Robert Eggers explains the twisted reason behind Nosferatu’s big change to Bill Skarsgard’s version of the vampire

Bill Skarsgård’s Nosferatu has been deliberately obscured from the trailers for Robert Eggers’ new horror, as the director promises a much differently looking fanged foe than Max Schreck’s back in the ’20s. But there are more ways in which the latest Count Orlok deviates from the original – and fictional vampires in general, too.

Warning! As mentioned above, we know that the marketing for Nosferatu has been very… well, mysterious… so if you don’t want to know anything about the movie or its titular baddie, it might be best to leave the below until you’ve seen it.

“One of the interesting things about doing the research is to try to forget everything you know about vampires,” Eggers recalls of the production process in the new issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who’s Christmas special ‘Joy to the World’ on the cover and hits newsstands on December 3. “You’ll notice that [in this film] Orlok drinks blood from the heart, not the neck. Now obviously you can’t pierce a breastbone, so it doesn’t really make sense. It makes much more sense to drink someone’s blood from their neck.

“But in folklore, when people are experiencing vampiric attacks it’s similar to old hag syndrome [a colloquial term for sleep paralysis] where you have pressure on your chest, so people interpreted it as vampires drinking blood from their chest,” he continues. “But there are also folk vampires who didn’t drink blood, but just fornicated with their widows until their widows died from it. So I think it’s all part of the source material…”

(Image credit: Focus)

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Also starring Willem Dafoe, Nicholas Hoult, and Lily-Rose Depp, Nosferatu takes inspiration from F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent feature of the same name, and subsequently Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. It sees Skarsgård play a “gross, but sexualized” version of Transylvanian bloodsucker Count Orlok, as he sets his sights on the wife of his estate agent – and brings terror to their small town.

Unsurprisingly, given the era of its release, Murnau’s Nosferatu was a silent film. Eggers’, as you might expect, is not. With that, the filmmaker knew he had to give his titular monster one heck of a voice. He was influenced by “chain-smoking Bulgarian actors” and Ralph Ineson, a regular Eggers collaborator who plays Dr. Wilhelm Sievers in the scary flick and whose bassy tones are “pretty much as low as the voice can humanly go”, laughs Skarsgård.

“Robert wanted it as deep as possible,” says the actor. “I didn’t want it to feel contrived. I wanted it to feel otherworldly and fucked up and unsettling. Robert writes beautiful descriptions. As an actor, you feel very fortunate working with such a script, because it’s almost like working off a novel. You have these descriptions that are so visceral: the pained, labored breath of Orlok. Even with speaking, there’s an element of pain in it – it almost hurts him to speak. All those little things were building blocks for the development of the voice.”

Nosferatu creeps into theaters on December 25 in the US, and January 1 in the UK. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Doctor Who’s Christmas special ‘Joy to the World’ on the cover and hits newsstands on Tuesday, December 3. Check out the fittingly festive cover below…

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