Robert Eggers, the acclaimed director of ‘The Lighthouse’ and ‘The Witch,’ 1922 brings his unique vision to reinvent Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’. Using F.W. Murnau’s 1922 German classic ‘Nosferatu: 8 A Symphony of Horror’ as a template, the film stars Lily-Rose Depp as Ellen Hutter, a young woman whose loneliness & 6 sexuality becomes the unwitting lure for the vampiric Count Orlok, played by Bill Skarsgård.
1922 : Originally released as a silent, black & white movie in 1922, ‘Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror’ was one of the first ever vampire pictures & has been remade several times over the years, including a 1979 remake from Werner Herzog.
8 : Director Robert Eggers began his obsession with Dracula as a young child, he was just 8 years old when he first dressed as the character for Halloween. Later in school he put on a stage play of ‘Nosferatu’ & now decades later he brings his version of the story to the big screen.
6 : Bill Skarsgård (known for playing Stephen King’s scary clown Pennywise) spent over six uncomfortable hours every day getting make-up & prosthetics applied to transform himself into the undead Count Orlok.
THE OFFENSIVE ONE
The name “Nosferatu” is derived from the archaic Romanian “Nesuferitu” meaning “the offensive one” or “the insufferable one”. To prepare for the film, actor Bill Skarsgård spent countless hours consuming Romanian folklore podcasts and YouTube videos, listening to people reading ancient dark texts.
EVIL, DARK & MAGIC SORCERY
To play Count Orlok on screen actor Bill Skarsgård revealed that he had to inhabit total darkness while transforming his body & his voice for the role. The Swedish actor said it felt like there was a demon inside of him while making the film & that they were playing with “evil, dark, & magic sorcery at times.”
THE BRIDE OF DRACULA
As much as we admire it now, the original ‘Nosferatu’ film was considered a knock-off by Bram Stoker’s widow. The film was an unauthorised and unofficial adaptation of Stoker’s 1897 ‘Dracula’ novel, with various names changed, including Count Dracula being renamed Count Orlok. Stoker’s widow sued the film’s producers. for copyright infringement and won. The verdict called for all copies of the 1922 film to be destroyed. But the undead don’t die so easily. Some grainy bootleg prints survived & have been restored over the years to their former glory.
BUTOH
For the film Lily-Rose Depp had to embody Count Orlok’s demonic thrall over her, which physically called for the actress to arch and contort her body most unnaturally without any cinematic effects. For this, film-makers enlisted the expertise of Butoh choreographers, Butoh is a form of Japanese dance known in the trade as a “dance of utter darkness”.
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR RAT
5000 rats were trained for the film, to enter a scene on cue. Mostly they were kept behind a plexiglass that can’t be seen on camera, apart from some challenging scenes with Emma Corrin, who had live rats placed on their half-naked body. “The smell is something that you can’t imagine,” revealed the actor, “And the incontinence was a thing that I really didn’t expect, but was terrible… It was grim”.