Bill Skarsgard’s Nosferatu looks like a real corpse, says director

Count Orlok looms Nosferatu Just like the Cloverfield monster. Although he is one of 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—full of sores, goblin-like limbs, and lumbering movements—He looks like a resurrected corpse. Bill Skarsgård’s demeanor is markedly different from Lily-Rose Depp’s relatively young (and energetic) Ellen.

This is exactly Just as director Robert Eggers had hoped. “I love that he’s portrayed as a folk vampire,” Eggers told Polygon ahead of the film’s premiere. “These early folk vampires looked like corpses and were in a state of decay.”

Eggers said the goal with the Orlok look was not to flip the bird (or bat, as the case may be) into the famously flashy uppers, e.g. twilightEdward Cullen or true bloodBy Bill Compton. Instead, it’s another expression of Eggers’ consistent goals: historical accuracy and immersion. His instruction was “What does a dead Transylvanian noble look like?” – which reminded him of Skarsgård’s look, with long sleeves and plenty of fabric to convey his wealth – and the eerie action.

As a viewer, there’s still a palpable sense of evolution. If horror was truly an expression of the era’s anxieties, then Orlok’s battered form symbolized something very different from the swarms of the undead that arrived in the 2010s. To Eggers – of course Nosferatu — What the more folkloric vampire represents is something powerful; not sparkling beauty or impossible love, but something corrupt, unnatural, and maybe even disturbingly familiar, if you’re a relative One of the townspeople who emerges from the grave.

Like most Nosferatu stories, Orlock In Eggers’ film, he’s more of a horror figure than a hunk; he also represents one of Allen’s forbidden desires. “The attraction to this character… I thought he might have been a beautiful man at one point, but now he’s covered in maggots,” the director said. “That’s interesting to me.”

Eggers is eager to reveal the sexual subtext Nosferatucalled his version an apparent “demon lover story” and likened it to Wuthering Heights (He reread the script while trying to decipher it). Depp’s Ellen is both the catalyst for Orlok’s awakening and her own descent into darkness, as well as “a victim of 19th-century society.”

“Even though she was a victim of vampires, she could see into another realm and had a certain understanding that she couldn’t put into words,” Eggers said. “But people call her melancholic, hysterical, etc. Sadly, the only ‘person’ she can relate to is this demonic force, this vampire, this demonic lover.” [And] Orlok was lonely, too.

It is worth noting that in Eggers Nosferatu it is Her connection with Orlok awakens himtrapping her and those around her in his game. Throughout the film, the pull between the two is constantly teased, with her running away and falling into a trance. NosferatuThe strength lies in not trying to make this oppression clear with a gorgeous vampire. Instead, Orlok’s appeal is both rebuttal and repulsion, amorous and grotesque. This connection – between Allen and Orlok, 2024 Nosferatu And the repetition of this story’s past, between folk vampires and their more modern relatives – is what makes it so difficult.

“Max Schreck’s performance is great [from the 1922 Nosferatu] That’s why he’s so slow,” Eggers said. “Obviously there’s some accelerated camera stuff, but overall: Nosferatu is like the Terminator in a way. He doesn’t go very fast, but he gets you, and it’s impossible not to get you.

Nosferatu Arrives in theaters on December 25th.