Features with his script, and “Nosferatu” was all Eggers had to say to sell the film studio executive on his idea.
We can consider it incredibly fortunate that the bootleg of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu exists, or Robert Eggers never would have stumbled upon it and created the remake everyone’s talking about. First screenings had critics calling the horror remake “horrifically brilliant” and recent reviews describe the upcoming film as “cryptic, beautiful, and unsettling.” The American filmmaker’s journey of Nosferatu proves that dreams that start at a young age have the potential to grow into a masterpiece you can share with the world.
Make sure to bring your Nosferatu popcorn bucket when it hits theaters this Christmas. Until then, the original horror classic is one of the best movies you can watch for free on Tubi and with your Amazon Prime subscription.