Count Orlok draws near.
With Nosferatu set to bleed theaters dry on Christmas day, Robert Eggers, Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe, and Nicholas Hoult talked to Deadline about the upcoming vampire film.
“Vampirism and Dracula is the thing that I’ve been thinking about and looking at for a long time,” Eggers says. “I had read Montague Summers [the clergyman scholar who wrote about the occult] as a teenager, and many other authors of vampire lore, but I think, until I set out to make Nosferatu, I was still too contaminated by the cinematic tropes. And so, you’re infusing things you’re reading with cinematic tropes that aren’t there. In doing the research to write this script, I needed to be disciplined to forget what I knew. And then, you start looking at the really early vampire accounts, and you’re like, ‘They’re not even drinking blood, they’re just strangling people, or suffocating people, or f*cking them to death.’ And that was really interesting.”
In Nosferatu, Dafoe plays Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz, a kindred spirit to Count Dracula’s vampire-slaying nemesis Abraham Van Helsing. “I know he had been talking about Nosferatu for a long time,” says Dafoe, “and I certainly wasn’t going to play Orlok because in fact, I did that before in Shadow of the Vampire [the E. Elias Merhige-directed 2000 film about the making of the original Nosferatu, for which Dafoe was Oscar-nominated]. But I was very happy when he proposed this role of Von Franz, because clearly it was a role that was a guilty pleasure for him. And once upon a time he was an actor, and I felt very strongly that this is the role he would play if he weren’t directing.”
The complete article on Deadline has many interesting tidbits as we eagerly await the film. Keep it locked to Horror News Network for more on Nosferatu.
