Nosferatu Exhumes a Vampire Classic

Vampires have lurked within cinema’s dark shadows and castle crypts for more than a century. The malevolent, bloodsucking creature made one of its earliest and most memorable onscreen appearances in 1922, when the German feature Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror arrived in theaters to terrorize audiences.

Directed by F.W. Murnau and shot by cinematographers Fritz Arno Wagner and an uncredited Günther Krampf, this silent classic hewed so closely to the plot of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula that the author’s widow sued over the unauthorized adaptation and won. A court ordered that the original film negative and all prints of the film in Germany be destroyed, but the movie proved as difficult to kill as its undead protagonist, Count Orlok; thankfully, a few copies survived, and Murnau’s masterpiece outlived the attempted burial.

Cineastes the world over remain grateful that the nightmarish glories of Nosferatu were preserved, as it proved to be one of the most influential horror films ever made, spawning an entire genre immortalized by the 1931 release of Tod Browning’s iconic Dracula (shot by Karl Freund, ASC). Several versions of Nosferatu have risen since then: Werner Herzog directed the atmospheric Nosferatu the Vampyre (photographed by Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein) in 1979, and David Lee Fisher’s 2023 interpretation (shot by Christopher Duddy) is currently streaming. And most recently, horror aficionados hotly anticipated the Dec. 25 release of an impressively mounted production conceived and developed for years by director Robert Eggers, whose previous collaborations with cinematographer Jarin Blaschke — The Witch (AC March ’16), The Lighthouse (AC Nov. ’19) and The Northman — promised a visually stunning spectacle.

In the new film — set in 1838 in Wisborg, a fictitious Hanseatic port city on the Baltic Coast — estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) receives a commission from his boss, Knock (Simon McBurney), to travel to the remote castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård) in the Carpathian Alps, where he must help complete the “eccentric” client’s purchase of an old, decrepit property in Wisborg. Hutter is reluctant to leave the side of his emotionally fragile wife, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), who suffers from nightmares and somnambulism, but recognizes the assignment as a chance to improve the couple’s financially challenged circumstances — and, potentially, their social standing.

After embarking upon his journey, Hutter stops at a rustic inn, where he ignores the dire warnings of villagers who beg him to turn back. Undeterred, he presses onward to Orlok’s castle, where he discovers that the Count is indeed an intimidating and terrifying figure whose sinister plans will place Ellen — and the rest of Wisborg’s populace — in grave danger.

Imprisoned in the castle by Orlok, Hutter manages to escape and make his way back to Wisborg, where his wife’s strange condition has deteriorated into a frenzy resembling demonic possession; meanwhile, the Count heads toward the city by ship, whose crew is terrorized by a mysterious plague. Recognizing the gravity of Ellen’s illness, Thomas and his friend Friedrich Harding (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) seek the help of a physician, Dr. Wilhelm Sievers (Ralph Ineson) — who, out of his depth in attempting to diagnose her, leads the group to consult with an expert in occult and supernatural matters, Professor Albin Eberhart von Franz (Willem Dafoe). After examining Ellen, Von Franz deduces that she is in thrall to Orlok and may become his victim unless the vampire is destroyed.

While envisioning the visual style for Nosferatu, Eggers examined many previous vampire movies, but also various other films with stylistic elements he found interesting, flagging some for Blaschke. “Before every film we do, Rob always sends me a list of about 30 films — and usually before prep I can get to the top 12,” Blaschke admits with a wry smile. “If there’s something he really wants me to see in the films I don’t get to, he’ll show me the most important sequences.”

Surprisingly, Blaschke reveals that he’s never seen more than snippets of Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre. Eggers, for his part, says he avoided rewatching it. “I did watch nearly every Dracula movie again, just to understand the things that worked and didn’t work in those films,” the director submits. “I even watched [the 1995 comedy] Dracula: Dead and Loving It — which points out a lot of problems! Jarin and I have both watched Bram Stoker’s Dracula a ton, so I was avoiding that film during the 10 years I worked on Nosferatu — but I know there’s some influence there. And while I was avoiding another look at Herzog’s version, there’s plenty of influence from that one as well.

“The only vampire film we were consciously, occasionally grabbing from, at least visually, was Tod Browning’s Dracula. The scale of that movie’s castle is much larger than any real castle interior would ever be, but we did want to evoke that [kind of size] without being unrealistic to what an actual Transylvanian castle might have been like. I also love the crypt in that film, which was based on real crypts.

“Some of the other [film] influences were The Innocents [1961], The Queen of Spades [1949] and lots of Gothic or black-and-white movies. I was constantly sending Jarin little videos of movies I was watching to show him the different kinds of staging that Freddie Francis [BSC] was using, either as a cinematographer or director.”

Blaschke adds, “During prep, Rob also sends me a look book — sometimes before I even get the script — that’s filled with images, mood boards, and other indications of what he has in mind. On The Lighthouse, we were primarily looking at still photography for aesthetic references, but with Nosferatu, the main influences were German Romantic painters, like Caspar David Friedrich.”

Eggers expands, “I was looking at all kinds of stuff, but certainly for scenes involving Wisborg and Hutter’s travels, Friedrich was an influence. There’s a clear reference to his [1818] painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, and for our Wisborg sequences, we also referenced artists like [Norwegian Romantic painter] Johan Christian Dahl and Biedermeier painters.

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The cinematographer also participated in this episode of ASC Clubhouse Conversations, in discussion with James Hawkinson, ASC: