IN COLD BLOOD

Robert Eggers’ long-cherished vampire film…

Nicholas Hoult takes on the role of estate agent Hutter in Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu remake

Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Northman) was nine years old when he first watched F.W. Murnau’s silent masterpiece on VHS. He, like many of us, was haunted by the atmosphere of undiluted dread that emulsifies the celluloid, and by Max Schreck’s gaunt, rodent-featured vampire who travels from his castle in Transylvania to the town of Wisborg, Germany, and brings with him the plague. Eggers has been trying to make his own version of Nosferatu since 2015 – it was meant to be his second movie, after The Witch – but only now has he managed to marshal his chilling vision to the screen.

‘I’ve been thinking about it for a long time so I’m glad to have finally done it,’ he grins at Total Film, backdropped by books pertaining to creatures of the night. ‘I’m glad it fell apart the various times that it did. After making The Northman, with the scale of that, I felt ready to do this well.’ He chuckles. ‘It’s hard not to imagine the first time being a complete disaster if it had actually happened.’

Is this a big film, then? Surely not, when compared to the elaborately choreographed battle scenes in The Northman? ‘If you think about the story, it goes to so many different locations,’ he points out. ‘So while there are no battles, there are still ships! Craig Lathrop, the production designer, and his team built over 60 sets. It’s pretty massive. We all went into it thinking, “Yeah, this is smaller than The Northman.” Then once we started breaking it down, we thought, “Maybe this is bigger than The Northman!”’

Cleaving to the 1830s time period, to the settings of Transylvania and Northern Germany, and to essentially the same Dracula-riffing story – the titular Count Orlok (here played by Bill Skarsgård) becomes obsessed with Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp), the wife of his estate agent, Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) – Eggers’ Nosferatu does make strategic deviations. ‘It digs deeper into the psychology of the relationships, and the main thing is, it’s really Ellen’s story,’ he says. Being an Eggers picture, it also, naturally, chases authenticity wherever possible. Take Orlok. Schreck’s iconic make-up was pretty much recreated in Werner Herzog’s striking 1979 remake, and also, somewhat bizarrely, in Tobe Hooper’s miniseries of Stephen King’s vampire novel Salem’s Lot. But Eggers is going for something different.

‘There are things that are Schreck-like but I felt we had to do something else,’ he says. ‘Basically I was like, “What would a dead Transylvanian nobleman actually look like for real?” Bill lost a tremendous amount of weight. He’s so transformed in every aspect that I don’t know if people will give him the credit. You can see Bill [as Pennywise] in the It make-up; you can’t detect any Bill here. He worked with an opera coach to lower his voice an octave. I think people are going to think we treated it digitally, but that’s his performance.’

We can’t wait to feast on this one.