Count Orlok looms over Nosferatu like the Cloverfield monster. While he is among the first voices we hear, and the first faces we see, the full reveal of Orlok’s form comes much later. When we see him in all his glory — with all the sores, sylphlike limbs, and ponderous movements — he looks like a reanimated corpse. Bill Skarsgård’s mannerisms mark a striking difference from the comparatively youthful (and alive) Ellen, played by Lily-Rose Depp.
This was exactly as director Robert Eggers hoped. “I enjoy the fact that he is represented like a folk vampire,” Eggers told Polygon ahead of the film’s premiere. “These early folk vampires look like corpses, and they’re in this state of putrefaction.”
Eggers said the goal for Orlok’s look wasn’t really to be a flip of the bird (or the bat, as the case may be) to noted resplendent vamp like Twilight’s Edward Cullen or True Blood’s Bill Compton. Rather, it was yet another expression of Eggers’ constant aim: historical accuracy and immersion. His directive was “What does a dead Transylvanian nobleman look like?” — which led him to Skarsgård’s look, long sleeves, where ample fabric would communicate his wealth — and eerie movement.
Still there’s a distinct sense of evolution as an audience member. If horror really is an expression of the anxieties of the time, Orlok’s decrepit form signifies something very different than the rash of undead that arrived in the 2010s. To Eggers — and certainly in Nosferatu — there’s something powerful in what a more folkloric vampire represents; not a gleaming beauty or impossible love, but something corrupted, unnatural, and maybe even disturbingly familiar, if you were one of the townsfolk whose loved one emerges from a grave.
Like most Nosferatu stories, Orlok is represented in Eggers’ film as more of a horror than a hunk; he also represents a sort of forbidden desire for Ellen. “To have the attraction to this figure… I think he was probably a beautiful man at some point, but now he’s covered in maggots,” the director said. “That’s interesting to me.”
Eggers, for his part, was eager to bring out the sexual subtext of Nosferatu, calling his version a clear “demon lover story” and likening it to Wuthering Heights (which he reread while trying to crack the script). Depp’s Ellen is both a catalyst for Orlok’s awakening and her own pull to something darker, while also being a “victim to 19th-century society.”
“As much as she is a victim of the vampire, she can see into another realm, and has a certain kind of understanding that she doesn’t have the language for,” Eggers said. “But people are calling her melancholic and hysteric and all of these things. And tragically, the only ‘person’ that she can kind of connect with is this demonic force, this vampire, this demon lover. [And] Orlok is also alone.”
It’s notable that in Eggers’ Nosferatu it’s her connection with Orlok that awakens him, ensnaring her and those around her into his game. It’s the pull between the two that is constantly teased apart in the film, a thing she runs from as much as it sends her into a trance. Nosferatu’s power lies in not trying to make that repression legible with a drop-dead gorgeous vampire. Instead, Orlok’s pull is both rejoinder and repulsion, amorous and grotesque in equal measure. That connection — between Ellen and Orlok, between 2024’s Nosferatu and past iterations of this story, between folk vampires and their more modern kin — is what makes it go so hard.
“Something that’s great about the Max Schreck performance [from the 1922 Nosferatu] is how he’s so slow,” Eggers said. “Obviously there’s some sped-up camera stuff, but in general: There’s a way in which Nosferatu is like the Terminator. He’s not getting anywhere fast, but he’s going to get you, and there’s no fucking way he’s not.”
Nosferatu arrives in theaters on Dec. 25.
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